Slavery was a sad and ugly fact of our world history in the early 1500s when African slaves were brought to the Americas and sold as cheap labour to work in the plantantations of South America. As the Americas developed so did the slave trade and it took about 300 years before the slave trade finally came to an end. In the process it displaced about 15 million people of African descent who found themselves in America. Alex Hayley, author of the novel ‘Roots’ embarked on a journey to trace his own roots back to Africa after hearing that his own grandmother called Cynthia had been a slave. Hayley traced his roots to a West African called Kunta Kinte who had been bought to Maryland USA and sold as a slave to work in the plantations in Virginia.

It can be a difficult and an emotional process to trace your ancestry especially if you find that you are facing a similar scenario to that faced by Alex Hayley. The emotions are understandable but the difficulty arises because most of Africa’s history during the slave trade years is of an oral tradition. This means that full details of people’s names and other personal facts cannot be as easily traced back to those times. In America itself there are not many Pre civil war records about African Americans available to refer back to apart from details of the slave owners themselves and the number of slaves that they owned.

This is when online sites like Christine’s Genealogy can help as it provides databases of African American genealogy and other useful links to help you start your search. The web link www.aagriots.org is another helpful website that points towards the griots as another useful direction to look at when tracing your African roots. The griots were the storytellers who kept an oral account of the history of a family’s ancestry. They were invited at the birth or death of family members where they related stories of the members of that family and their life histories to honour them. These stories were retained over the years and the family histories kept intact.

It was during the American civil war that many African Americans found a chance to join the army. Here they had the opportunity of being clothed, fed and educated and it was a better option than working long hours in the plantations. It is during this time that the records of African Americans started to be kept. Pre-Bureau Records, also called Freedmen’s bureau, kept the records of the Africans who joined the army during that period and details about births, deaths, marriages and educational records can be researched from these records. National Archives and Records Administration is another useful organization which has recorded personal details about the African Americans family lives and their residential details. The names of slave owners and the details of the slaves they kept in their households can also be accessed from these records.

Census records, military records and records to do with monies that the African Americans deposited and saved can also provide useful links to tracing roots. Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture are some useful sites to explore. CDs, VHS and DVDs, books and catalogues like Afro-Americana 1553 1906 can also be helpful. DNA and Genetic Genealogy uses modern technology to help provide the answers that you are looking for and they are based at the University of Arizona.