FOR quite some time now, thousands of people have been rummaging through dusty old courthouse records, driving out to country gravesites or digging through genealogical web sites, all to research their family histories. The hobby has caught on in a big way as ordinary people become amateur sleuths, eagerly tracking down ancestors they never knew existed. But in the midst of all this, many African American have run into more challenges and been limited in their research far more than the average searcher. All because of one factor - slavery. "That's where a lot of people run into roadblocks," says Jackie Stewart, of the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California, based in Oakland, which offers resources and information on the specific aspects of researching black history. "It becomes a lot more complicated when you can't follow a family name, because given names and surnames of slaves, not to mention their ages and places of birth, were rarely recorded on various records," she says. "That's where (the society) comes in, where we begin to help each other in breaking through these walls. "It's not impossible to trace our ancestors through the years of slavery, but it's certainly most challenging." If you're persistent, it's often most rewarding, however. It took Anita Wills nearly two decades, but she was overjoyed to trace her past to her mixed-race ancestors' home at George Washington's family plantation in Virginia near the Potomac River, where they worked as indentured servants. For her, the process became almost a "spiritual quest," the Oakland resident says. Researching back to the days of slavery in America can be challenging, but if nothing else, some of the documents and records uncovered provide a fascinating look at the way things worked back then. For instance, in going through old census data, it's interesting to note the "slave schedule" forms filled out by the census marshals, which detail the method in which slaves were categorized, listed and counted - or not counted at all, in many cases. In the seventh and eighth censuses of the United States, in 1850 and 1860, information is arranged by state and then divided into "free" and "slave" schedules. These lists give the name of each slave's owner, with a listing of slaves by age, sex, and color. Slaves were also counted according to the number freed during the year. And there was also a column for fugitive slaves, who were counted by the number who had fled and not been captured, or by those who had been captured and returned. "Slave schedules are a valuable source of information," says Juliet Culliver Crutchfield, a genealogy columnist for the African American Genealogical Society. "To complicate matters for the researcher," she says, "slaveholders may not have lived on the land (where the slaves worked). They may have lived in another county or state. Some slaveholders employed an overseer, and the census taker may have reported that person as the slaveholder." Also, confusing matters, "The age given may be an estimate, as many slaves and their owners did not know the correct age," Crutchfield says.
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For Stewart, her genealogical research uncovered some family mysteries and helped explain her life-long love of the sea.