We are excited to publish a contribution by a team of scholars from FamilySearch International, a non-profit genealogical resource that helps people discover their family history, and Brigham Young University, that identifies about two million named Black Americans born before emancipation in the United States.
“FamilySearch . . . has an immense amount of searchable data about individuals who appear in a great range of primary sources—from censuses to baptismal records to birth records and more. Enslaved.org is excited and honored that FamilySearch is publishing a complete dataset through our project. This is a rare collaboration between a center that caters mostly to an academic audience and a non-profit organization that caters to the general public,” said Walter Hawthorne, director of Enslaved.org.
“We’re honored to contribute to this important project that brings greater visibility to the lives and legacies of formerly enslaved individuals,” said Stephen Valentine, Executive Vice President for North America and Europe FamilySearch. “In addition to sharing this valuable dataset, we’re excited that scholars and descendants can access original historical images and linked family records in Family Tree. These connections enrich academic research and empower families to discover and preserve their heritage in deeply personal ways.”
According to Joseph Price at the BYU Record Linking Lab, "The crowdsourcing capabilities of Family Tree have been instrumental to the development of multiple record-linking projects and will enable the continued enhancement of the ‘Two Million Black Americans Born Prior to Emancipation in the 1900 U.S. Census’ dataset as a portal to deeper research possibilities. For descendants especially, access to Family Tree with free FamilySearch accounts allows users to explore their connections to formerly enslaved individuals and input their own genealogical information. These contributions by descendants in turn strengthen . . . scholarly research."
In this issue:
● Brown, Ras Michael, Britton Davis, Joseph Price, Elizabeth West. "Two Million Black Americans Born Prior to Emancipation in the 1900 U.S. Census." Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 6, no. 2 (2025): 72-82. Article currently accessible at: https://jsdp.enslaved.org/fullIssue/volume6-issue2/. Data available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JSHPJT.
Enslaved.org has benefitted from and is grateful for generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, but our existing grants were terminated; “The President’s February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions.” Please consider helping us and our partners continue our important work of documenting the lives of named enslaved individuals of African descent. You can do so by giving through this link https://give.msu.edu/?SMID=AN2306.
