Family History Tips--Part 25

The Challenges of Researching African American Roots in U.S. Census Records

by Brenna Corbit, Instructional Services Librarian

In recognition of African American History Month, I would like to offer a few tips on researching one’s African American roots. Vital, military, and civil records, for example, follow pretty much of the same advice I addressed in past columns, but there are challenges as well as some unique records encountered. I will not explain those unique records, since the tutorial link below does an excellent job of that. Instead, I want to explain some of the challenges in using census records to trace African American roots. 

U.S. census records are always my base upon which I build families since they have been taken every ten years since 1790. In many cases it is quite easy to work backward through the decades, but herein is the problem—slaves were not recorded in the U.S. censuses, which means most researchers with Southern slave roots hit that brick wall of 1870.

Ancestry.com 1920 U.S. Census, Delaware

But within those parameters, you can often trace your tree back to the mid/early 1800s providing that a parent or grandparent lived past 1870. There are other possibilities of working past that brick wall addressed in the tutorial that follows, such as slave manifests and the Freedman’s Bank Records that required depositors to give much information such as age and place of birth. Census records offer other challenges, too.

Missouri Digital Heritage, sos.mo.gov

After the Civil War and the Great Emancipation, many shifted from state to state trying to reconnect with their widely dispersed families and to seek a better way of life. A vast portion of Blacks migrated to the North seeking respite from the harsh Jim Crow laws. As I research families of African descent, I often notice children in a household each being born in a different Southern state. Moreover, most Black families I encounter in censuses of the North have Southern roots. As a result of this massive shifting, many individuals are missed in a census year. Even up until  today, many obituaries of older African Americans who died in Northern states were born in the South. 

I must point out that African Americans do sometime appear in U.S. censuses prior to 1870, providing they were free. This is most evident in the Northern states, but sometimes this occurs in the South, too. 

In the course of researching two co-worker’s trees, I was led to several pre-1870 census records in Maryland and Virginia that included their families. At the time, I wasn’t aware of what I was viewing until Mary Ellen Heckman pointed out that meant they were not slaves, but free. In fact, I was able to trace one family via census records back to the early 1800s. Although these states were below the Mason-Dixon Line, many Blacks in those states were free.

Keep in mind that the term African American wasn’t popularized until the 1980s. Old records will often use black, negro and mulatto (one who is a mix of white and black). Thus, use these as advanced search terms.

If you are interested in your African American roots, I encourage you to follow the link in the institutional subscription to Ancestry. Click on the top link “Learning Center,” scroll down to “Ethnic” and click on “African American Family Research.” I have added links since they are difficult to find. Here you will find a tutorial on many record types unique to the African American experience.

Do not use the link in the tutorial unless you are an Ancestry subscriber. After having logged into RACC’s institutional subscription, type this URL into the address bar to access the African American Collection:

https://search.ancestrylibrary.com/search/group/aabooks.