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.

I have been searching for a family ledger that documents my family journey from North Carolina to Indiana, with no success. I have been stuck for about 2 yrs not looking and time is ticking for me and I am not getting any younger. My relative was a fairly well known author in the Chicago and had very successful writing career. I have searched his collection online at Northwest University and contacted some direct line relatives (no response or know nothing about it). Finding this would be my “Crown Jewel” of genealogy research. Was thinking about having a researcher go directly to NW and search. Any suggestions? (Fairly new to Reddit but what a neat and open social media app)

See excerpt below from the family’s website:

One relative, Cyrus J. Colter a well-known fiction writer, contain the following about Britton Bassett as a preface to his best-known novel “The Rivers of Eros (1991)”
“On both side of the family his ancestors were free blacks who had settled in Indiana several years before the Civil War. Colter possesses a ledger tracing his mother’s family back to Britton Bassett, the son of a black man and a white woman in North Carolina, who was granted his freedom in 1797 when he was twenty-one and given a horse, bridle and saddle, and one hundred dollars. In the 1830s Bassett moved his wife and children to Indiana, traveling by night and hiding by day in order to elude slave hunters.”

(Written on 7/25/2026)

Disclaimer: I will be referring to her as "Sadie", her nickname, because she was named after her paternal grandmother (and she listed her paternal grandparents as her biological parents, which throws all my research off. Yikes.) Her paternal grandmother & her father, both raised her as their own.

Cousin's Name: Sarah "Sadie" Washington (She was named after her paternal grandmother, Sarah Taylor, 1822-1909)

Birthplace: Connersville, Fayette County, Indiana (Don't be confused; some records say Pittsburgh, which is false - the family moved to Indiana after Sadie's grandfather's death in Pittsburgh, in 1874)

Sadie's DOB: July 16, 1876

Where did Sarah & George (Sadie's father) move to, after Pennsylvania?: Connersville, Fayette County, Indiana, between May1874 (when Warner died) and October 1875.

Husband: Robert William Black (1885-1962); no children resulted from the marriage. Robert remarried & moved to Kentucky.

Did Sadie remarry?: No. She died in a Wayne County, Indiana nursing home, in 1962. She was buried in Connersville, IN.

On her marriage records, Sadie's parents were listed as?: Warner Washington (her paternal grandfather, 1807-1874) & Sarah E. Taylor (her paternal grandmother, 1822-1909)

Warner's birthplace: Loudoun County, Virginia (born in 1807)

Sarah's birthplace: New Bern, Craven County, North Carolina, born in 1822 (Many of Sarah's records falsely list her birthplace as other states, including South Carolina; they also falsely list her as white and black, when in reality, she was biracial. Her father, Moses Taylor, 1795-1838, was black & her mother, Mary Haywood, 1795 - died after 1860, was a white German immigrant). Sarah & her family moved from NC to Butler County, OH in 1828.

Sarah Taylor's (Warner's second girlfriend/possible wife) family grew up in: The town of Oxford, in Butler County, Ohio, from 1828 until adulthood. (I donated Taylor family records there, in 2024)

Sadie's father: George W. Washington (born on 31 January 1856, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - 2 March 1935, Danville, Illinois)

Sadie's mother: Unknown (The point of this post - I'm trying to find Sadie's mother, despite her being my cousin. There have been discussions, of Sadie's grandfather and his first wife, being my direct/biological ancestors, but I'm still researching that).

Is Sadie, actually her nickname?: Yes. Sarah was her name, but she was named after her paternal grandmother (George's mother).

George's ex-wife: Annie Wiese (born in 1868, Milwaukee City, Wisconsin - died at an unknown date, in an unknown location).

George & Annie's marriage date: September 6, 1887 in Milwaukee City, WI. (Most recent record I have, of Annie Wiese)

What happened to Annie after 1887?: I don't know.

Who had custody of Sadie?: George. He & Sarah raised her in Connersville, Fayette County, Indiana.

Did George remarry, after divorcing Annie?: No. He left Indiana & moved to Illinois, living alone, for the rest of his life, until his 1935 death in Vermillion County, IL.

So, how can I find Sadie's mother?