African-Americans are underrepresented in genealogy. Slavery tore apart families and remains an ugly genealogical brick wall for many Americans. In 2020, a group of volunteers led by genealogist and author Emma MacBeath came together on WikiTree to create the US Black Heritage Project. Its mission: make it easy for descendants of enslaved ancestors to discover their roots and connect with family members.

Over 200 professional genealogists and amateur family historians have donated thousands of hours of research time to the Black Heritage Project. As of today, they have created over 282,000 African-American family member profiles. These are all available to the public, entirely free, on WikiTree.com. An African-American who comes to WikiTree now has a good chance of finding their ancestors, cousins, and connections across the entire 32,000,000-person global family tree.

“WikiTree is the perfect place for us to connect families who have been left disconnected for generations," says Emma MacBeath. "There is nothing like this project out there. There are many projects working on groups of families or large document sets. But no one else is combining document processing with tree building in a public one-world tree like WikiTree. Best of all, our information is freely available to everyone."

Despite these accomplishments, WikiTree’s generous volunteers say they are just getting started. This month – Black History Month in the US – a new project was announced: The US Black Heritage 1880 Project. Its goal: create a connected WikiTree profile for all 6.6 million Black Americans enumerated in the 1880 US census. Anyone can help this project. Click here to volunteer.

WikiTree has been growing for 16 years, from the grassroots up. Our community now includes over one million members and over 37 million profiles. Our tree is considered the most accurate and trusted global tree because of WikiTree’s collaborative culture, sourcing requirements, and incorporation of DNA. See this 90-second animated explanation.