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National Archives

One of the nation’s oldest and largest genealogical societies, founded to help Americans trace their family ancestries, apologized Thursday for its history of racism, which includes a founder who was a eugenicist, and early resistance to integration.

“In order to be credible, we have to be transparent, and we have to fully discover what our past was, as so many organizations are doing right now,” said Kathryn Doyle, president of the National Genealogical Society,  based in Falls Church, Va.

The society’s effort began in 2017 after complaints about the lack of diversity among the expert presenters at the society’s annual conferences. It gained momentum, she said, after <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/12/george-floyd-america/" target=_blank>the murder of George Floyd</a> by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 sparked a national conversation on race.

While the society members used their digging prowess to scour the organization’s archives, “we haven’t looked at everything yet,” Doyle said. “There may be more.”

The apology, which was made public at the organization’s conference in Richmond, comes five months after the American Society of Human Geneticists issued<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/01/24/geneticists-eugenics-apology/" target=_blank> a similar apology </a>and announced steps to rectify past harms, which also included the promotion of eugenicist beliefs. The  ASHG is the largest group of human geneticists in the world.

Beliefs in biologically superior and inferior races — which contradict modern genetic knowledge — have permeated both the study of genetics and the practice of genealogy.

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In<a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ngsgenealogy.org/towards-a-fully-inclusive-genealogy-community/__;!!M9LbjjnYNg9jBDflsQ!BkJliJxEGpNEZJWiOKi3QshTeta8U60iuLd8ciApMGVijJyZcVqJxGdOxe49QleONDBRB1wtENUKCNiFgaJd$" target="_blank"> a report </a>issued with its apology, titled “Our Journey from Exclusion to Inclusion,” the National Genealogical Society noted that its founding in Washington, D.C., in 1903 coincided with the rise of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/02/death-of-a-devil-the-white-supremacist-got-hit-by-a-car-his-victims-celebrated/" target="_blank">the American eugenics movement</a>, which was based on the long-discredited theory that humanity can be improved through breeding, with supposedly pure White people of European ancestry as the ideal.

One NGS founder, Joseph Gaston Baillie Bulloch, a physician from Georgia and president of the group from 1909 to 1912, was an adherent of eugenics, the report said. In a 1912 article he published in the society’s quarterly journal, he advised how genealogy should be used to protect the White race from genetic mixing and “tainted blood.”

Given the society’s decision to publish the article and its segregated membership, “it is reasonable to assume that other founders may have shared Bulloch’s beliefs in eugenics or racism and that those beliefs informed the exclusionary practices NGS maintained throughout its early years,” the report said.

In early 1960, James Worris  Moore, an African American employee at the National Archives, attended a meeting of the NGS as a guest and was given a membership application, prompting an angry response among members and a rancorous discussion as to whether to integrate, the report says. On Nov. 19 that year, the society voted to both deny Moore’s membership and bar all Black people from joining.

“Negroes … have nothing in common with us, generally speaking,” one member told The Washington Post at the time.

In 1972, the NGS finally approved its first Black member: James Dent Walker, a highly accomplished African American genealogist employed by the National Archives, who became the group’s first Black officer. Walker later assisted author <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/05/13/alex-haley-mlk-malcolm-x-roots/" target=_blank>Alex Haley</a> with the genealogical research for his novel “Roots.”

While the organization continued to become more inclusive, the report said, it struggled with the perception, at times well-founded, that it was not sufficiently so. In 2017, it convened a panel at its conference in Raleigh, N.C., to address complaints about the lack of diversity among its conference speakers.

Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests in 2020 then prompted the NGS to excavate its own past, the report said. The society merged that year with the Federation of Genealogical Societies, and now the combined group has a membership of 8,625 professional and amateur genealogists and 554 genealogical organizations, including societies, libraries, archives and museums across the country.

Among other aims, which include diversifying its board, the NGS set a goal that 25 percent of its conference speakers would be from diverse backgrounds addressing topics of importance to members of color. In 2022, the society surpassed its goal, the report said.

The broader sharing of expertise and information has real-world benefits for members, Doyle noted, at a time when the practice of family genealogy has seen explosive growth, including among African Americans.

About  1 in 3 African Americans have used multiple methods to research their family history — including talking to relatives, conducting online research and using a mail-in DNA service such as Ancestry.com, according to <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/04/14/black-americans-family-history-slavery-and-knowledge-of-black-history/" target=_blank>a 2022 Pew Research Center report</a>. And yet Black descendants of enslaved people confront unique research obstacles. Black people who were not free were usually not listed by name in the U.S. census before 1870, and records of the enslaved were often written by hand and poorly maintained or are no longer in existence.

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Experts trained in tracing African American genealogical roots are able to explain alternative research methods, such as relying on enslavers’ insurance records, wills, bills of sales and other documents. Black members also learn more about their pasts when White members share findings about their ancestors’ connection to enslaved people or upload them to websites designed to facilitate such collaboration.

The promotion of inclusion by the NGS is a way of encouraging “all genealogists to be more aware and generous in their research,” Doyle said. She said she hopes the public apology and goals also prompt other groups to follow suit.

The relationship between African American genealogists and the NGS has been at times tense since Walker joined the NGS as its first Black member, said LaJoy Mosby, national president of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, which was founded by Walker in 1977. The D.C.-based group, with 1,500 members in 35 chapters, is the largest “ethnic-focused” member of the NGS since the merger, she said.

The NGS and other majority-White societies dismissed oral histories as a legitimate means of research, said Mosby, despite the outsize role they have played among African Americans, who were largely illiterate as enslaved people and had inherited rich oral traditions from Africa.

Following the popularity of the television miniseries “Roots” in 1977, however, interest in African American genealogy soared and oral histories continued to gain credence as a source of important information that could be validated with other sources, Mosby said.

Over the last five years, Mosby said, the largely Black association — which has always had White members, including board members, she said — has appreciated the efforts of the NGS to help lead the way in inclusivity. The apology “is definitely a step in the right direction.”

She noted that close collaboration between Black and White genealogists would seem to be ideal, given that the ancestral roots of many White and Black Americans have been interwoven for centuries. And yet the shared history around enslavement has led to a degree of discomfort, particularly among Whites, that has sometimes undermined the ability of family historians to work together, Mosby said.

“It’s a matter of having people come to terms with that,” she said. “It’s the present, not the past, and regardless of how painful it is, it is okay to confront it. Let’s accept it and move forward.”

University of Virginia, BA history and Spanish

Sydney Trent has been a journalist at The Washington Post since 1999. Most recently, she was Senior Editor/Social Issues, supervising award-winning coverage of religion, gender, poverty and other topics.  In this role, she ran coverage of the 2013 inauguration of Barack Obama and Pope Francis' U.S. papal visit in 2015. 