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US Black Heritage Project Newsletter Archive 2023

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Contents

SEPTEMBER 2023 NEWSLETTER

Announcements

  • 2023 has been the year of streamlining for USBH. We want to be as efficient as possible in everything we do and making learning how to do it easy. If you see a way we can improve a process, please contact a Project Leader and share!
  • Are you looking for more training to learn the Heritage Exchange process of documenting slavery era families? Come to one of our 2nd Tuesday Heritage Exchange classes. See the registration link at the bottom of the Learning the Heritage Exchange System help page
  • Please see the reminders below regarding living people and living notables profiles. This is very important!
  • A USBH DNA Team is coming soon. If you are experienced enough with DNA to confirm family and know how to write WikiTree DNA confirmation statements, please consider helping us confirm members' family on WikiTree using their DNA. Contact Emma MacBeath for more information.

Reminders

  • Please don't create a viewable profile for a person born less than 100 years ago unless you have found a death source for them. Don't assume people in the 1920-1950 census records are deceased because this is often not the case. Some people prefer to use born 105, 110, or even more years ago as their benchmark for creating profiles. Choose your preference and be diligent about finding the death records. Please also remember, to honor the WT rules regarding recently deceased, that we don't create profiles for anyone deceased in the past two years unless you plan to manage that profile and choose a higher level of privacy with a private biography.
  • Please remember to add birth locations to all profiles even if it's estimated. Birth locations are important for finding and connecting ancestors, as well as for running reports by location.
Living People

If you are a member of USBH, please see the two posts from September 19th regarding creating living people profiles and the rules for creating living notables. In short, WikiTreers shouldn't create profiles for living people they aren't closely related to or don't have permission from. WikiTreers should always work with the project who will manage it before creating living notable profiles. All living notables not created by close family members must be managed by a project.

USBH Living notables should only be created by close family members or USBH Project members certified to do so. If you'd like to be certified to work on USBH living notables, please contact Emma MacBeath. For WikiTreers who have been around a while, the process will be quick and easy. USBH Project members need to complete the Profile Improvement Path and be in the project for one month before applying for certification.

Upcoming Events

  • October 10th 4:30 Pacific/7:30 Eastern: 1st Tuesday Heritage Exchange Class
  • October 13th-15th: USBH Weekend Sprint (Cleanup): Needs Sources category
  • October 27th-29th: USBH Weekend Sprint (Creation): 1880 census for western states
  • November 3rd-5th: WikiTree Day and Symposium
  • November 10th-12th: Military-focused USBH Weekend Sprint
  • November 14th 4:30 Pacific/7:30 Eastern: 1st Tuesday Heritage Exchange Class
  • December 8th-10th: "Home for the Holidays" sprint: adding missing birthplaces and adding family to "Tree Size One" profiles

Help Needed

  • We have many profiles still to create for the Baltimore, Maryland Laurel Cemetery. We are working from a spreadsheet. If you can help us create profiles from death certificates, please contact Emma MacBeath for access to the spreadsheet.
  • We need Team Leaders in all areas of the project! Leadership can be tailored to your time availability and skills. Contact Emma MacBeath who can get you started.

Team Updates

See our Project Teams Page for a full list of the USBH teams.

Family Builders Team

Emma MacBeath
Family Builders build trees from scratch for new WikiTree members on a first come, first served basis.

Do you like building trees? Contact Emma to help us give this amazing gift to these members. It's a great way to grow the USBH database!

Heritage Exchange Team

Elaine Martzen, Gina Jarvi
Are you experienced with the Heritage Exchange system of creating profiles and adding categories? The HE Checklist Team needs your help! This team checks all new profiles created for Heritage Exchange to make sure they are formatted correctly and have the right categories. Even updating a couple profiles a week helps! Contact Elaine Martzen for more information.

Notables Team

Katie Bryant, Kate Schmidt
Have you noticed the new connection links at the top of all Notable profiles? Now you can see who is connected and who isn't. Our connection rate has gone up 3% this year. Keep up the great work!

One Place Studies

We've recently added a category stream for African-American One Place Studies. Currently we have five - check them out! We will use these categories for One Place Studies (OPS) for locations that have/had a majority African-American population during the time period being studied. Like the African-American Cemeteries category stream, this will be a parallel category stream to the general OPS categories.

If you'd like to start an African-American OPS, please follow the normal sign-up directions on the OPS project page to answer their sign-up post in G2G, but make sure to mention in your answer that it will be an African-American OPS so that Azure can add these new categories when she's getting your study set up. If you have an existing OPS for a location with a majority African-American population and would like to have these new categories added to it, please let Christy Melick know and she will get them added. We're creating the state level categories on an as-needed basis, so we'd like USBH leaders to create those categories to make sure they're set up uniformly for all states.

Plantations Team

Michelle Detwiler
We continue to work on plantations in all of the slave states. Although there are more plantations that need to be recorded, we have a multitude of plantations that have been researched and need profiles created. If you are interested in helping profile the lists of the enslaved on plantations please let us know.

Profile Improvement Team

Christy Melick
A reminder that we have a very helpful page that explains how to use all of our USBH maintenance categories and how the profile creation cycle works for people who don't prefer the whole profile approach. This cycle uses maintenance categories and allows each of us to do what we do best on many profiles.

The "US Black Heritage Project, Needs Connection" category has now been deleted. We realized it would become larger and larger over time, be difficult to maintain, and we could easily pull reports for unconnected profiles by location in WT+.

Please join us in our next clean up sprints including the first one in October to add sources. Thanks to massive clean up of many maintenance categories, our Needs Sources category has become quite large. Please help us finish sourcing these profiles.

Reminder: The Needs Sources category should be used when you aren't using the whole profile approach and only adding one or two sources upon creation and expect there to be more. Please don't use this category on well researched profiles.

State Teams

Florida and Georgia

A huge thank you to Team Leader Carolyn (Atkinson) Martin for her amazing work setting up these two teams and helping them to flourish. Carolyn needed to step down as Team Leader so these two very active teams now need a Team Leader. Please contact a Project Leader if you can help!

Louisiana

Most of this quarters effort has been on the cemeteries all across the state.

Mississippi

Mississippi Team continues work on Pontotoc (2 cemeteries need profiles; one only needs 8 profiles to complete) and Lafayette counties (5 cemeteries have categories and need profiles). Also work on the Mound Bayou OPS continues (522 people have profiles and 8 cemeteries are almost complete).

Ohio

Christy Melick, Amy Johnson
Ohio Team has worked on the Burlington 37, the settlement of freed slaves of John Ward of Pittsylvania County, and continues adding families for the 1880 census in Fayette Township. At this point, we're finding that most families from the 1880 census can easily be connected within one or two steps. Christy has been tracking some statistics for Lawrence County - towards the beginning of July we had 163 African American profiles with 70% connected and as of August 13th we had 308 profiles with 90% connected. It's great to see the team's work pay off like that! Let's keep it going!

