A Search for Black Heritage

Ten years ago, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) tried to research his family history in Manning, S.C., but he did not get far.

"It was almost impossible to find any records of anything," Cummings says. "My parents were sharecroppers and forbidden to go to school, so the records were limited. I was able to get a lot of history word of mouth."

Cummings wants to make sure that the difficulty he experienced in trying to research his ancestry doesn't happen to other people. That's why he and Sen. Mary Landrieu (DLa.) are asking Congress for funds to help African Americans trace their ancestral heritage.

"We all want to understand who we are and one of the best ways to do that is to discover where and who we came from," says Landrieu. "Segregation did not just mean segregated schools and neighborhoods, but also segregated records, which makes research all the more challenging."

The effort is called the Servitude and Emancipation Archival Research Clearing House Act of 2005 (SEARCH Act) in the National Archives and Records Administration. The legislation calls for $5 million to create a national archive and another $5 million to help colleges, universities and states gather historical documents.

Letters, diaries and other first-person records used to research family history are rarely available and many are in private collections. The SEARCH Act will give researchers the opportunity to go beyond the basic U.S. Census Bureau information, voting and business records, and other widely used sources for researching genealogy. Instead, the clearing-house will house a catalog of various documents, such as Freedmen's Bureau records and former slave-owner records.

"A clearinghouse to organize the system is noble, but I think the money could be better used to extract information from existing books and records," says John Logan, a member of the African American Geneaology Group in Philadelphia. "Ten million dollars is not enough to really make a difference at the grassroots level."

The measure comes, however, at a time when President Bush's 2006 budget calls for the elimination of grant funds and staff positions at the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the location where the clearinghouse would be maintained.

But until the measure is passed, those like Logan, who has traced his family back to the 170Os, will continue to hit a brick wall in their quest to find their roots.

"I still don't know where my family comes from; it's frustrating," says Logan.

- Betsy Adeboyejo

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Sep/Oct 2005
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved