FREE ON-DEMAND WEBINARS offered by Reuters in conjunction with Legacy Family Tree Webinars covering Slavery and Researching Enslaved Persons
Legacy Family Tree Webinars, in conjunction with the Reuters series Slavery’s Descendants, is making available at no charge a variety of online genealogy webinars from its extensive library to help novices and experts alike. Taught by genealogists from around the world, the webinars below require no registration and are accessible without membership. The webinars range from introductions to genealogy for novices to courses that explore African American genealogy.
About 15 webinars will be offered for free, here, each month before being replaced by a different set of 15 webinars in each subsequent month. The rotating roster of webinars will be accessible through the end of 2023.
Resources for researching your ancestry
Almost all genealogical research begins in the present and proceeds to the past. That means you – and what you know about your parents and grandparents – are the starting points for researching your family’s ancestry. You can begin to piece together that tree by identifying the ancestors you already know.
You might also have access to records that provide additional details about your relatives. These could include obituaries, marriage documents, birth and death certificates, wills, yearbooks, newspaper clippings, family Bibles, letters, or any other record that might include details that will make it easier for you to track down additional information.
Two websites Reuters used extensively were Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. Ancestry charges for access. FamilySearch is free but requires users to register.
Source: Resources for researching your ancestry accessed 27 June 2023
How Reuters researched and reported Slavery’s Descendants
How many members of America’s political elite are direct descendants of people who were slaveholders?
To answer that question, Reuters examined the family ancestries of more than 600 of the country’s leading officeholders: members of the 117th Congress, which ended this January; the 50 U.S. governors in office before last November’s elections; the nine current justices of the Supreme Court; and President Joe Biden and the five living former presidents. (The analysis of the 117th Congress was essentially a snapshot of its members as of April 2021, when it had 536 members.)
Such an inquiry has never been done.
At the outset, Reuters sought assistance from the Record Linking Lab at Brigham Young University in Utah. Led by an economics professor and staffed by student researchers, the lab harnesses the underlying data of FamilySearch.org, a top genealogy website, which says it has digitized billions of records from across the world. (The website is funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an early pioneer in genealogical research in the United States. The church also founded Brigham Young University.)
The Record Linking Lab uses machine learning to perform automated linking of U.S. census documents, typically for academic papers and large studies, and then staffers manually check smaller sets of records to match them with the names of specific ancestors.
For Reuters, the Lab performed an initial search of the ancestries of the 600-plus political notables. It returned a large set of probable cases in which top politicians appeared to be descended from at least one direct lineal ancestor who enslaved people in America.
(Reuters only considered evidence of slaveholding that occurred after the founding of the United States. Journalists also limited their research to direct lineal descendants of the present-day elite rather than building sprawling family trees that included distant cousins.)
The Lab tentatively identified slave-owning ancestors for 142 members of the 117th Congress, 16 governors, two Supreme Court justices, President Joe Biden and all living former presidents except for Donald Trump, whose ancestors came to America after slavery was abolished.
That information was only a starting point. It provided initial roadmaps for a team of about a dozen journalists who spent more than a year developing and then executing a multi-step reporting process that either corroborated the initial links, disproved them, or identified entirely different familial lines tied to slavery.
Source: How Reuters researched and reported Slavery’s Descendants accessed 27 June 2023
