Honest accounting
Every research tool has limits. These are mine. Knowing them is part of doing this work well. A researcher who understands what their tools cannot do is less likely to mistake a gap in the record for a fact about a person.
Research before 1870. African American genealogy before 1870 is an area of research that Krio Griot can support without claiming to be the definitive authority on it.
Researching enslaved ancestors is exceptionally challenging. Records are fragmented, individuals were frequently unnamed, family relationships can be difficult to establish, and historical documents may contradict one another. Even experienced genealogists cannot guarantee that a particular ancestral connection can be established.
Krio Griot helps family historians, genealogists, and researchers discover, navigate, and interpret historical records relevant to African American ancestry and the African diaspora, emphasizing access to research resources rather than promising successful ancestral identification.
Ancestry.com, Fold3, Newspapers.com, and most state archives require paid subscriptions or per-record fees. I can tell you which database is likely to hold the record you need and how to search it, but I cannot retrieve it for you. The archives I search directly are listed in the documentation, and all of them are free to search. If a record sits behind a subscription you don't have, I'll say so plainly rather than returning a fabricated result.
I search eight archives directly: the National Archives, Chronicling America at the Library of Congress, DPLA, Born in Slavery, the Internet Archive, the Georgetown Slavery Archive, Enslaved.org and SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context). SlaveVoyages is not connected yet. When you let me, I also read public web pages. I cannot see inside FamilySearch, Ancestry, Fold3 or other record databases, even when the record you need is there. When a record is likely to be in one of them, I will tell you where to look.
Some collections are described by ship, date or place where I search them, and indexed by each person's name only somewhere else. The New Orleans slave manifests of 1807 to 1860 are one: I can find the voyage and the manifest, but not every person listed on it. When that happens I say so, and I tell you where the names are indexed so you can look there yourself.
Each plan includes a set number of research engine searches and Archive Scanner scans. When you reach the limit, I stop and tell you what was used and when it resets. I will not charge you to continue.
The research engine forms hypotheses from the evidence it has and from historical patterns. It is sometimes wrong. It may suggest a search that returns nothing, misread a name variant, or propose a connection that closer examination disproves. Every finding I make is presented as a suggestion for you to verify, not a conclusion. What I write is marked Synthetic, and it is kept apart from what you confirm. Those are different things, and the distinction is preserved.
The historical record for enslaved African Americans is deliberately incomplete. Enslavers were not required to name the people they held. Births were not registered. Families were separated without documentation. Marriage was legally forbidden in most enslaved states. Where no record exists, no tool can manufacture one, and I will not. I will tell you where I looked and what I did not find there, explain why the record may never have been made, and suggest adjacent strategies: the records of enslavers, estate inventories, neighboring counties, oral history, DNA evidence.
What your grandmother told you is evidence. It is not automatically correct, and it is not automatically wrong. Oral tradition is a legitimate form of historical knowledge. It carries information that was never written down because writing it down was dangerous or impossible. I can help you record it, date it, compare it to documentary evidence, and identify where it is corroborated and where it conflicts. I cannot tell you which version of a family story is true when the records are silent.
Some records are sealed: certain adoption records, juvenile court records, Social Security files after a certain date, and some state vital records within the past 50–100 years depending on jurisdiction. I can tell you how to petition for access through the correct legal channel, but I cannot retrieve restricted records myself and I will not advise on methods to circumvent access restrictions.
When a search returns no results, that is not evidence that a person didn't exist, wasn't in a place, or wasn't named in a record. It means the record was not found under these search terms in these databases. The absence of a result is information about the search, not information about the person. I will always record what was searched and what was not found, rather than treating a null result as a conclusion.
I will not speculate about undocumented ancestry, assign identities to unnamed people, or generate plausible-sounding family histories when the evidence runs out. The unknown must stay unknown until evidence says otherwise. A blank record where a name should be is not a failure. It is an accurate representation of what the archive did to that person's life. I hold it that way.