On Thursday,
Georgetown University announced its decision to extend preferential treatment in the admissions process to prospective students descended from enslaved people owned by the university. How will those people be able to prove their family connections? In some ways, the thousands of people with ancestors who either labored on the Maryland plantations that supported the university or were held on the Georgetown campus may have an easier time proving a relationship to their enslaved forebearers than other black Americans typically do. The nonprofit
Georgetown Memory Project has
hired genealogists to research the lineage of people sold by Georgetown and to reach out to people it identifies as descendants; the university is also putting documents related to the university’s slaveholding history
online. Because of the records kept by the Jesuits who ran those plantations, lineages may be less difficult to trace than has often been the case for those black Americans who have tried to uncover their genealogies.
Both Berry and Burroughs wanted me to make it clear to prospective researchers that the challenges of finding enslaved ancestors might seem great, but they are not insurmountable. Still: I am a person with a love of research, and listening to the two genealogists speak about the barriers they had found, and crossed, in tracing their own family histories, I found my head spinning. It became clear that any future institutions intending to extend benefits to descendants of enslaved people must make it a practice to do as Georgetown is doing and offer help to people who need to find the relevant records to prove their connection