After spending several months in our first focus county, Lawrence County, the Ohio Team is starting a new focus county this month: Gallia County. This is a county several of us have done some work in previously, so we have a good base to start from. Our Ohio Team page has been updated with Gallia County information.

South Carolina

Michelle Detwiler, David Hamilton
This fall finds the work in the state of South Carolina continuing at a steady pace. David has been working on the plantations located at Edisto Island, researching the enslaved, and linking and recording the families who lived there on the plantations. Michelle has begun research to the Georgetown area, recording the Freedmen’s Labor Contracts 1865- 1867. See: Georgetown Plantations 1865-1867, SC. This work has been very interesting as the labor contracts give plantation names, the names of the plantation owners, and the names of persons who worked the plantations just after emancipation.

Other Georgetown County work going on is linking the Find-a-Grave memorials at the Chicora Wood Plantation Cemetery to those who lived on the Chicora Wood Plantation before emancipation. This has been exciting as some of those persons in the cemetery were also involved in the Civil War and received military pensions!

Texas

Focus has been primarily on adding cemetery categories to previously created profiles and creating profiles.

Virginia

The Virginia Team continues to focus on Wythe County. The 1850 Slave Owners page is now available. Thanks Marina!

Please send a message via our google groups email if you are interested in joining any state team or have anything you'd like to share.

New Projects/Activities in the Works

  • We will begin adding Oklahoma Freedmen to WikiTree soon (people formerly enslaved by the 5 tribes). Currently we are discussing categories and pages. If this is an area of interest for you, please help us! Contact a Project Leader for more information.
  • One Place Studies: See the One Place Studies section above for more information


Members in the Spotlight

Thank you to our many generous and hard working USBH Project members. Here are a few who were Featured Members of the Week in 2023 (click on the link to see their interviews in g2g)


Welcome New Members!

Welcome to our new members this quarter!

Alex Adkins-Langen, Taneya Koonce, Sara Rice, Lily (Robison) Swan, Kamala Gray, Robin Williams, BobbieRae (Weldon) Young, Naomi Van Tol, Rick Fryrear, Whitney Cecil, M Cole, Sjana Lee (Dreyer) Bauer, Mary (Brown) Haak, Kate Thompson, J (Kelley) Grohsmeyer


Congrats New PATH Graduates!

Virginia (Butter) Fields, Orin Hargraves III, Naomi Van Tol, Eva Head, Sarah (Councell) Turner, Mary Baker

Sources in the Spotlight

Have you heard of the Book of Negroes?

The Book of Negroes is a historical document that records names and descriptions of 3,000 Black Loyalists--enslaved Africans who escaped to the British lines during the American Revolution and were evacuated to points in Nova Scotia as free people of color. It exists in two original versions, created separately but at the same time by the British and the Americans as they registered the refugees. One lies in the archive at Kew Gardens, England, as part of the Carleton Papers, and the other is at the US National Archives (NARA).

See: Book of Negroes Category to see what resources we have available on WikiTree regarding this source.

Awesome Accomplishments

  • As of October 1, 2023, the new total of profiles is 241,325. That's only 8,675 profiles from our 2023 goal of 250,000! Can we meet the goal in October?
  • We now have 63 Platinum Profiles that have been taken through a rigorous notables checklist. 197 more profiles are currently undergoing the process.
  • Our percentage of connected profiles continues to increase thanks in part to the increase in number of profiles and thanks to members like you making connections between families. We are now at 50.6% connected for stickered profiles and 38.8% for our notables.

Statistics

+ in parenthesis is how many were added so far in 2023

  • Number of Profiles: 241,325 (+79,722)
  • Number of Notables: 3696 (+953), 63 Platinum
  • Number of Plantations: 332 (+88) See: this table for a break down by state.
  • Number of Cemeteries: 1914 (+848)

End of Quarter 3, 2023 Heritage Exchange Statistics (+this quarter)
* top 3 increases

Enslaved AncestorsSlave Owners Free People Of Color
Alabama 3091 625 119
Arkansas 435 124 15
California 0 2 11
Connecticut 74 323 327
Delaware 101 299 75
D.C. 77 23 88
Florida 2252 397 5
Georgia 4340* 1800* 111
Illinois 4 10 75
Indiana 1 5 234
Iowa 0 9 10
Kansas 5 5 4
Kentucky 3189 1854* 267
Louisiana 880 560 437*
Maine 4 10 31
Maryland 1463 1094 307
Massachusetts 164 310 1107
Michigan 0 0 146
Minnesota 0 0 2
Mississippi 1375 612 20
Missouri 275 261 30
Nebraska 0 0 0
New Hampshire 37 50 72
New Jersey 123 171 167
New Mexico 0 0 2
New York 58 213 837
North Carolina 4178 1944 619
Ohio 1 2 1161*
Oklahoma 82 20 1
Pennsylvania 22 54 1097
Rhode Island 20 49 105
South Carolina 7164* 1508 254
Tennessee 797 627 34
Texas 750 242 19
Utah 3 2 0
Vermont 0 0 186
Virginia 17254* 4378* 1478*
West Virginia 141 64 0
Wisconsin 2 3 1
Totals: 48,362 (+4,145) 17,650 (+1,633) 9,455 (+889)

End of Q3 2023 Cemetery Statistics
Denise (Harden) Jarrett

#States#Counties #Cemetery Categories#Profiles#Graves%Complete
Previous Year324871,0669,0551,153,0120.79%
1-31-2023325111,13110,5681,204,0400.88%
2-28-2023325421,27712,0421,269,4020.95%
3-31-2023325611,35413,2201,303,0701.01%
6-27-2-23326421,65718,1181,491,728 1.21%
9-30-2023327051,91422,3861,554,6971.44%
Monthly Change0+16+84+2,113+32,287+6.54%
Quarterly Change0+63+257+4,268+62,9696.78%
YTD Change0+218+848+13,331+401,685+3.32%

Profiles by Birth Location (top 10)

  1. Virginia 42,162
  2. North Carolina 25,829
  3. Georgia 18,875
  4. South Carolina 16,678
  5. Texas 16,462
  6. Louisiana 13,542
  7. Alabama 13,312
  8. Mississippi 12,845
  9. Kentucky 10,584
  10. Tennessee 7,214 (Tennessee moved above Arkansas this quarter)

Profiles by USA Birth Location (less than 50 profiles)

  1. Alaska 1
  2. Nevada 5
  3. North Dakota 6
  4. Hawaii 8
  5. Wyoming 8
  6. South Dakota 15
  7. Idaho 15
  8. Oregon 23
  9. Montana 28
  10. New Mexico 29
  11. Arizona 34

Past Featured Members


JUNE 2023 NEWSLETTER

Announcements

  • 2023 is the year of streamlining for USBH. We want to be as efficient as possible in everything we do and making learning how to do it easy. If you have ever created slavery era profiles, please take five minutes to complete this short survey about the Heritage Exchange help pages and learning process. This will help us make them even better.
  • Team Roses will be partnering with USBH during the January, April, and July Connect-A-Thons. If you don't have a team, join us and add some profiles to help boost USBH numbers!
  • Elaine Martzen moved up from Project Coordinator to Project Leader and Christy Melick moved up from Team Leader to Project Coordinator. We welcomed Amy Johnson as our newest Team Leader for Ohio.
  • We started new teams for Maryland and Ohio. Contact the Team Leaders if you're interested in helping with that state's work.

