"I was a student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale," writes Tony Burroughs in his book Black Roots: a Beginner's Guide to Tracing the African American Family Tree. "I attended a lecture on February 14, 1969, given by Alex Haley for Black History Week (that was before it was turned into a month-long celebration)." But rather than talk about Malcolm X, which Burroughs had expected, Haley began speaking of his own family:
"He spoke of Kunta Kinte, Kizzy, Chicken George, and other people he'd found in his search for his family tree back to Africa. Haley was a great storyteller, and I was mesmerized. I had never heard anyone talk about searching for their ancestors before, let alone listened to someone who had actually done it and, incredibly, back to Africa."

On Thanksgiving Day in 1975, Tony Burroughs began a 23 year journey tracing his family history. Beginning with interviewing every relative he had, he then moved onto visiting cemeteries where his ancestors were buried, and began to research the local archives and libraries. In 1977, he attended a three week genealogy symposium sponsored by the National Archives in Washington DC, where he attended lectures given by state archivists, librarians and genealogical experts from around the United States by day, and researching his family history at night.

He made friends with an archivist at the National Archives called James Dent Walker, who specialised in military records. This was helpful to Tony, because his great-grandfather had been in the military, and what Dent taught him was invaluable to his research, they became good friends, and Burroughs credits him with providing him with invaluable research skills.

Burroughs began teaching classes on genealogy, and established the African American Institute of Ancestry. In 1996, he received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Genealogical Society and co-authored the African-American Genealogical Sourcebook. In 2001 he published Black Roots. He currently teaches genealogy at Chicago State University, and does consultancy work for public and network television as an expert on genealogy. His books have helped hundreds of thousand of people research their family history.

The following is an interview with Tony Burroughs, by Kate Tuttle of Africana.com

How common is it for an African American to be able to trace his or her roots all the way back to Africa?
Very uncommon, very uncommon. It will probably get better in the future, because more records are being uncovered, more records are being microfilmed, being detailed, and we're developing new methodologies. And also due to my book and other books people are getting a better foundation to build upon now. But the difficulty is - to put it bluntly- when European Americans trace their ancestry, their ancestors came on ships when they planned to come here. There are manifest logs, passenger lists, where their names are available, as well as records on where they departed from, where they landed. These kinds of things are very rare for African Americans, because blacks were considered cargo. They weren't concerned with their names; they just wanted a body. So the kinds of records that exist for European Americans do not exist for African Americans.

What are the other big challenges for African Americans as opposed to European Americans in trying to find out about their heritage?
One of the big challenges is the fact that the vast majority of African Americans' ancestors were slaves, and slaves only had first names; they're not recorded on records for the most part, with surnames -although in very rare instances there are surnames associated with slaves. Now, it's difficult enough to trace somebody with a first name and a last name, because you can go into communities and there were many people that had the same name - first and last. Here you're talking about a whole nation of people that didn't even have surnames, so that's very difficult.
The other thing, for African Americans trying to research their ancestry back into the slavery period, is that to make that bridge they have to first identify the name of the former slave owner. Because slaves were property, you had to find out who was the slave owner, what did the slave owner do with his property. Trying to find out the name of the slave owner is extremely difficult, because in many instances that individual had a different surname than the name of the former slave when he actually, legally, used a surname.
And even before you get to then, you have the problem of segregation, Jim Crow, and that whole period, so you don't - blacks are not traditionally found in obituaries, in Who's Who in America, all the traditional sources that whites use. There were parallel societies because of segregation and often times records didn't exist, or they were organized in a segregated fashion. You need to understand what records were segregated and how and how our research differs from European Americans.
Another hurdle you run into is when white genealogists did their research and went into the courthouse and transcribed records, or went to the cemetery or whatever - when they published those things, because of racism, they often did not include the blacks and the slaves in those lists of names. And so African American genealogists can go into the genealogy library, pick up a book of rolls for Mississippi, look in it, not find his ancestors in there, and think that they're not in the record, not even realizing that the person that compiled the record neglected to put the blacks in there because he said, "I'm not related to any blacks, why should I include them?"

So black genealogists have to start from scratch.
Exactly.

For people out there who are starting from scratch, what's the one piece of advice you'd give someone just starting out?
If I could give one piece of advice, I'd tell them to get a tape recorder and go to all their relatives and record them as much as possible before they died. It's the most important thing they could ever do.

What do you predict for the future of black genealogy?
I'd say the future looks very good. Like I say there are more records being uncovered and this is continually happening, so people will have more available to them. We're developing new methodologies, so people don't have to reinvent the wheel. At the same time there's a trap you can fall into now, too. Because there's so much information available now, people can get confused, and not be able to separate the forest from the trees. So in that way they have to be a little more scholarly -just because the Internet exists, doesn't mean that you're going to be more successful, the same way that just because you walk into a library doesn't mean you're going to walk out smart. [Laughs]

What does someone gain from learning about their family's history? Why do it at all?
They gain a richness of their family history, of American history and black history. It's very satisfying to learn things about your history on a broad scale, and also to learn about your history on an individual personal level. It gives you a level of confidence, a pride in what your ancestors have done, and how they contributed to the building of America. A lot of people don't have any knowledge of the roles that their ancestors played and consequently they feel very disconnected from what's going on? I mean, think about walking past the White House and thinking on the one hand that the president lives there and then look on the other hand and think, "Well, slaves built this." And that happens on a continual basis when you research your ancestors and you see the things that they've done.