Resources for African American history and genealogy research

You don’t have to visit the library to do serious research into African American studies! Historic materials are being digitized and made available every year, so historians and genealogists can find new answers to old questions. To celebrate Black History Month, we wanted to share some freely available resources you can use for research in topics related to African American history, and for genealogical research for people of African American descent. 

At the Riverfront Library, we’ve developed an extensive collection of African American materials - over 1,800 titles covering all aspects of African American life can be found here, including nonfiction, fiction, and biographies available for you to check out. 

You can find information in our Digital Archives about Yonkers and learn about the lives of local residents through oral histories in Histories of Change, Continuity, and Community: Yonkers, the African American Oral History Project, and Azim Thomas’s photography documenting the National Action Network. 

Anyone with a library card can check out our print and electronic materials, and we welcome those who’d like to work with our archival materials, whether they have a library card or not! Email localhistory@ypl.org for more information about on-site archival research. We’ve got city directories, yearbooks, clipping files, and access to historic local newspapers onsite, and you can find out more about our local history program by following this link

Are you interested in finding primary sources? Primary records are those generated by a particular event, by those who participated in it, or by those who directly witnessed the event. Primary sources might be interviews or typewritten accounts from witnesses, newspaper articles describing the event, or other recorded accounts.

100 milestone documents. A cooperative effort among National History Day, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the USA Freedom Corps. 

First-person narratives of the American South. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Freedmen and Southern Society Project. Established in 1976 to document emancipation in the words of the participants: liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners. Includes 50,000 documents that explain the journey from slavery to freedom between the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Radical Reconstruction in 1867. Interpretive essays by the editors provide historical context.

In motion: the African-American migration experience. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Virginia Memory Collection, through the Library of Virginia. Large collection of digitized records, offered by the Library of Virginia, the state archives and reference library at the seat of government for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Extensive genealogy and biographical information can be found, including “vast and varied collections of print materials, manuscripts, archival records, newspapers, photographs and ephemera, maps and atlases, rare books, and fine art that tell the history of the commonwealth and its people.” 

Making of America. Collection of approximately 1,600 full-text books and 50,000 journal articles from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. 

National Museum of African American History and Culture. More than 37,000 objects relating to African American history can be found through this digital collection.

New York Heritage Digital Collections. The collections in New York Heritage represent a broad range of historical, scholarly, and cultural materials held in libraries, museums, and archives throughout the state. Includes photographs, letters, diaries, directories, maps, books, etc. covering people, places and institutions of New York State. 

The Missing Chapter: Untold Stories of the African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley. Documents from a variety of archives, libraries, and private collections around New York State, primarily from Ulster County, New York. Describes the African American presence in the Mid-Hudson Valley, and their role in colonial and antebellum society in this region. Photographs, bills of sale, last will and testaments, inventories, auctions, runaway slave notices, court cases, slave law codes, journals, ledgers, and correspondences. 

New York Historical (formerly The New-York Historical Society). Digital holdings include 12,000+ pages of text dating from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Collection includes important manuscript collections relating to the institution of slavery in the United States and the Atlantic slave trade.  Account books and ship manifests documenting the financial aspects of the slave trade, records of educational institutions and anti-slavery organizations, correspondence and other personal papers of abolitionists, legal documents such as birth certificates and deeds of manumission, and political works are included.  

The New York African Free School Collection. In 1787 the New York Manumission Society created the African Free School with the primary goal of educating black children. It began as a single-room schoolhouse with about 40 students, the majority of whom were the children of slaves, and taught them a variety of practical subjects. By the time it was absorbed into the New York City public school system in 1835, it had educated thousands of children, including many who went on to become notable leaders. Actual examples of students’ work from 1816 through 1826 are included, offering a glimpse into the little-known history of African-American life in New York City in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

North American slave narratives. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Slave voyages database. Publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history, providing information about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Database sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Emory and Harvard Universities; University of Hull (UK); Universidade Federal do Rio de Janiero (Brazil); Victoria University, Wellington (New Zealand).

Valley of the shadow: living the Civil War in Pennsylvania and Virginia.  Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia Library project that interweaves the histories of two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line during the era of the American Civil War, incorporating a narrative and electronic archive of sources.

Xavier University of Louisiana's Digital Archives. Including the Charles F. Heartman Manuscripts of Slavery Collection, with over 6,000 pieces dating from 1724 to 1897, relating to the social, economic, civil, and legal status of enslaved Negroes and Free People of Color in Louisiana and especially in New Orleans, and The Slavery & Freedom in Louisiana Collection, containing newly discovered hand-written manuscripts pertaining to a variety of slave records in Louisiana, dating from 1784 to 1860. These rare documents, including freedom papers, wedding certificates, affidavits on runaway slaves, slave revolts, police records, and slave sale receipts, expand the historical knowledge of slavery in Louisiana and surrounding states during this time period.

Lee Archer, Tuskegee Airman and Yonkers native shown above. Photograph courtesy of the African American Aviation Collection Repository: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive