Slaveholders deliberately declined to record enslaved people, forcing oral tradition.

Evidence

We started off talking about white supremacy and how enslavement consciously broke up Black families. We commiserated on how hard it was to do genealogy since the slaveholding families refused to keep track of our ancestors. And we marveled at the resilience of our families and Black communities for their commitment to telling oral stories and making sure that they were passed down from one generation to the next. Rose and I wanted to honor those ancestors by finally writing these stories down. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 412

Categorization

• XREF: Genuine connection to A Midwife’s Tale: both reconstruct lives from records designed by an owning/recording class that filtered who got documented.