Getting started
Krio Griot is a research workspace, not a passive tree. This guide walks you from your first sign-in through your first search.
Before you begin
You don't need a complete family tree or extensive documentation to start. All you need is one name, even a partial name, and a willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads.
The platform is built around the 1870 break: the point in American records where most enslaved ancestors were first documented under their own names. Everything in Krio Griot is designed to help you work up to that break, through it, and beyond it.
Step by step
Krio Griot is in private beta, so accounts are by invitation. Your invitation email has a link to choose your own password, of at least 8 characters; the link works for 7 days. After that you sign in with your email address and that password. The Free plan needs no card.
Go to Ancestors in the left sidebar and add a person, or start from the Family Tree. Begin with yourself or the oldest ancestor you know by name. Enter whatever you have: a full name, a first name only, another name they went by, or a description like enslaved woman, Mississippi, c. 1840. You can refine it as you find records.
Every person and fact carries one of the seven ways of knowing: Documented, Inferred, Oral, Carried, Contested, Absent or Synthetic. A story your grandmother told is Oral. A census entry you have seen is Documented. Keeping the two apart is what makes your research defensible.
On the Family Tree, click a person and choose Add relative, or click an empty Add father or Add mother space. Make yourself the home person so the tree, the trail along the bottom, and every relationship are drawn from you.
Open Legacy Search. Choose Quick Search, Deep Research, or Speak to Me for a guided search. Enter the name, the spellings you know, places, years and the question you are trying to answer. The research engine searches the archives it is connected to and writes a report that cites every record it used.
Choose which findings to save. Each saved record has an evidence folder: what it proves, what it only suggests, and what it does not prove. Questions the search could not answer stay on the person's profile under Still unknown.
Open the Archive Scanner and upload a photograph, a letter, a certificate or a scanned page. It suggests a description for you to review, and nothing is saved until you do. The Free plan includes 5 scans.
How the workspace fits together
Working with the 1870 break
At some point your direct-line research will reach 1870 and stop. Names disappear. The 1870 break is the point where formerly enslaved people appear in the federal census under their own names for the first time, but their earlier lives are either undocumented or documented only in records that identified them as property.
Getting through this break is what the platform is built for. The research engine knows the specific record sets most likely to hold post-emancipation evidence: Freedmen's Bureau records, labor contracts, ration rolls, marriage registers, cohabitation registers. It also knows the slave schedules, estate inventories, and plantation records that can carry a name backward into the antebellum period.
Next steps
Read the full documentation for how each part works. If you're unsure what the platform can and can't help with, read What I cannot do. It is an honest accounting of the limits of this work.
Questions about your data and how it's stored are answered in the privacy page.