An Apology from the National Genealogical Society

A Research Community Reckons with Its Long Record of Racism

NGS acknowledges, regrets, and offers its deepest apology for previously failing to confront the Society’s historical and organizational bigotry, racism, and discrimination. These past actions and behaviors marginalized communities of American genealogists and family historians, especially African Americans. - National Genealogical Society, “Our Journey from Exclusion to Inclusion”

At Hard Histories we credit the summer 2020 uprisings — in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota — with ensuring that our work is connected to a broader reckonings with slavery and racism in Baltimore and across the nation. In this work, we have never been alone. Our re-examination of the university, hospital, and now-closed orphan asylum has been conduted alongside many other efforts at reckoning and repair.

Earlier this month, word that the National Genealogical Society has been undergoing its own hard history project made news. Headlines trumpeted the apology issued by the Society’s leadership. But we read further to discover how the Society got there. Self-examination required unearthing a neglected past. Today the Society explains that its origins at the dawn of the 20th century were enmeshed with the thinking of a Society president, Dr. Joseph Gaston Baillie Bullock, a proponent of eugenics. Evidence of Baillie’s views was in plain sight, on the pages of the NGS Quarterly in which he recommended genealogy as a practice that could protect the white race from “admixture” and “tainted blood.” Into the 1970s, Black Americans continued to be excluded from NGS membership.

Among the best known examples of how historians, genealogists, and collective memory have come together to tell new stories is the example of the children born to Sally Hemings while enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. Today, at Jefferson home, Monticello, Hemings story is among those openly and fully told. Image courtesy of PBS Frontline, “Jefferson’s Blood.”

In Baltimore, we’ve witnessed our own share of apologies. In winter 2022, the Baltimore Sun released its apology, titled “We Are Sorry,” which expressed regret for how it had long “reinforced policies and practices that treated African Americans as lesser than their white counterparts.” As far back as March 2007, the Maryland state legislature approved a resolution that expressed “profound regret for the role that Maryland played in instituting and maintaining slavery and for the discrimination that was slavery’s legacy.”

At Hard Histories, these stories underscore how institutions — importantly the archival repositories which they generate and maintain — have been shaped by slavery and racism. They provide a note of caution about how we rely upon records produced and stewarded by the State of Maryland. At the Maryland State Archives, for example, it was only in 2001 that it began what became the important “Legacy of Slavery in Maryland” project. Similarly, resources produced to support genealogical research, such as Ancestry.com, continue to face criticism for avoiding the hard histories that its database reveals. In 2019, historian Adam Domby covered the troubles generated when Ancestry, for a time, detached the U.S. Census slave schedules from it general search functions.

Apologies are not the end of this story. They are a beginning. What must follow is a commitment to repair and transformation. Still, we recognize that role of reckoning, as expressed in terms of regret, in teaching us as hard history researchers new, cautionary tales about the critical eyes we must bring to the archives upon which rely, understanding how racism has shaped their content, accessiblity, cataloging, and interpretation.

— MSJ