Social media genealogy groups enabled new routes to locating descendant communities

Evidence

This was 2015, and genealogical groups were becoming popular on social media platforms—I found one Facebook group dedicated to families from Columbia, South Carolina, home of the Benjamin Franklin Taylor Plantation, where Papa Renty and Delia had been enslaved. I noticed a woman named Rose Shiver was very active on the site and decided to send her a message, introducing myself, and I included a link to the “Finding Papa Renty” story that had just been published in the Hartford Courant. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 400

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how digital genealogy groups changed the research landscape that had long excluded Black family histories.