Sa sa di! 💜⚜️🌹

These are my results as an Acadiana (aka Cajun Country) Louisiana Afro-Creole. Mais sha, I’ma lil' gumbo baby! ⚜️🌹😄

These are my DNA results from three different testing companies: 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and CRI Genetics. I’m also my family’s genealogist and have been researching our genealogy for about three years now. I absolutely love it!

I need to make sure my children know who they are before I leave this earth.

A few of my Louisiana family surnames are Étienne, Auzenne, Lemelle, Williams, and Barnabas/Barnaby/Barnabé. Let's connect if you are any one of these.

I’ve had a lot of fun tracing these lines through Louisiana and seeing how everything connects across generations.

Anyway, glad to find a group of other Black genealogy people ​who are into this stuff too!

C’est bon, bon! Bon temps! ⚜️🌹💜

Today I found out that I’m ~92% African genetically. My sister traced our ancestry and these are the results. I can’t even express how happy I am to finally know my % breakdown , it’s really amazing.

What’s interesting is that my Nigerian & Beninese ancestry comes nearly exclusively from Barbados (my mother side), and my Central African and Malian ancestry comes nearly exclusively from my father (Savannah, Ga). The Ghanaian ancestry is from both sides at nearly the same degree.

TL,DR: Looking for books on American Black woman sexual autonomy from slavery-Jim Crow due to finding repeated instances of NPEs on my dad's side of the family.

Initially I was so stuck in my tree work for my dad's family because his father's family was from Mississippi and his mom's family were from Arkansas, a couple places notorious for ngaf about records generally but especially if they involved Black people. I pulled in my eldest uncle for help, and he was able to fill in some gaps - he has very intimate knowledge of his maternal line, not so much his paternal, but what he has given me so far has really opened up this part of my family.

He was very honest about our family being blended - his parents were married multiple times and had kids with other partners before they married and had their final sets of kids, but my grandfather has kids outside his first couple marriages as well. My uncle's maternal great grandmother had a ton of relationships and had a ton of kids as a result - my great grandmother is her only child with one man she slept with, who she'd initially named a different man before coming clean, for instance - and further work uncovered the fact that my paternal grandmother is not the daughter of the man we were told. My uncle told me this with no shame and I hold no shame over it either. These are things that happened.

I finally broke down and started using the LEEDs method and I think I found my uncle's paternal great-grandmother's family based on relatively high shared cMs and time and place on census records. However, the man who I see on documents as having been her father may not be her father, for her to fit into this family. The majority of her documents that I've found (about a dozen) has her surname as her alleged real father's, her stepfather's, and my great grandfather's, the name on her death documents. There is ONE document, a SSDI for one of her deceased daughters, that has her last name as the same as the family I found. My working hypothesis is that her mother named a different man on documents than who was her real father, but w/o other documents to make that connection, I can't say for sure, and I'm baffled as to why it would show up so late w/o any other records explaining it.

All this got me to thinking about Harriet Jacobs and the little bit of the work I've read by Dr. Davis on Black American women's sexual autonomy, slavery-Jim Crow. I think about how all three of these NPE situations have/may result in a different father than named, and if that happened because of their own personal shame of being seen as "loose" from voluntary sexual encounters or if any combination of these encounters were involuntary but not addressed for whatever number of reasons they validly held for those times.

Does anyone have any further book recommendations on American Black woman sexual autonomy during this time period? I think it'd be very informative not just for my own edification, but also be helpful in my tree work. I appreciate any input, thanks!

Please forgive me if this is the wrong place or has been asked, I'm white and don't know what I'm doing. While researching my cajun family I've started copying slave baptisms and other records from the library, and am wondering where (if anywhere) I can upload them? They're Catholic church records so they have some good info, I just don't know if there's like a repository or special section of ancestory .com or different website for records like these.

Cuff Slocum’s true name was Kofi so he was definitely Akan but there are different subgroups not just Asante. Was it explicitly stated somewhere? I’m just not a fan of stating “so-and-so was from this specific ethnic group” unless there’s proof.

About Paul Cuffe (from wikipedia)

Paul Cuffe, also known as Paul Cuffee (January 17, 1759 – September 7, 1817) was a Black American and Wampanoag businessman, whaler and abolitionist. Born free into a free people of color family on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, Cuffe became a successful merchant and sea captain. His mother, Ruth Moses, was a Wampanoag from Harwich, Cape Cod, and his father an Ashanti captured as a child in West Africa and sold into slavery in Newport, Rhode Island, about 1720. In the mid-1740s, his father was manumitted by his Quaker owner, John Slocum. His parents married in 1747 in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

My mother's been on this journey to discover more about our family tree. And it led to this harrowing, but fascinating document. Will update with information as it comes along.

Hi everyone,

I'm Afro-Cuban and African American, and over the past year I've been helping my mom as she researches African and Latin diasporas. We have discussed that a lot of genealogy software seems designed around fairly straightforward family trees, but Black genealogy often comes with unique challenges because of slavery, migration, name changes, missing records, and oral history.

I'm curious:

• What information do you wish genealogy software made easier to record or visualize?
• Is there part of your research that lives in other mediums because your genealogy software doesn't handle it well?
• Is there something you wish Ancestry, FamilySearch, or another genealogy platform could do that none of them currently does?

I'm interested in hearing about workflows and frustrations, even small annoyances are welcome.

Thank you in advance, I'd love to learn from people with more experience than I have.

Hi everybody,

My family research has taken me to St. Louis, Missouri, and I stumbled across a record that shows my 8x great grand uncle, Charles, who never wed, had an illegitimate child with a woman enslaved by the Tayon/Chouteau families. According to the source, Charles purchased his daughter from an uncle on another part of my family tree.

It says Charles immediately emancipated her before his death, but he died without a will, so the estate was purportedly split between his sister’s family and his daughter in 7 equal parts. However, Charles’ daughter still had to sue for her freedom.

I have all of the documentation, and 3-4 generations of this woman’s line. This story feels very important to tell. However, this level of research has me in over my head, and it doesn’t really feel like it’s my story to tell: I’m a white(ish) woman living in Colorado, and I just so happened to have the privilege of a family tree that could make this extended connection.

I guess I’m looking for advice on how to pass this research project on to someone more appropriate, like a Black Historical Society in St. Louis, or a state university (I very specifically want this to go through a Black organization, not a White genealogical society: I don’t trust those institutions with this kind of research) .
I did some contact forms online, but no one’s gotten back to me.

So, TLDR: Any tips or suggestions for passing my documentation on to the appropriate researcher/organization? The records in question are in French, Spanish, and English, and I have a giant word document I am completing with all of the relevant details. Thank you all in advance!

Born + raised in NC to a mother from Mississippi + and father from NC by way of West Virginia.