Just in time for Juneteenth, genealogy website Ancestry has published a new resource called Articles of Enslavement that allows descendants of enslaved people to discover crucial information about their ancestors. In partnership with newspapers.com, Ancestry employed artificial intelligence to analyze and extract meaningful data from over 38,000 articles and advertisements published before 1900.
The collection provides details like names, names of enslavers, locations, occupations, relationships and physical characteristics of more than 183,000 enslaved individuals — crucial information boosting people's efforts to track their ancestors and piece together family histories that have long been obscured. In addition to aiding personal genealogy research, Ancestry also hopes to enrich everyone's understanding of American history and the African American experience during enslavement.