Reminders

  • Please only use [[Category: US Black Heritage Project, Needs Profiles Created]] when you add a source that lists additional family members. When someone chooses to work on a profile from this category, they expect the source they need to create the family members from to already be available.
  • Please add the standard text found at Editing the Slave Owner Profile as a public comment if you're the first person to add a === Slaves === section on a slave owner profile managed by someone other than yourself.
  • Please don't create a profile for a person born less than 100 years ago unless you have found a death source for them. Don't assume people in the 1920-1950 census records are deceased because this is often not the case. Some people prefer to use born 105, 110, or even more years ago as their benchmark for creating profiles. Choose your preference and be diligent about finding the death records. Please also remember that we don't create profiles for anyone deceased in the past two years unless you plan to manage that profile and choose a higher level of privacy with a private biography.

Upcoming Events

  • Because of the July Connect-A-Thon, we will have only one USBH Weekend Sprint July 28th-30th to create basic biographies for profiles in our project's Needs Biography maintenance category. Look for announcements about two August and two September sprints.
  • Bookmark our USBH Project Calendar to keep up with all upcoming events.

Help Needed

  • Are you experienced with the Heritage Exchange system of creating profiles and adding categories? The HE Checklist Team needs your help! This team checks all new profiles created for Heritage Exchange to make sure they are formatted correctly and have the right categories. Even updating a couple profiles a week helps! Contact Elaine Martzen for more information.
  • We need more team leaders for state teams, Heritage Exchange, Family Builders, Outreach, Notables, and Military and War. If there's a team, we need more leaders! Message a Project Leader if you are interested. If we don't have a team yet for an area you'd like to get started, let them know that too.
  • We'd like to increase the representation of profiles in states with the lowest numbers. See the list of the eleven lowest states at the bottom of the statistics section below. Can you add a few profiles for some of these states?

Team Updates

See our Project Teams Page for a full list of the USBH teams.

Connectors Team

Katie Bryant

  • Did you know we now have a list of the largest unconnected branches for USBH profiles? Adding family members to these branches can help us get them connected faster. And since they're large branches, we'll connect a large number of people at once. This report is updated weekly.
  • We also now have a list of unconnected branches for states where we have a state team. Check our Connectors page for a list of some large unconnected branches for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia

Family Builders Team

Emma MacBeath
We restarted the Family Builders program last month after a hiatus. Shirley contacted people who were waiting to see if they still wanted help and we have a list ready to go. If you like building basic trees for others, please help us build and transfer trees on WikiTree. Getting a tree started is often the hardest part for people. You can help set them up for success.

Heritage Exchange Team

Elaine Martzen, Gina Jarvi
There is a constant need for enslaved ancestor profiles to be created from lists on slave owner and plantation pages. Check Category: USBH Heritage Exchange, Needs Slave Profiles for pages and profiles you can work on.

Notables Team

Katie Bryant, Kate Schmidt
In June, we cohosted a Finding Your Roots Connection Challenge alongside the Jewish Roots and Notables Projects. We started with 123 unconnected profiles (40 USBH) and at the live kickoff, had the amazing opportunity to chat with Nick Sheedy, the lead genealogist for the show! During June, we connected 71 of the profiles (26 USBH) which was incredible! We want to get to 100% connection, so please feel free to keep working on the list found on the spreadsheet linked in our g2g post.

We have tons of notables who still need profiles. Can you help? See the New Notables to Create spreadsheet for a list of notables who don't have profiles yet. This list is in no way close to complete, so if you know of a notable without a profile, please create it! Just be sure to add USBH as co-manager. Contact one of the Notables Coordinators for information on how to do that.

Plantations Team

Michelle Detwiler
Plantations Team has been working diligently on recording plantations and the enslaved. As of the June tally there are 327 plantations recorded on our Plantations Index, with 188 of them complete! This count is up by 60 plantations since the beginning of the year.

When we work on a plantation, we look for the owners, deeds of purchase and sell, history of the area involving the plantation, and the names of the enslaved connecting them to the plantations and the owners. Sometimes this is an easy job with internet shouting out all of the above. Then sometimes we have a named plantation or a named owner with very little information about the enslaved. Those are the plantations where the research can get pretty involved.

One thing that helps with connecting the owners and the enslaved on the plantations are the Freedmen’s Bureau Labor Contracts of 1865-1868. In Georgetown County, South Carolina, the Freedmen’s Bureau records have been very helpful citing which plantations were actually contracting with the same formerly enslaved there. And many of those formerly enslaved are now listed with their first and last names.

For an example of a connection found connecting families and plantations, please see the Israel Carr family and Turkey Hill Plantation.

If you would like to help work on plantations, making connections, contact Michelle Detwiler.

Profile Improvement Team

Christy Melick
It's been a busy quarter for Profile Improvement!

  • We had several weekend sprints focusing on profile improvement during which we cleared over 2000 Data Doctor suggestions, added over 300 military stickers to profiles and added birthplaces to over 1200 profiles. During our profile creation sprints, we created profiles for soldiers in the 5th US Colored Infantry regiment from the Civil War and added parent profiles for Mother's Day and Father's Day.
  • We have a new report that shows all of the project's Data Doctor suggestions.
  • We created a new help page for the project's maintenance categories. All project members are asked to read through this help page, paying close attention to the first two major sections on "Purpose of Maintenance Categories" and "Categories for the Profile Creation Cycle". We want to make sure we're all using the categories in the same way so that we can work together as efficiently and effectively as possible.
  • We have also created help pages with important information about our project's guidelines for copyright and birth locations. Please read these as well. All of these help pages can be found on the project's page directory in the "Profile Creation Policies and Help Pages" section.
  • We are working on cleaning out the "Needs Profiles Created" maintenance category so that it is somewhere our connectors can find easy places to add new profiles. If you'd like to help with this effort, please contact Project Coordinator Christy Melick.

