Grantee Partner Spotlight: Tony Burroughs

A Q&A with Tony Burroughs

Genealogist, Author, and Historian

How did you first become interested in history and genealogy more particularly? 

And seven years later I read an article in the Chicago Sun-Times by the president of the Chicago Genealogical Society, who said on Thanksgiving Day, that we need to say thanks to our ancestors and trace our family tree. I had a flashback to what Alex Haley had said, and I checked but his book hadn’t come out. I discovered that the Boy Scouts had a merit badge book on genealogy.

I had been a Boy Scout when I was young. I got the book and started reading it. It talked about interviewing your parents and grandparents and going to the cemetery and doing research. And I got hooked. Never put it down. I was 27. 

By the way, no one knew how Alex Haley’s work would blow up. We had a speaker series, and he was just another in a list of speakers. Genealogy would become a global phenomenon, with the television series “Roots” and how it would lead to a boom in genealogy. It just came around at the right time. This was right after the 1960s, and it was a time of protest, and a time of inquiry, and of curiosity. Plus it was of universal interest, not just for Black people. 

Today, we have the annual RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City, and 15,000 people attend. 

As someone who has been involved in community history for over 30 years, in broad terms how would you describe the tools you have at your disposal today versus back when you started?

Well, I got started in caveman times (laughs). There was no internet, cell phones, or computers. You had to go on location for everything. Had to go to the library to get books. Had to learn how to do genealogy, by reading books. We had to take classes and learn about sources and methods. You had to get in your car, drive to the national archives, pull out old microfilm, and read line by line to find our ancestors. What would take 3 hours then, might take 15 minutes today. So research was very different.

I drove back and forth to Pennsylvania to look at records that now are online. So it was very different. However, the methodology and the sources are still similar. The difference is that the things we had to visit, you can do today online. The sources are essentially the same. The difference is the technology, which has taken it to a whole new level. However, it also adds to the confusion. 

If you don’t understand the methodology and the sources, you can misinterpret the records because you haven’t learned what the records are. 

You have to know what evidence is, and how to prove a case. When there’s no direct evidence, you have to use circumstantial evidence. They’ll look at you like you’re crazy. Things we take for granted, like birth certificates, are essentially 20th century documents. 

Well, what do you do when you get to the 19th century or the 18th century? You don’t have a birth certificate. So you have to find a different way to prove someone was born. 

So in my opinion the people who came up old school are better researchers. Today, I don’t call them researchers, I call them surfers. You have to know how to define a problem, lay out a research plan, understand what sources are available and what are not available, how to find what form they are in, and which are digitized and which are not, which are on microfilm and which are not, which you can access locally and which you cannot. 

Most people don’t understand that you have to consider all those questions. It’s another thing to go to a database, plug a name into a search box, and when nothing comes out, they don’t know what to do. So there are advantages and disadvantages to doing research in the 21st century.

You once said that African Americans may not be in history books they are still in records. Can you elaborate on this?

That’s not an anomaly. That’s most African Americans. We know about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King. But what about all the others? 

You probably know the name Isabel Wilkerson. She was a New York Times award-winning journalist, who wrote the best-selling book The Warmth of Other Suns. She did an end-of-the-year essay in the Times, and it was titled “A First Time for Everything.” She had reviewed obituaries over the past year, and when she looked at them, saw a reoccurring theme. The theme went like this. Eugene King was the first African-American milk-delivery man in Gary, IN, and Bernice Riley was the first African-American teller at First Federal Bank in Rocky Mount, NC. 

Each one of these people was the first Black in their field. Are they in any books? No. Were they trailblazers? Yes. Are they in the records? Yes. 

So that’s a perfect example of all these people who made history, were pioneers, and yet they’re not in the history books. If you didn’t see their obituary, you’d never know anything about them. I read that and I thought ‘Who the hell was Martin Luther King?’ These people were trailblazers, and never got credit for it until Isabel Wilkerson pointed out their obituaries in the newspaper.

You wrote the book Black Roots: A Beginner’s Guide to Tracing the African-American Family Tree. What are some of the special problems, solutions, and sources particular to African American families?

A lot of people have written that Black genealogy is like everyone else’s genealogy, until you get back to the slavery period. Well, I strongly dispute that. If that were true, it would negate all the history from now back to 1870. We’re talking about a history of racism, of Jim Crow, of segregation, and all the other things that affected American history. So, if you’re looking for marriage records for Huntsville, AL, did you have any clue that those records were segregated by race? Genealogists who may have published a history of marriages in Huntsville, AL, may not have included the “colored” records because they knew that their people were not colored, so there was no reason to include them in the book. So this is one main reason that African-American genealogy differs from traditional genealogy, long before you get back to 1870. 

So if you look at the history of racism and segregation, many of the records of African Americans were segregated by race. In some areas they were, in some areas they were not. In some time periods they were segregated, in some time periods they were not. As a researcher, you have to find out when they were segregated, and when they were not. Similar to that, you can pick up a book on the cemeteries of Atlanta, GA. Again, you can go to Atlanta, GA. You might not find your ancestors there. But did you know that there are colored cemeteries in Georgia? In Alabama? And, there are colored sections in white cemeteries? All this has to do with integrating history with genealogy. 

If you don’t understand history, you’re not going to be able to do genealogy because they’re intertwined.

When you look at the Civil War, there was a thing called the U.S. Colored Troops. Those were segregated units of Blacks who fought in the Civil War. But what if your ancestor lived in Vicksburg? He might have served in the Civil War Navy. Did you know that the Navy was not segregated? That the Blacks and the whites served in the same naval units? Again, this is about history and this is about understanding how traditional genealogy differs from African American genealogy. There are many more examples.

Another thing: When you get back to 1870, the majority of African Americans were enslaved - four million. So you’ve got to identify who that former enslaver was. And for most families, that name was not passed down from generation to generation. So you have to do research, to figure out who that person was. I found out through studying history, that the majority of those freed persons after the Civil War did not use the surname of their last enslaver.  

The myth is that after slavery, freed people took the surname of their last enslaver. I found out that in 85% of cases that was not true. So you have to have evidence to find out who that person was. In addition, all African Americans were not enslaved before the Civil War. There were over 200,000 free in the North prior to the Civil War, and over 280,000 free in the South before the Civil War. So there were almost a half million Blacks free before the Civil War. Most people don’t know that history.

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