I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

————Maya Angelou, Still I Rise

American descendants of slavery or ADOS is an organization founded by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Brown. According to the ADOS website, the group “seeks to reclaim/restore the critical national character of the African American identity and experience…”

This is important work and they are so acknowledged. With respect to reclamation, my interest is piqued because learning our African American family history is just that, a very important type of reclamation.

Here at The Genealogy Situation Room, ADOS lineage and legacy will be addressed straight-on with no shying away, no pastel shading of the facts which created our conditions.

How so?

• Documenting the names of enslaved ancestors
• Naming slaveholders
• Examining historical legal documents, such as census slave schedules, inventory lists, wills, deeds of indentures and trusts, and various other items of interest
• Discussion of implications and lasting legacy of slavery’s atrocities, overt and covert, which morphed into Jim Crow’s evils, which have lingered and lasted in various manifestations of suppression

This is our history. Reparations and reclamation is now. This is our shared situation.

The Genealogy Situation Room