State Teams

Florida

Carolyn Martin
The Florida State Team was shorthanded this quarter (volunteers are welcome!). We are glad to have Betsy Simpson back on our Team as of the end of June. The team worked on St Johns County this past quarter adding completing 2 cemeteries, and adding 13 slave owners, 6 "slaves of" pages, and 12 slave profiles. Our focus for next quarter will be Suwannee County which was created in 1858.

Georgia

Carolyn Martin
The Georgia State Team completed 34 slave owners (11 "slave of" pages), 33 slaves, and 1 cemetery this past quarter for Jackson County, Georgia. We are very excited about our new project for this quarter which spans numerous counties while focusing on the large Troup family of enslavers and their associates. We actually jumped in on this project the last week of June and have already added 10 slave owners' profiles, 1 plantation, 1 slaves of page and 20 slave profiles!

Ohio

Amy Johnson Christy Melick

  • We now have 4326 stickered profiles of African Americans born in Ohio and 7789 total Ohio profiles (people who were either born, married, or died in Ohio).
  • 362 Ohio profiles were added in June.
  • 63% of the Ohio profiles are connected.
  • We passed 1000 Free People of Color FPOC profiles in Ohio this month, with the total now at 1014.

New Projects/Activities in the Works

  • We need help creating profiles for all those interred at Laurel Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland. See this G2g post for more information and to get access to the spreadsheet.
  • 15 for 15 USBH Project Activities
  • Categorization and identification of Black churches is under way! If this is an area of interest for you, please contact the leader for this team, Denise Jarrett

Members in the Spotlight

Thank you to our many generous and hard working USBH Project members. Here are a few who were Featured Members of the Week in 2023 (click on the link to see their interviews in g2g)

Rob Neff

Dr. Shelley Murphy was featured on both CNN and The Today Show as a part of the kick off for the International African American Museum.

Welcome New Members!

Welcome to our new members this quarter!

Nicole Adams, Cheryl Hammond, E. Stagner, Mike Parson, Ryan O'Hair, Rob Neff, Doug Strand, Virginia (Butter) Fields, Sarah (Councell) Turner, Amy Jones, Lynda Davis, Eva Head, Mary Baker, Valeri Shafer

Congrats New PATH Graduates!

Sue Knifley, Janet Demcoe, Lisa Murphy, Nicole Adams, Eileen Robinson

Sources in the Spotlight

Are you working on or looking for enslaved family in Louisiana? This linked document lists the names of any enslaved used as collateral on loans and mortgages with a couple of Louisiana banks that were later acquired by J P Morgan Chase. It's broken down by Parish and the plantations are often named, along with the owners. Start on page 29 of the PDF and search or scroll.

Awesome Accomplishments

  • As of July 1, 2023, the new total of profiles is 218,871. We are so close to our 2023 goal of 250,000!
  • We now have 45 Platinum Profiles that have been taken through a rigorous notables checklist. 179 more profiles are currently undergoing the process.
  • Our percentage of connected profiles continues to increase. We are now at 50.4% (+1.2%) connected for stickered profiles and 37.7% (+1.8%) for our notables.

Statistics

+ in parenthesis is how many were added so far in 2023

  • Number of Profiles: 218,871 (+57,268)
  • Number of Notables: 3488 (+745), 45 Platinum
  • Number of Plantations: 327 (+83) See: this table for a break down by state.
  • Number of Cemeteries: 1,657 (+591)

End of Quarter 2, 2023 Heritage Exchange Statistics (+this quarter)
* top 3 increases

Enslaved AncestorsSlave Owners Free People Of Color
Alabama 2882 533 85*
Arkansas 396 103 15
California 0 1 9
Connecticut 73 320 307
Delaware 101 297 72
D.C. 39 22 87
Florida 2220 321 5
Georgia 3569* 1641* 109
Illinois 3 10 64
Indiana 0 5 214
Iowa 0 9 10
Kansas 5 5 4
Kentucky 2787 1687* 223*
Louisiana 831 533 229
Maine 4 10 29
Maryland 1401 1036 275
Massachusetts 159 249 1089
Michigan 0 0 142
Minnesota 0 0 2
Mississippi 1300 544 7
Missouri 226 245 30
Nebraska 0 0 0
New Hampshire 36 48 72
New Jersey 118 168 133
New Mexico 0 0 2
New York 55 205 755
North Carolina 3952 1820 570
Ohio 1 1 1014
Oklahoma 57 16 1
Pennsylvania 21 52 1087
Rhode Island 13 45 105
South Carolina 6521* 1399 248
Tennessee 670 551 30
Texas 609 198 16
Utah 3 2 0
Vermont 0 0 186
Virginia 16022* 3873* 1339*
West Virginia 141 65 0
Wisconsin 2 3 1
Totals: 44,217 (+5,224) 16,017 (+1,876) 8,566 (+813)

End of Q2 2023 Cemetery Statistics

#States#Counties #Cemetery Categories#Profiles#Graves%Complete
Previous Year324871,0669,0551,153,0120.79%
1-31-2023325111,13110,5681,204,0400.88%
2-28-2023325421,27712,0421,269,4020.95%
3-31-2023325611,35413,2201,303,0701.01%
6-27-2-23326421,65718,1181,491,728 1.21%
Monthly Change0+25+121+2,729+77,284+3.53%
Quarterly Change0+81+302+4,861+185,9132.61%
YTD Change0+155+591+9,063+338,716+2.68%

Profiles by Birth Location (top 10)

  1. Virginia 39,347
  2. North Carolina 23,867
  3. Georgia 16,128
  4. South Carolina 15,239
  5. Texas 14,697
  6. Louisiana 12,401
  7. Alabama 12,123
  8. Mississippi 11,351
  9. Kentucky 9,486
  10. Arkansas 6,461

Profiles by USA Birth Location (less than 50 profiles)

  1. Alaska 1
  2. Nevada 5
  3. North Dakota 6
  4. Hawaii 6
  5. Wyoming 8
  6. South Dakota 11
  7. Idaho 14
  8. Montana 19
  9. Oregon 22
  10. Arizona 25
  11. New Mexico 28

Past Featured Members

March 2023 NEWSLETTER

Announcements

  • Team Roses will be partnering with USBH during the January, April, and July Connect-A-Thons. If you don't have a team, join us and add some profiles to help boost USBH numbers!
  • New state teams Alabama and Mississippi were just started. If you'd like to participate, let the Team Leader know. Kentucky will be coming soon.
  • Because the Plantations are growing so quickly, please send links to all new plantation pages to one of the profile managers of the Plantations Index. They will check the page to make sure it has all the necessary parts, then link it in the correct location.
  • We are piloting a Leadership Path that will help onboard all new Team Leaders. Stay tuned for more information...
  • Reminder: Please only use [[Category: US Black Heritage Project, Needs Profiles Created]] when you add a source that lists additional family members. When someone chooses to work on a profile from this category, they expect the source they need to create the family members from to already be available.
  • Did you know USBH Project has a Facebook page? Follow us for updates and features!

