"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.
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