Unlocking Harvard's Ties to Slavery Through Descendant Research

On his PBS series, Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. shows how we’re shaped by the ancestors on our family trees — ancestors known and unknown. In his day job, Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and a member of the Advisory Council of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative — helping to guide the University’s efforts to uncover its historic ties to the institution of slavery. Gates joins genealogist Lindsay Fulton, chief research officer at American Ancestors, and Sara Bleich, vice provost for special projects at Harvard and leader of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, to explain how researchers uncover the names of individuals enslaved by Harvard leaders or who labored on Harvard’s campus between 1636 and 1865. In 2022, Harvard researchers partnered with American Ancestors to undertake the complicated and painstaking task of poring through records like wills, journals, letters, land deeds and property, marriage, and church records to identify these enslaved individuals. The most recent data shows about 1,600 names. As this data grows over time, it will help advance Harvard’s efforts to help descendants recover their family histories. This is just one way that Harvard is working to reckon with its history of slavery. More information about this work is available at https://bit.ly/49eBftB.