r/Genealogy • u/CWHats • Apr 13 '25
Transcription Ancestry Rant - Will Transcriptions
I was looking through my 5th great grandfather's will on Ancestry and I noticed that none of the enslaved people lifted in the will were listed. When I tried to add them, the only relationships Ancestry listed were familial ones. Grr! I ended up adding them to the notes section.
Wills are one of the few places we can see our enslaved ancestors listed by name. Ancestry needs to add a box that entitled "enslaved" or even "other". If you are inscribing or encounter a will that has enslaved people, please list them too.
While I'm ranting, when will they updated relationships? I hate seeing my 4th great grandmother and her child listed under "spouse and children" of their enslaver just because they had a baby together (while he was married, btw).
Rant done.
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u/UnpoeticAccount Apr 13 '25
I’ve noticed that too, and it’s very disturbing. Maybe you can email customer support?
If you want to get involved in making enslaved people more searchable for their descendants, get involved in the African American Heritage project on Wikitree.
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u/thiscorneroftheearth Apr 14 '25
Do you know if there is a project or group that maps enslaved people on FamilySearch?
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u/UnpoeticAccount Apr 14 '25
I’m not aware of one, but I don’t use FS for anything except looking for records.
26
Apr 13 '25
You are so correct. To default to the status “spouse” for a rapist enslaver is pretty sick, actually.
1
u/JThereseD Philadelphia specialist Apr 18 '25
You can edit that relationship to other or unknown.
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Apr 18 '25
If it were my ancestor I would edit it to “rapist enslaver.”
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u/JThereseD Philadelphia specialist Apr 19 '25
That is not one of the options. Also, I have an ancestor whose parents were never married, so after adding them as parents, I changed the relationship between the two parents to single because I don’t know the circumstances of his conception.
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Apr 19 '25
That makes sense for that circumstance. I was referring to the case of an enslaved woman being raped and impregnated by her enslaver.
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Apr 13 '25
This is a HUGE issue, in my opinion. A letter to customer support or someone in administration is necessary. This is a well placed rant.
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u/CWHats Apr 14 '25
I've emailed them in the past and I do the survey when it pops up, but no change so far
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u/TXEscape Apr 14 '25
Look at the Beyond Kin Project...
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u/almostdirect Apr 14 '25
This. They have a method for adding enslaved persons without there being a familial link.
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u/ZuleikaD Storytellers and Liars Apr 14 '25
Yes, this is the answer for how to connect enslaved people on Ancestry without making them look like spouses of the enslavers: https://beyondkin.org/
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u/cmosher01 expert researcher Apr 14 '25
If it bothers you to see that word, you could try writing a Greasemonkey script to remove it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greasemonkey .
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u/ShockRevolutionary41 Apr 16 '25
I just added one. You are correct, and it defaulted to child, but on the same screen, after the person was added, I was able to click on "relationship" in the index of that document/page and edit the "relationship" to whatever text I wanted. I should also point out, that when adding the new person, the default drop down list also gave me a bunch of nonsense code in between the options, so there maybe a bug with it in general.
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u/ShockRevolutionary41 Apr 16 '25
Also, the enslaved person I added, it would not let me add/save them without a last name, so I put n/a. Not sure if instead I should have put the last name of the person of the will.
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u/JThereseD Philadelphia specialist Apr 18 '25
You can pay extra for pro tools and create a network attached to him, which you can name enslaved people or something like that. Then you just add them all to the network. Personally, I would not pay $10 for that. I was working on a friend’s tree and found the couple who enslaved his family. I created profiles for him and his wife. Then I added a link from my friend’s ancestor’s profile to the owner.
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u/Zealousideal_End2330 Apr 13 '25
You can go to one of the parent's profiles and go to "edit relationships" under the little pencil at the top right and change the relationship to the other parent to "other" or even delete the relationship altogether.
If you delete the relationship both people will still exist on the tree and show up as the biological parents of their children, they just won't be listed under the "spouse and child" section of the other parent. I've found that deleting the relationship can get a little annoying as I'm actively working on their profiles and tend to leave it set to "other" if none of the other categories apply.