TAMPA, Fla. — For most African Americans, tracing your family roots isn't easy.
Yet, inside the Robert W. Saunders Sr. Public Library, it's a journey to the past.
Binders hold the pages of articles, archives, and documents detailing Hillsborough County's former black communities.
But it's the database that focuses on individual history that pulls people in. Shedriek Battle is the man in charge of keeping it up and running.
"The idea was that there should also be a place kind of like highlighting the historical African American community. That was like in the Central Avenue area here in Tampa. And so there's a library in Fort Lauderdale, the only other one in the state that has an African American genealogy collection. And that library was kind of like the inspiration for how this was set up and created to be kind of like a multipurpose like cultural history and cultural center for the African American community," he explained.
Alexia McKay is one of the many people to use the resources available and find out more about her family.
"Being able to reclaim some of that history and just put a face and names to those identities, because obviously, I would not be here if they were not here first. It is empowering. It's enlightening. It's insightful," McKay said.
McKay said she was able to learn a lot about her family, including her great-great-great-great-grandfather on her mother's side.
"Turns out that he was the first one in our family who was born free," she said.
McKay took a deeper dive into who she is with help from Shedriek Battle.
"It's a very rewarding experience, just to realize, you know, your own personal history and the history of what your ancestors lived through," he said of his job.
One of the reasons the collection is so successful is because it's home to The Freedman's Bureau Microfilm Collection.
"It was kind of like a multipurpose social services organization that would help freed slaves, handle land claims, find jobs, get war, pensions, things of that nature, help them like settle a new land," Battle said. "The good thing about a lot of the Freedmen's Bureau records, as well as the Freedmen's bank records, a lot of times they were those records, were very detailed, and they would include information, like where the person was born, if they were born on the plantation, and would often give like the name of the plantation, any relatives that they had that live with them in their household prior to being freed from enslavement, so that kind of thing."
That particularly comes in handy once inquiring minds reach a certain time period.
"A lot of times, people, if they are able to trace their family, sometimes they'll get back to like 1870. And then they'll hit a brick wall because prior to that, people who were enslaved, they would have been classified as property. So they might not be on the census records. They could change, you know, plantation, which would also change like their last names and things like that. So it's kind of hard because the records just weren't there for a lot of the African American community," he explained.
Yet, those film strips provide digitized versions of handwritten documents that could be the missing link to growing the family tree.
McKay said this is especially important to her, as an expecting mother.
"I want to be able to pass that history down to my daughter so she can learn about her mother's family. So she can learn about some of the characters and relatives that we've had, and those stories," she said. "Not just stories of having a tough pill to swallow. So it's more than just stories about suffering and struggles. You know our family is also one of resilience, persistence, and education."
Floridian or not, you can use this free resource at the library. More information can be found here.
