Digital Branch: Heritage Resources for Genealogy &amp; Family History: Black Ancestry

Start Researching Your Black Ancestry

The Morse Institute Library offers two e-resources that are great places to start. To access both Ancestry.com Library Edition or HeritageQuest, go to the "GET STARTED" tab and click on the resource of your choice. The other websites on this page offer awesome resources to start your research. Most offer a tremendous amount of information for free.

ACPL Genealogy Center: African American Gateway
Choose a state, region or subject to explore resources.
African American Genealogy: A Guide to Finding Your Ancestors Online
In this guide to African American genealogy research, we will talk about how to get started researching your African American ancestors, discuss common challenges and potential strategies for avoiding them, and highlight the best resources to help you begin to uncover your family’s roots. This guide also includes many resources for researching Black persons in general, not just those individuals of African descent.
The International African American Museum’s Center for Family History
The IAAM is a one of a kind research
center with a special focus on African American genealogy at one of our country’s most sacred sites.
Family History Guide: African American Resources
Learn how to get started, about specific resources, and tips and tricks you can use to enhance the research you are doing. This resource will also be of great value when starting to use databases like Ancestry.com.
Cyndi's List: African American
Cyndi's List provides a huge resource for researching your family history. Besides offering a many resources and websites, it also provides a great cross-check on what records can be found using FamilySearch.org, or Ancestry.com, etc.
Blackpast.org
BlackPast is not a genealogy research site. Nonetheless, because of the often related history and genealogy interests of our online users, we have listed below African American and General genealogy websites that may be useful for those seeking to research personal or family history.
AfriGeneas: Finding Your Way Around
AfriGeneas is a site devoted to African American genealogy, to researching African Ancestry in the Americas in particular and to genealogical research and resources in general. It is also an African Ancestry research community featuring the AfriGeneas mail list, the AfriGeneas message boards and daily and weekly genealogy chats.
African American Heritage
The Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the Black experience.

Newspapers

Websites that offer digitized newspaper content that can be searched a number of ways including by name, keyword, place, name of newspaper, or date. So even if you don't have all the information, your search may still turn up something useful. Search results may show a number a number of types of articles and other information. Scanning the page sometimes provides you with treasures you didn't think of finding! Here are a few examples of the types of articles you might find.

Vital Records: birth announcements, marriage intentions, divorce information, obituaries, funeral notices, and more.
Family Reunions: family members coming from long distances
Weekly News & Social Columns little mentions of who was doing what where. "Mr. & Mrs. So and So played whist at the home of ...."
Front pages - most likely to include articles about large community news or events that may include mentions of people, photos and more.
Opinions, Letters to the Editors, Letters to Santa Claus
Classifieds & Advertisements
Probate Notices
Court Actions
Women's Pages - these often include minutes or notes from women's clubs, and recipes submitted by community members
School Related
Sports
Military - often includes a photo of an individual with details of their service
Shipping News - may include details of arrivals and departures of ships
Kids page - sometimes winners of contests, essays submitted by children, etc.

Additional resources can be found in our Historical Online Newspapers Guide.

Historical African American Newspapers
This guide provides a list of historical African American Newspapers available online as part of digitization projects at libraries and historical societies as well as digitization projects done by Google. The content is available for free, though it is at the discretion of the institution providing the content. The newspapers contained within guide are those that have ceased to operate or are currently running papers with archives available. It does not include papers that are currently running and only offer access to the most recent articles.
Library of Congress: Chronicling America
Search and view newspaper pages from 1860-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. All articles are full-text

Heritage Resources for Genealogy & Family History

More Genealogy Resources

Start Researching Your Black Ancestry

Newspapers