One of the nation’s oldest and largest genealogical societies, founded to help Americans trace their family ancestries, will apologize Thursday for its history of racism, which includes a founder who was a eugenicist, and early resistance to integration.
, which was based on the long-discredited theory that humanity can be improved through breeding, with supposedly pure White people of European ancestry as the ideal.One NGS founder, Joseph Gaston Baillie Bulloch, a physician from Georgia and president of the group from 1909 to 1912, was an adherent of eugenics, the report said.
“Negroes … have nothing in common with us, generally speaking,” one member told The Washington Post at the time.In 1972, the NGS finally approved its first Black member: James Dent Walker, a highly accomplished African American genealogist employed by the National Archives, who became the group’s first Black officer.
About 1 in 3 African Americans have used multiple methods to research their family history — including talking to relatives, conducting online research and using a mail-in DNA service such as Ancestry.com, according to. And yet Blacks descended from enslaved people confront unique research obstacles. Blacks who were not free were usually not listed by name in the U.S. census before 1870, and records of the enslaved were often written by hand and poorly maintained or are no longer in existence.
The relationship between African American genealogists and the NGS has been at times tense since Walker joined the NGS as its first Black member, said LaJoy Mosby, national president of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, which was founded by Walker in 1977. The D.C.-based group, with 1,500 members in 35 chapters, is the largest “ethnic-focused” member of the NGS since the merger, she said.
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