Upcoming Events

  • Because of the Connect-A-Thon April 21-24, we will have only one USBH Weekend Sprint April 7th to clean up Data Doctor suggestions. Look for announcements about two May and two June sprints.
  • Bookmark our USBH Project Calendar to keep up with all upcoming events.

Help Needed

  • We need more team leaders for state teams, Heritage Exchange, Family Builders, Outreach, Notables, and Military and War. If there's a team, we need more leaders! Message a Project Leader if you are interested. If we don't have a team yet for an area you'd like to get started, let them know that too.
  • Can you help us make slave owner indexes to make sure we've documented 100% of the slave owners from the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules? It takes a little bit of tech know-how following the instructions on this help page. Anyone at WikiTree can help us with this. We have a lot of counties to cover.

Team Updates

See our Project Teams Page for a full list of the USBH teams.

Connectors Team

Katie Bryant
We are now tracking  % of USBH profiles Connected on the stats page. We've been hovering at around 49%. Here's ways you can help us increase that number:

  1. Participate in the monthly USBH Connecting Challenge . The more profiles created the better chance we have to connect everyone!
  2. Participate in the monthly USBH Notables Birthday Connection Challenge and help connect specific people.
  3. Add profiles to those who are in the Category:US Black Heritage Project, Family Tree Size One. These individuals are all by their lonesome at the moment. Add a parent, spouse or child and double the chances of them being connected at some point
  4. Check our Connectors page for a list of our biggest trees that need connecting - connect one of these and you can really boost our stats! Lists are currently being added by state for the state teams to help with.

We've connected some huge branches in the past several months. Keep up the great work!

Heritage Exchange Team

Elaine Martzen, Gina Jarvi
There is a constant need for enslaved ancestor profiles to be created from lists on slave owner and plantation pages. Check Category: USBH Heritage Exchange, Needs Slave Profiles for pages and profiles you can work on.


Notables Team

Katie Bryant, Kate Schmidt
We now have a special sticker to designate our "Platinum Profiles"; these are ones that have been verified against a long list of criteria, including being "genealogically defined". We have 23 USBH Notable profiles that have completed the process and have the sticker, with over 180 in the queue to be checked. We need help to get these all through the verification process. If you are interested in being on the Platinum Team, let us know!

During our February creation sprint, we created over 100 new notable profiles.

We connected a lot of big names during the first quarter including Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Satchel Paige, Ann Lowe, Michael Jordan, Vanessa Williams, Stevie Wonder, Kamala Harris, Willie Mays, Will Smith, just to name a few!

Profile Improvement Team

Christy Melick

  • February Comedians Profile Improvement Sprint: Worked with the Notables team to improve the sourcing and biographies for 11 notables and 87 of their ancestors, as well as increasing CC7's for the notables.
  • March Sourcing Weekend Sprint: Sourced over 60 unsourced profiles and moved several to a new maintenance category (see below), bringing our unsourced from 232 down to 149. Also fully sourced a number of profiles in the "Needs Sources" categories.
  • New Maintenance Category: After the sourcing sprint, we added the new maintenance category US Black Heritage Project, Unable to Identify for profiles where we cannot identify any direct sources. This will help keep our Unsourced category for profiles that we're more likely to be able to source when we do sourcing sprints and source-a-thons several times a year. We'll come back to the "Unable to Identify" profiles less often, but we hope that as more records becoming digitized or more research into their family happens, we will eventually be able to identify and source them as well. Please only use this new category after two experienced researchers have attempted to find sources. This means you need to use research notes to let others know when you try to find sources, but are unable.

Transcribers

Gina Jarvi
A big shout out to the transcriber volunteers! In March the USBH Project started a Transcriber service for its members offered by WikiTree volunteers who shared their interest in helping us. At the moment we have 7 volunteers. We will put out a call for new volunteers when the requests increase.

State Teams

Florida

Carolyn Martin
The Florida Team worked on Duval County all quarter. We added a One Place Study of the Lavilla community in Jacksonville. We also added two cemeteries with a total of 174 profiles created, one plantation (Gravelly Hill) , one slave profile, and 24 slave owner profiles, along with 5 Slaves of pages which need slaves identified. In April we will start working on St Johns County. We welcomed Dot Tribble to our team

Georgia

Carolyn Martin
The Georgia Team worked 2 months on Meriwether County and one month on Coweta County during this quarter. We added two cemeteries with a total of 77 profiles created, three plantations, 433 slave profiles, 242 slave owners, and 56 pages. We also had one name study - Strozier in Meriwether County. n April we will continue working on Coweta County. We welcomed Dot Tribble to our team.

Louisiana

Denise Jarrett
The team will continue to focus on Caddo Parish, Louisiana.

North Carolina

Loretta Buckner
For the months of December 2022 and January and February 2023, the team focused on Chatham and Randolph County, North Carolina. Beginning March of 2023, focus will shift to the "Big Six" counties: Edgecombe, Halifax, Granville, New Hanover, Warren, and Wake.

South Carolina

Michelle Detwiler, David Hamilton
This quarter the South Carolina Team has grown. We added two new team members, and we worked on our Edisto Island One Place Study. We gathered a lot of interesting information, recorded the plantations we found there, and recorded the multiple owners of those plantations. We were also able to record hundreds of enslaved ancestors on those plantations this quarter. Thank you to our additional team members!

Texas

Denise Jarrett
Texas Team has a huge number of counties, so the Texas Team is working on more state-wide set up. January - June, the team will focus on South and East Texas.

Virginia

Cheryl Cruise, Gina Jarvi
The Virginia Team has been focused on Henry and Albemarle Counties with stops in Spotsylvania and various other parts of the state. This next quarter we start work in Caroline County. The stats since last newsletter: Slave owner profiles added: 105; Slave profiles added:162; Plantations total: 33

  • Team work this past quarter: Dr. Murphy has been busy with the UVA project: Finding Enslaved Laborers at UVA; Carl continues his work on the cohabitation records in Henry County; Loretta has been adding to Spotsylvania County; Gina is working on slave owner profiles and pages and doing bits of work on Monticello, Highland and George Mason's plantations; Cheryl continues her work on the Confederate Slave Payrolls.

New Projects/Activities in the Works

  • We need help creating profiles for all those interred at Laurel Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland. See this G2g post for more information and to get access to the spreadsheet.
  • 15 for 15 USBH Project Activities
  • Categorization and identification of Black churches is under way! If this is an area of interest for you, please contact the leader for this team, Denise Jarrett

Members in the Spotlight

Thank you to our many generous and hard working USBH Project members. Here are a few who were Featured Members of the Week in 2023 (click on the link to see their interviews in g2g)

Welcome New Members!

