American Ancestors, also known as the New
England Historic Genealogical Society, has
troves of genealogical information on its
website, but the GU272 Project is unique, said
Claire Vail, the project director.
“For this project, we said, ‘Let’s do something
different and let’s talk to the living
descendants,’ most of whom have ... no family
lore that stretched back to their enslaved
ancestors,” she said.
So in addition to documents, photographs
and the indexed genealogies of thousands of
descendants, the project includes recorded
interviews with dozens of living descendants.
“As black Americans — as descendants of
enslaved people — we have always been told,
‘You’ll never know who you are. You’ll never
know where you came from.’ Now that we
have this data, my hope is that we can use it to
open doors and make connections,” Mélisande
Short-Colomb, 65, a slave descendant pursuing
a history degree at Georgetown, said in a
statement released by American Ancestors.
Facing mounting debt, the Jesuits who ran what
was then known as Georgetown College made
the decision to sell the slaves to a Louisiana
sugar plantation. The slaves themselves were
Roman Catholic, having been baptized by the
Rev. Thomas Mulledy, Georgetown’s president.
The sale raised $115,000, or about $3.3 million in
today’s dollars, and allowed the Jesuits to settle
their most pressing debts and start the process
of transforming the modest college into today’s
prestigious Georgetown University.
Much of the information for the American
Ancestors site comes from a project launched
several years ago by Richard Cellini, an
attorney from Cambridge, Massachusetts,
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