Writing Our Ancestors Back Into History

Beginning Genealogy for Black and American Indian Families

My great-grandmother, Bertha Lewis. A Creole Indian born in 1905 in St. Landry Parish.

My ancestors were not always recorded as they knew themselves. They were marked down in boxes and lines that distorted who they were.

Genealogical research for Black and American Indian families is not a straightforward path. It asks us to move through silences, contradictions, and the weight of histories designed to obscure rather than preserve. To do this work acknowledges how systems sought to fragment our families and identities, while also affirms that we are still here, carrying forward what was meant to be erased. The gaps and distortions in the archive do not diminish our history; they reveal the resilience of our ancestors, who lived, loved, and endured despite those efforts.

As we read these records critically and with care, we are not just collecting data. We are restoring connection. We are writing our people back into history on our own terms. In doing so, we create a more complete inheritance—not only for ourselves, but for those who will come after us.

For Black and American Indian families in the United States, genealogical research is never just about names and dates. It is shaped by the long shadow of U.S. history: by enslavement, forced displacement, assimilationist policies designed to erase identity, and by the state’s shifting attempts to categorize people according to race.

Understanding that context is essential, because the records themselves are not neutral. They were created within systems that often sought to control, diminish, or redefine the very people we now seek to remember.

Take, for example, the question of racial categories. Across different censuses and local records, the same person or family might appear under multiple designations: “Negro,” “colored,” “mulatto,” “Indian,” or even “white,” depending on the assumptions or the political motives of the person recording the data. My great-grandmother Bertha Lewis, a Creole Indian born in St. Landry Parish 1905 is listed as both mulatto and Negro in the United States Federal Census records over a thirty-year span.

According to the Native American Guardian’s Association, the terms Mulatto or Free People of Color were used to describe individuals of mixed race in the earliest U.S. Census records, and included mixed-blood American Indians who were subject to tax laws and the U.S. Government. In the American South specifically, the term Mulatto was also applied to persons with mixed American Indian and African ancestry.

For example, a 1705 Virginia statute reads as follows: "And for clearing all manner of doubts which hereafter may happen to arise upon the construction of this act, or any other act, who shall be accounted a Mulatto, Be it enacted and declared, and it is hereby enacted and declared, That the child of an Indian and the child, grandchild, or great-grandchild, of a negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a Mulatto."

For genealogists, this means that finding ancestors often requires following them across categories, recognizing that these labels were imposed rather than chosen. The act of misclassification was itself a form of erasure, but noticing these shifts can reveal how families moved through (and resisted) the racial logics of their time.

For both Black and American Indian families, the legacy of slavery remains stitched into record and shapes what can (and cannot) be found. Before 1870, the vast majority of enslaved people were not listed by name in federal census schedules. Instead, they appeared in “slave schedules” as numbers and ages, recorded under the name of the enslaver. Reconstructing family lines often requires turning to wills, probate records, and bills of sale—documents that are matter-of-fact in their transactional language but sometimes the only surviving evidence of kinship ties.

After emancipation, the Freedmen’s Bureau created a remarkable archive between 1865 and 1872, recording labor contracts, marriages, schools, and testimony. These records are both a window into the lives of newly freed people and a reminder of how freedom itself was bureaucratically policed.

In the 19th century, the federal government oscillated between excluding American Indians specifically from official censuses altogether and forcing them into categories like “mulatto” or “colored.” Later, as assimilation policies deepened, the government sought to formalize identity through tribal rolls. The Dawes Rolls, compiled between 1898 and 1914 for the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, are a prime example. On paper, they were meant to establish citizenship and allocate land allotments. In practice, they functioned as tools of dispossession: dividing communal land, enforcing blood quantum, and defining identity through the lens of federal bureaucracy rather than community belonging.

Blood quantum is the practice of measuring “Indian-ness” in fractions, a settler invention designed to reduce the number of people who could claim tribal belonging over time. As journalist Tailyr Irvine writes, blood quantum was never about Indigenous ways of knowing family; it was about the state defining and limiting who could be counted, and who could not.

In the same centuries, Black Americans were bound by the opposite measure: the “one-drop rule.” Any trace of African ancestry, no matter how small, was enough to mark a person as Black and therefore subject to exclusion, segregation, or enslavement. This logic of blood was less about biology and more about control. To have even “one drop” meant to be fixed permanently in a racial caste, regardless of appearance, culture, or community.

So while American Indians were fractioned into smaller and smaller parts, Black Americans were consolidated into a single category. Both systems worked toward the same goal: to constrict identity, to limit access to land, resources, and self-determination.

Other federal projects compounded the problem. The Indian boarding school system, designed to “kill the Indian, save the man,” generated its own records while systematically erasing languages, traditions, and kinship structures. For many families, the paper trail begins in these institutions rather than in community-kept histories. This makes genealogy as much about reckoning with policies of forced assimilation as it is about celebrating survival.

At every step, genealogists working in Black and American Indian contexts must navigate not only archival silences but also political agendas. The categories we see in old records are not simple descriptors; they are artifacts of systems that sought to define who could belong, who could own land, who could marry, who could be free. Recognizing this doesn’t diminish the value of those records. It sharpens our ability to read them critically, see beyond the labels, and recover the people who lived beneath them.