Welcome to our new members this quarter!

RL McAdoo, Holly Johnson, Jack Day, Diane Spencer-Carr
Judy Bramlage, Sue Knifley, Lisa Murphy
D Davis, Kye Miller, Anonymous Runnette
Eowyn (Langholf) Walker, DrO Olmstead, Susan McNamee
Kathy Nava, E. Compton, Karen Lee
Costa Costa, Irene Biggs, Angel Faull
Mary Sleppy, Janet Demcoe

Welcome New Team Leaders!

Judy Bramlage and Karen Lee are our first Team Leaders in Training. Thank you for piloting our Leadership Path!

Congrats New PATH Graduates!

Karen Lowe, Sara Lively, Natalie Trott, Adriana Hazelton, Ruth Montgomery, Judy Bramlage, D Davis, Susan McNamee, Jack Day, Suzanne Lowe, Karen Lee, Kathy Nava

Sources in the Spotlight

Adams County, Mississippi, U.S., Slave Certificates, 1858-1861

These certificates where required by law for all the slaves that were brought to Mississippi from any other state for the purpose of being sold. If you're looking for names of people enslaved in Adams County, this is worth a look!

Awesome Accomplishments

  • As of March 26, 2023, the new total of profiles is 189,386. Can we reach 200,000 by the end of April?
  • We now have 25 Platinum Profiles that have been taken through a rigorous notables checklist. 185 more profiles are currently undergoing the process.

Statistics

+ in parenthesis is how many were added so far in 2023

  • Number of Profiles: 189,386 (+27,783)
  • Number of Notables: 3154 (+264), 25 Platinum
  • Number of Plantations: 275 (+31) See: this table for a break down by state.
  • Number of Cemeteries: 1,354 (+288)

End of Quarter 1, 2023 Heritage Exchange Statistics (+this quarter)
* top 3 increases

Enslaved AncestorsSlave Owners Free People Of Color
Alabama 2686 441 16
Arkansas 356 92 14
California 0 1 9
Connecticut 69 308 299
Delaware 97 294 71
D.C. 37 21 78
Florida 2110 294 4
Georgia 3071* 1344* 109
Illinois 2 10 59
Indiana 0 4 203
Iowa 0 9 10
Kansas 1 5 4
Kentucky 2420 1370 199
Louisiana 812 481 223
Maine 4 10 27
Maryland 1219 960 209
Massachusetts 145 139 1076
Michigan 0 0 141
Minnesota 0 0 2
Mississippi 988 441 6
Missouri 204 222 24
Nebraska 0 0 0
New Hampshire 33 46 66
New Jersey 84 161 132
New Mexico 0 0 2
New York 50 194 736
North Carolina 3663 1670 538
Ohio 1 1 789*
Oklahoma 57 15 1
Pennsylvania 12 44 1047*
Rhode Island 11 42 105
South Carolina 5345* 1265* 224
Tennessee 598 490 30
Texas 355 153 15
Utah 0 1 0
Vermont 0 0 184
Virginia 14421* 3546* 1100*
West Virginia 141 64 0
Wisconsin 1 3 1
Totals: 38,993 (+6,178) 14,141 (+2,141) 7753 (+1,002)

End of Q1 2023 Cemetery Statistics

#States#Counties #Cemetery Categories#Profiles#Graves%Complete
Previous Year324871,0669,0551,153,0120.79%
1-31-2023325111,13110,5681,204,0400.88%
2-28-2023325421,27712,0421,269,4020.95%
3-31-2023325611,35413,2201,303,0701.01%
Monthly Change0+19+77+1,178+33,668+0.07%
YTD Change0+74+288+4,165+150,058+0.22%

Past Featured Members


December 2022 NEWSLETTER

Announcements

  • Team Roses will be partnering with USBH during the Connect-A-Thons. If you don't have a team, join us and add some profiles to help boost USBH numbers!
  • New State Teams Louisiana and Texas will be starting January 2023
  • WikiTree's theme for 2023 will be "Year of Community Connections." We'll be looking at ways to work within communities to build and connect members together.
  • Check out the 2023 list of free webinars at Legacy Family Tree. There are quite a few in the 2023 lineup about African diaspora.
  • The Connecting Challenge will continue in 2023! Congratulations to our top 2022 contributors, Nanette Pezzutti, Emma MacBeath, Carolyn Martin, Katie Bryant, and Kate Schmidt. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the 49,869 profiles made during the 2022 challenge.
  • Bookmark our brand new USBH Project Calendar to keep up with all upcoming events.

Help Needed

  • We need more team leaders for state teams, Heritage Exchange, Family Builders, Outreach, and Military and War. Message a Project Leader if you are interested.
  • Can you help us make slave owner indexes to make sure we've documented 100% of the slave owners from the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules? It takes a little bit of tech know-how following the instructions on this help page. Anyone at WikiTree can help us with this. We have a lot of counties to cover.

Team Updates

See our Project Teams Page for a full list of the USBH teams.

Cemetery Team

Denise (Harden) Jarrett

The Cemetery Team's first year has had OUTSTANDING results in 2022!

  • Added 7085 profiles in 829 African-American cemeteries.

Thank you to all who have contributed to the success in 2022. We look forward to working together again in 2023!

Connectors Team

If connecting someone to the WT Global Tree gives you that "ta da" feeling, we invite you to help us each month with our Unconnected Notables Birthday Challenge, where we feature 10 unconnected USBH Notables with birthdays that month and ask for help in expanding their trees. The link to the current monthly challenge on G2G is provided on the Connectors page. Even if we don't get that magic connection that month, every profile added expands the chances they will connect in the future!

If you want to maximize the bang for your buck, so to speak, we list some of the larger unconnected USBH trees (Notable and non-Notable) on the same Connectors page. If you connect one of these trees you may connect one Notable but also hundreds of other people! For instance, Kate Schmidt just made a connection at Christmas for Michael Jordan's tree, which helped close to 750 people get connected.

Since our number of connected USBH profiles has almost doubled this year to near 80,000, it is becoming easier (but not necessarily easy) to connect. The more we do connect, the easier it will be in the future. Please reach out to Katie Bryant if you have any questions or suggestions!

Family Builders

Team leader wanted!

Although we stopped the research question portion of Family Builders last summer, we continue to build family trees for new WikiTree members. We now ask anyone with research questions or brick walls to build out their family trees, then post their questions in g2g.

