Until Alex Haley’s “Roots” miniseries aired on television in 1977, most African Americans held little hope of tracing their heritage past modern times. Since slaves were considered property instead of people, records of the slaves’ births, deaths, sales and trades were kept no better than records of livestock. This has always been a tremendous stumbling block for the descendants of those slaves to learning about their ancestors.

Fast-forward to the New Millennium, and to the power of the Internet. Just type “African American genealogy records” into the Google search engine, and you will find enough free and paid genealogy resources to keep you busy for some time.

For example, if you have already traced your ancestors as far back as the 1930s, and if some of them were former slaves, you MAY be able to find out more about them for FREE. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. According to the website, “These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.” You can search this database to see if your relatives’ narratives and/or photos have been included.

Another excellent online genealogy resource for African Americans is Civil War Slave Compensation Claims In Compiled Military Service Records of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). After the Civil War, slave owners in border states were allowed to file a claim against the Federal government for loss of the slaves’ services if their slaves enlisted or were drafted into the U.S. military. According to the website, “Since each slave compensation claim was based on the service of a specific soldier, a copy of the claim’s paperwork was placed in that soldier’s compiled military service record. The regiments of U.S. Colored Troops that have a large number of these claims are the regiments formed in the border-states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri) or in neighboring states.” So if you have reason to believe that one of your ancestors served in the military during the Civil War, you should take a look at this database.

The Internet has many more genealogy websites that you can use to find out about your family’s history. Although the Internet doesn’t contain ALL the essential records about your family, you should still consider it is a useful tool that can point you in the right direction.

African Americans have played a vital role in U.S. history. If you are an African American and you wish to know more about your family’s history, you should try searching for your ancestors’ information on the Internet. It can guide you in locating seemingly unobtainable documents.

If you look for genealogy databases that don’t cost anything online you will find an amazing number of websites. After providing you with a small amount of results, they require you to join their website in order to obtain any additional information. It would probably be a good investment for you if you were seriously interested in searching for your family tree.

Additional free genealogy databases have extra information and actually allow you to download some of the details they discover for you. Other family members who are linked to the relative you have searched for will sometimes suggested in your search. If you have recently started researching your ancestors, this can be quite beneficial.

The databases for genealogy can be an excellent source for details if you know your relatives names and just need the days they were born and died. These will pop up on nearly all of the genealogy databases that are free without you doing anything else. The majority of the time, the search results will offer an address for the person as well.

There are a lot of kinds of genealogy databases out there. Research can be done via ancestry, birth or death records, marriage records or military service. Those who migrated from that region, Canadian ancestry databases have gathered quite a bit of information. Ancestors that fought in the Civil War can even be found. Information on criminals who were incarcerated during that time period is also available in their databases.

Your entire family tree can be found within a few of these genealogy databases.

If you join as a member you could actually include information that you might not previously have on the database. There was one particular free genealogy database on the Internet that actually provided the Bible records of a family. In order to have gotten the information in the first place, a highly committed individual had to enter data from their own family tree.

Getting you on track in your search for your family history, free genealogy databases can be very helpful in getting you started. This is one of the best methods out there of discovering your family’s history. It’s possible you’ll discover your family tree has someone well known in it.