Tracing their roots

LaDonna Garner of Festus, Mo., began researching her family ancestry when she was 13 years old. More than 25 years later, she is still searching for long-lost ancestors who may have been brought to America centuries ago as slaves. Garner has traced her paternal family history back to 1870, but that is where her search grows cold.

"My great-great-great-grandfather was listed on census records in 1870, but I have not found any slave records," she said. "It's a matter that may come down to DNA testing. Some searches end there."

According to Tony Burroughs, who has been awarded the Distinguished Service Award by the National Genealogical Society and is author of the 2001 book "Black Roots: A Beginner's Guide to Tracing the African American Family Tree," few areas of American genealogy research pose as much of a challenge as the search for black families.

The vast majority of black Americans are descendants of the 400,000 black Africans brought to North America to serve as slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since slaves had no legal rights, they are often not found in many of the traditional record sources available for that period.

Some have resorted to DNA testing to find long-lost ancestral links. In 2003, Rick Kittles and Gina Paige founded African Ancestry, a Washington, D.C.-based company that helps blacks reconnect with the roots of their family trees. According to the company website, www.africanancestry.com, it has helped more than 100,000 people reconnect with the roots of their family tree.

Garner, 38, said she began researching her ancestry as a junior high school class assignment.

"A teacher told us to go home and ask our families what nationality they were," she said.

Garner said she went first to her paternal grandfather, who had pale skin and sky-blue eyes.

"He was black, but he looked like a white man," she said. "But he would never talk about it."

That made Garner curious. Now a certified genealogist pursuing a bachelor's degree in historic preservation at Southeast Missouri State University, Garner said she began to understand that black culture was a melting pot of nationalities.

"We don't have a nationality, we are made up of many nationalities," she said. "Not all of us were brought to the United States by way of Africa."

This became even more apparent when Garner's oldest child was born.

"She was pale, and that made me ask questions also," Garner said.

After her daughter's birth, Garner began aggressively searching both sides of her family ancestry. While she has traced her paternal ancestry to 1870, she has only suspicions and some documentation about her maternal family line.

"I probably have the clues, but it is kind of hard to link them together when so much information is missing," Garner said.

Although census records do not list blacks by name before 1870, they are a good place to begin a search, according to Steven Pledger, director of the Cape Girardeau County Archives in Jackson.

Before 1870, the U.S. census did not count enslaved Africans; instead they were placed on property schedules that only listed the name of the slave owner and the number of slaves owned by age, sex and whether they were black or mulatto, the term used for a person with one white and one black parent.

"That's where probate records come in," Pledger said. "Because they sometimes listed names of slaves."

Pledger said other local sources include "A Resource Guide to the Slaves, Slave owners, and Free Blacks of Cape Girardeau County, 1797-1865" compiled in 1998 by Margaret Mates. The document lists names of free blacks who lived in Cape Girardeau County.

Pledger said another hindrance to black family searches was that freed slaves wouldn't always adopt the last names of their owners.

"There was a German family named Eulinberg who lived in the area and who didn't have slaves," Pledger said. "Some freed slaves chose that name."

Ruth Randall of Albuquerque, N.M., has traced her paternal family history as far back as a slave bill of sale for the purchase of a 3-year-old whom Randall presumes to be her great-great-great-great-grandmother. She has also discovered that she has ancestors who once lived in Cape Girardeau. She has used the Cape Girardeau County Archives frequently to try to find other relatives.

"My paternal grandfather, Jay Gould Martin Randall, moved from Cape Girardeau sometime between 1900 and 1908 when he married my grandmother," Randall said in an e-mail interview. "My Cape Girardeau ancestors were fair skinned. In U.S. Census records, they are listed as mulatto. Therefore, there is a possibility that I have white family members in Cape Girardeau that are unknown to me."

Randall, 74, said she began searching her ancestry in 1996, when retirement gave her time for in-depth research. Randall said she has searched wills, probate and guardianship files and draft registration cards. She has also used Ancestry.com and records from the Missouri State Archives.

Randall also said clues regarding births, deaths and marriages that are usually found in family Bibles are nonexistent for former slaves except in rare situations where a slave owner recorded such data.

"In those cases, the researcher would have to have knowledge of the existence of such records and prevail upon the kindness of the owner of the Bible to share the information," she said. "The fact that descendants of former slaves did not have legally recognized surnames adds another layer of difficulty for black family history researchers."

But for Garner and Randall, the long hours spent piecing together scattered bits of their family histories has become a labor of love. Randall's search has lead to four articles published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. One of her articles, "A Family for Suzanne," was the 2007 Winner of the Family History Writing Contest sponsored by the National Geological Society.

Randall, who mentors family historians searching for enslaved ancestors, said the rewards of family history research are incalculable.

"Discovering how one's ancestors coped with the social and political forces of their time and endured through times of disease provides the researcher insight into who she is," she said.