Heritage Exchange Team

Elaine Martzen

  • Heritage Exchange Checklist Team - We have checked and categorized hundreds of enslaved ancestors and slave owners. This process makes connecting enslaved ancestors to the tree easier. Special shout-out to Shirley (Thompson) Gilbert for her tireless work!
    • Don't forget to add the category [[Category: USBH Heritage Exchange]] to your newly-created or edited profiles for enslaved ancestors or their slave owners, so that our Checklist Team can review them for formatting and categories.
  • Slave Narratives - We are slowly making our way through the WPA slave narratives. Thank you to Nanette (Gahn) Pezzutti for recent work in Arkansas!
Slavery Projects Team

Gina Jarvi, Michelle Detwiler, Elaine Martzen

The Slavery team is really comprised of the members of the US Black Heritage Project, who work mostly behind the scenes. So a big thank you to the members for all the help this past year! For 2023, we would love for members to come out from behind the scenes and connect with us about what you are working on and what projects you are drawn to.

The Slavery Projects Team works on large slavery related projects. This year a primary focus was on developing the Plantations Project. It started in November of 2021 and in January 2022 David Hamilton brought to the project his massive collection of plantations. Michelle Detwiler came on board in January, as well, and became the primary Team Leader for the project.

  • Plantations Project The Plantations project started out 2022 with a new Plantation Index page. During the year the Index grew by leaps and bounds! We tackled what worked for researching and recording plantations. This was truly the year of new beginnings and growth. By the middle of the year each state on the Plantation Index grew from a few to 20 or more! By November we decided it was time to re-format the Index page to shorten the lists and make it easier to read. To solve this problem a page was created for each state linking the plantations there. (Thank you, Gina!) The new USBH State teams went to work filling up their state plantations. Our goals for 2022 were realized. The end of year stats show that we now have 244 plantations created covering 15 states! Many of these still need profiles created, but 2023 should be an easier year as we now have good formats that work and confident volunteers! As new volunteers continue to join us we expect a much greater impact on recording plantations. This new year will see more growth, the re-formatting for counties on each state page, and more plantation pages that are complete. We are so thankful to have all the volunteers who have joined us this year and hope many more follow in their footsteps!
  • The American Colonization Society and the Roll of Emigrants to Liberia - This project began in December 2021. Today there is an extensive history of the ACS and there are now 60 documented ships that sent free and enslaved African American ancestors to Liberia. This year we traced several families that started their lives on plantations and ended their lives in Liberia. A very exciting development this year was when descendants of enslaved ancestors found their ancestors on those ships! This year, I hope members can help create the hundreds of profiles that could connect descendants to their ancestors! If this project speaks to you, please come on board!
  • The Coastwise US Slave Ship Manifests works on the manifests of slave ships within the United States after 1806. It is an important endeavor as it traces the movement of the enslaved from the "northern" slave states into the Deep South. This project began in August 2021 and is in great need of help from project members. It requires transcribing manifest documents and creating space pages for each ship. There are currently only 9 ships that have been fully developed, and there are a hundred more that need transcribing and space page development! If this project speaks to you please, Come on Board!
  • Index to Confederate Slave Payrolls on WikiTree is moving along slowly but carefully under the behind-the-scenes work by Cheryl Cruise and Elaine Martzen. There are hundreds of profiles that need creation of the enslaved who were rented out during the Civil War. It also involves a great deal of transcribing of documents. If this interests you, please reach out!

Each of the above projects could use more help, including team leaders. If any of the above projects speak to you, please contact one of us.

Military and War Team

Sarah (Murtaugh) Heiney Have you seen the new USBH Military and War Portal? Look for more coming for this team in 2023.

New Membership Team

A big thank you to our PATH Guides Gene Ellison, David Hamilton, Denise Jarrett, Gina Jarvi, Emma MacBeath, Elaine Martzen, and Kate Schmidt who help get new members set up for success.

Notables Team

Kate Schmidt, Katie Bryant

This year we’ve dramatically increased the number of Notable profiles we manage. Currently, we manage over 2800, 1358 of those being new notables we've added this year alone!

We’ve had a great deal of success getting some of these profiles connected. We connected Michael Jordan, who was part of a branch with almost 750 people in it, we connected Denzel Washington, Cory Booker, Alfre Woodard, and the Williams sisters, just to name a few. There’s still a long way to go, so keep an eye out for our monthly birthdays post on G2G, and our upcoming “52 Weeks” series. Sometimes just adding a few profiles to a branch will help connect it to the Tree.

If you even have five minutes a day to spare, check out our Notables Maintenance Categories page and work on some of these profiles! You don’t have to be a member of the Notables team to help out, but if you want to join the team, we always need more members!

Profile Improvement Team

Christy Melick

  • In the last few months, we began doing Weekend Sprints. During the cleanup sprints we added missing birth locations to over 1800 profiles, sourced more than 100 unsourced and undersourced profiles and added almost 200 military stickers to military veterans' profiles. Keep an eye out for announcements about upcoming sprints.
  • In 2023, we'll be working with the Notables team on the "52 weeks" series to improve the profiles of two notables each week. Other USBH teams will also work on getting them connected and increasing their CC7.
  • We'd love some help with our profiles that need sources and need biographies. Even working on just one or two would make a difference! If you're looking for a quicker task, we still have thousands of profiles that need their birth location added to the data fields.
Data Doctors

Ambar Díaz Despite the fact we are growing our number of profiles at a steady pace, our number of Data Doctor suggestions has stayed consistent. This means we're doing a great job. Keep up the quality work! If you have a few minutes to spare, consider clearing a few of our project profiles' suggestions. Links to the suggestions can be found on our Data Doctors Team page.

State Teams

Florida Team

The Florida Team currently has three members: Carolyn Martin, Team Leader, Nancy Morrisey and Betsy Simpson. We could really use some more members!

Statistics By End of 2022:

Tabulations display where we are at the end of 2022. They include prior work done on the county before the team was established as well as the team's contributions.

In September and October, the team focused on Leon County, Florida.

  • Number of completed tasks for Leon County:
    • Cemeteries with A-A profiles done/(total profiles) 7 (217)
    • Enslaved Ancestor Profiles from Slave Owner pages 829
    • Slave Owner Profiles 29
    • "Slaves of …" Pages Developed 13
    • Plantation Pages Developed 20

In November and December, we moved our focus to Jefferson County, Florida.

  • Number of completed tasks for Jefferson County:
    • Cemeteries with A-A profiles/(total profiles) 0
    • Enslaved Ancestor Profiles from Slave Owner pages 219
    • Slave Owner Profiles 14
    • "Slaves of …" Pages Developed (Total slave profiles done) 12
    • Plantation Pages Developed 7

For January 2023 our focus will move to Duval County, Florida.

Georgia Team

The Georgia Team currently has five members: Carolyn Martin, Team Leader, and Stacey Martin, Miyako Jones, Vickie Miranda, and Cheryl Varner.

