While
doing interviews for The Reckoning radio series, it became clear just how
difficult it is for most African Americans to learn the identities of their
enslaved ancestors because, except in rare circumstances, government officials
had left their names out of key documents, such as the Federal census. This
problem was compounded by countless archives that failed to include the
names and familial relationships of enslaved people they encountered when
indexing archival documents in the decades after Emancipation. The Kentucky
African American Civil War Soldiers Project aims to rectify that situation by
utilizing Union Army documents available through the National Archives.
Our starting place for this project are several ledger books which document
information about Kentucky’s African American soldiers, documentation which
helped their enslavers file for financial reparations for the loss of their
enslaved men to the war effort. There are nearly 9,000 soldiers listed in these
ledgers, which can be considered a “Rosetta Stone” that unlocks previously
unknown facts about not just these soldiers, but their extended family members
as well. This project will disseminate these documents through a free,
searchable online database, and use them as the basis for constructing family
trees going as far backward and forward as possible.
Dan Gediman has had a long career as a
radio journalist and documentary producer whose work has been heard on All
Things Considered, Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This
American Life. For many years he was the producer of the public radio
series This I Believe, which inspired nine books, the first of which was
a New York Times bestseller. More recently, Dan produced the Audible
documentary series The Home Front: Life in America During World War II,
which was narrated by Martin Sheen. Since 2019, he has been producing The
Reckoning radio and podcast series, which has led to the Kentucky African
American Civil War Soldiers Project, the subject of his presentation.