Location! Location! Location! That catchphrase popularized by the real estate community fits with the underlying theme in this book about researching African American family history in Alabama. As the genealogy bug attacks more and more African Americans, resource location almost always becomes one of the critical needs in their research process. Throughout this book, I will be using the terms family history, genealogy, family historians, and sometimes genealogist. In their book Black Genesis, James Rose and Alice Eichholz gave us an insight into how genealogists breathe life into family history:
“Genealogy is primarily a quest for identity, not in terms of name or status (although it has been used that way sometimes), but as a basis for understanding the psychological, social, political and economic forces that influenced us through our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and family life in general.”
Formal instruction on how to research a family’s history plays an important role in tracking down the branches of the family tree, however, nothing beats the resource that maps the way. The idea for this guidebook rose out of my lecturing throughout the country and having noticed that reference guides on African American family history resources seemed to exist for every state except Alabama. Books like Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut, 1650–1900, by James M. Rose and Barbara W. Brown, and Free African-Americans of North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina by Paul Heinegg are among the fastest growing state resources that I have seen. Whereas, Alabama’s African American resource information had remained only a chapter in many of the basic family history resource books.
This was regrettable not merely for researchers on African American history in Alabama. In fact, Alabama’s records play an especially important role in U.S. family history research because of the migration patterns of Alabama’s freedmen, first to urban areas of Alabama and then to northern cities, a trend that continued throughout the first part of the twentieth century. Florette Henri states in Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920, “By 1917–1918 they were pouring into northern cities, especially those with heavy industries, so that Detroit’s black population in 1920 was eight times as great as in 1910; Cleveland’s was four times as great, and Chicago’s was two and one-half times as great.”
The flight of blacks from the Southern states scattered families and today makes it a challenge—but not an impossibility—to research African American family history. This resource guide is intended to help identify and locate the resources for researching African American records in archives, libraries, and county courthouses throughout the state of Alabama.