Statistics By End of 2022

Tabulations display where we are at the end of 2022. They include prior work done on the county before the team was established as well as the team's contributions.

In September and October, the team focused on Camden County, Georgia.

  • Number of completed tasks for Camden County:
    • Cemeteries with A-A profiles/(total profiles) 1
    • Enslaved Ancestor Profiles from Slave Owner pages 312
    • Slave Owner Profiles 51
    • "Slaves of …" Pages Developed 40
    • Plantation Pages Developed 8

In November and December, we moved our focus to Chatham County, Georgia.

  • Number of completed tasks for Chatham County:
    • Cemeteries with A-A profiles/(total profiles) 9 (292)
    • Enslaved Ancestor Profiles from Slave Owner pages 172 (+ 15 freedmen)
    • Slave Owner Profiles 26
    • "Slaves of …" Pages Developed 12
    • Plantation Pages Developed 4

For January 2023 our focus will move to Meriwether County, Georgia.

Louisiana Team

Denise Jarrett We will begin our focus in Caddo Parish.

North Carolina Team

Loretta Buckner Our current focus is Randolph County.

South Carolina Team

Michelle Detwiler, David Hamilton, Emma MacBeath Our current focus is Abbeville County. We will move to Edgefield County in February.

Virginia Team

Cheryl Cruise The Virginia Team is beginning work on Albemarle County, which includes the plantations of presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. In 1860, more than fifty percent of Albemarle County's population was enslaved (nearly 14,000 people), so there are a lot of profiles to build and plantations to document. Any help is always welcome and appreciated.

Members in the Spotlight

Thank you to our many generous and hard working USBH Project members. Here are a few who were Featured Members of the Week in 2022 (click on the link to see their interviews in g2g)

Welcome New Members!

Welcome to our new members this quarter!

John Lowe, Ruth Montgomery, Suzanne (Campbell) Lowe
Shirleen (Bartholomew) Beland, Orin Hargraves
Hilary Mason, Jen (Massey) Schwartz, Sara Lively
Betsy (Yager) Simpson, Karen Lowe, Elida Tirey
Loretta Buckner, Colette Dean, Sheree William

Welcome New Team Leaders!

Congrats New PATH Graduates!

Stacey Martin, Denise E, Charles Uzzell, Dr. Katherine Wood, Russell Butler, Cynthia Van Dam, Vicki Posey, Paige Singleton, Nancy Morrissey, Suzanne Dyck, Loretta Buckner, Donna Fournier, Vickie Miranda, Claudia Scarbrough, Kim Williams, Elida Tirey, Jen Schwartz, Shirleen Beland

Sources in the Spotlight

  • Did you know any people enslaved by the five civilized tribes of Oklahoma may show up on their census rolls listed as Freedmen? This is an amazing resource to find lists of families! One such document set at Ancestry is the Wallace Roll of Cherokee Freedmen, 1890-1893. If you know an African-American was enslaved in Oklahoma, look for Freedmen records for each of the five tribes.

Awesome Accomplishments

  • We met our goal of reaching 150,000 profiles by the end of 2022 six weeks early!
  • In 2022, we began creating state teams and now have seven teams: Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia
  • We created standardized resource pages for most states and have begun to create county pages as well. See the directory here: Resources by State. Do you have a new resource not yet added? You can add them to our Sandbox or directly on the state page if it's a local resource.
  • Denise and Emma presented information about the project during the WikiTree Day Symposium. You can watch the video here if you missed it.
  • We began Weekend Sprints in September and during the 6 sprints, accomplished a lot of amazing clean up of profiles and creation of new ones.

New Projects/Activities in the Works

2023 Goals for USBH

Here are a few of our 2023 goals

  • 250,000 profiles in total!
  • Continue to increase leadership numbers while increasing representation of Black leadership
  • Create help videos for the project in general and Heritage Exchange.
  • Outreach: Have monthly video meetings to answer questions for new and potential members (we are also talking about having a regular USBH meet and greet for all members to talk about what they're working on and ask questions.)
  • Notables: Increase our number of completed Platinum profiles, make more use of the descendant sticker, follow the 52 weeks of Ancestors themes to improve our profiles, increase our number of connected profiles. The more we improve and connect, the more we can have featured in the Connection Finder!
  • Heritage Exchange: Continue to create checklists by county to identify and create profiles for slave owners
  • Slavery Projects: Add categories for all US President slave owners, work on the Congressman spreadsheet, add profiles for all enslaved ancestors on existing completed plantations, complete the ship rolls for emigrants to Liberia
  • Topics: Create a categorization structure for Black churches
  • State Teams: Continue to work through the counties systematically. More state teams will be created only when we have members willing to take on team leadership. The goal is to eventually have a team for every state.
  • Cemeteries: Keep doing what you're doing. It's working!

Statistics

+ in parenthesis is how many were added in 2022.

  • Number of Profiles (Jan 1, 2023): 161,603 (+ 92,887!!)
  • Number of Cemeteries: 1066 (+829)
  • Number of Notables: 2890 (+1262)
  • Number of Plantations: 244 (+about 219)

End of 2022 Heritage Exchange Statistics

Enslaved AncestorsSlave Owners Free People Of Color
Alabama 2560 374 14
Arkansas 307 76 10
California 0 1 6
Connecticut 65 303 271
Delaware 78 294 59
D.C. 44 19 69
Florida 2077 221 4
Georgia 2259 925 74
Illinois 3 7 55
Indiana 0 3 184
Iowa 0 9 7
Kansas 5 5 0
Kentucky 2111 1121 143
Louisiana 672 393 190
Maine 2 8 4
Maryland 1084 882 171
Massachusetts 104 115 1040
Michigan 0 0 128
Minnesota 0 0 2
Mississippi 945 354 6
Missouri 185 207 24
Nebraska 0 0 0
New Hampshire 9 13 66
New Jersey 82 144 128
New Mexico 0 0 2
New York 46 178 699
North Carolina 3418 1467 461
Ohio 1 1 692
Oklahoma 40 13 1
Pennsylvania 9 38 943
Rhode Island 8 39 99
South Carolina 3174 920 139
Tennessee 518 463 26
Texas 341 135 15
Utah 0 1 0
Vermont 0 0 177
Virginia 12525 3204 841
West Virginia 141 64 0
Wisconsin 2 3 1
Totals: 32,815 (+22,159!!) 12,000 (+6239) 6751

End of 2022 Cemetery Statistics

#States#Counties #Cemetery Categories#Profiles#Graves%Complete
12-31-202232487106690551,153,0120.79%
Monthly Change02288109268,2731.60%
YTD Change+9+487+829+7085+756,4500.94%

Past Featured Members





Collaboration


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