African American History

Online resources and research tools

Historical Resources

The following list of resources offer a great deal of information from sites with the most expertise and relevant documentation. • African American History | National Archives - The Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the Black experience. This page highlights these resources online, in programs and more. • National Museum of African American History and Culture - Explore African American History through digital activities on the Smithsonian Institutes Learning Lab platform. • African Americans | History, Facts & Culture | Britannica - African Americans are largely descendants from enslaved people who were brought from their African homelands by force to work in the New World. • Black History Milestones: Timeline | history.com - African American history began with slavery, as white European settlers first brought Africans • What was the Great Migration? - The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Learn how you can use Map My Cousins to see where your family lived at the time and how their movements may have been impacted by the great migration. • US Census Migration Map (1910- 1970)

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Genealogy Resources

• African Ancestry | AfricanAncestry.com: Discover your African roots with the world leader in DNA testing for tracing African lineages. With an extensive database of indigenous African DNA samples, African Ancestry can determine specific countries and ethnic groups. • Finding Black family history with Ancestry.com - Discover your origins from over 1,500 regions around the world - including 13 distinct regions across Africa and over 90 African American and Afro-Caribbean communities. • • Map My Cousins: Many of the DNA tests offer Ethnicity Estimates showing where your family came from on a world map based on your DNA. If you’ve done your own Family Tree in any of the popular software packages on the market, you can check how accurate these estimates are using the Cousins Club Map My Cousins application. This uses your ancestors information from your family tree to show on a world map where they were born, lived and died. You can filter by generation, see migration patterns and more. This is a useful comparison against the ethnicity estimates and can also give you some good ideas for future research on where your family is from.

African American History: Great Migration

Maps

Between 1910 to the 1970s, approximately six million African- Americans moved out of the southern states to avoid racial violence and prejudice. They moved to areas in the north, mid-west and western United States in 2 phases. The first phase (1910-1940), primarily saw people move to New York, Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh. With the onset of World War II, the nations defense industry grew quite a bit bringing job opportunities for African- Americans in other regions, including major cities in California (Oakland, Los Angeles and San Francisco); Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. The “Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series” has a great migration map, including an interactive map that shows migrations by time period in a way that very naturally lines up with time periods for your family’s migrations in Map My Cousins. If you want even more detail, James Gregory conducted extensive research on migration patterns and the movement of people during the Great Migration. This is documented, along with a collection of interactive migration maps on the University of Washington website (“Mapping the Great Migration (African American)” by James Gregory) . These interactive maps provide detailed information by decade, region and city about the movement of African Americans from the South to northern and western states.