NABJ\u2019s opening ceremony wrapped up with the announcement of the 10 Million Names project, an initiative to recover family history for descendants of American slaves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ryan Woods, who\u2019s the American Ancestors\u2019 chief operating officer and executive vice president, told NABJ Monitor about the decision to announce the project at the NABJ 2023 convention in Birmingham.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe wanted to bring this story to journalists who can help tell the 10 million names mission within their communities and nationally through larger, broadcast networks so that we can help individuals wherever they are,\u201d said Woods. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paula Madison, a long time member of NABJ, serves on the 10 Million Names advisory board, said it\u2019s imperative for diasporic Africans to be aware of this resource being offered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe don’t know who we are, we don’t know our real names,\u201d Madison said. \u201cThere is a way to know those things, but for many of us, we’ve been so separated for generations that we believe it’s impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The project is managed under American Ancestors<\/a>, an online repository for ancestral discovery, with a team of 100 research professionals. This week, convention participants sat down with a group of genealogists from 10 Million Names to consult with them about what information they could find regarding their family history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To start, participants are asked to offer information they already know about their family. From there, the experts do their \u201cmagic,\u201d combing through public resources like 10 Million Names itself, ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org<\/a> to uncover or confirm family history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s not like a DNA test where you spit in a tube, come back two weeks later and we tell you how many cousins you have around the country or where you come from in Africa,\u201d said Thom Reed, a genealogist with 10 Million Names. \u201cWe\u2019re sitting down with you and going over anything we might have.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Felicia Parks, a career advisor at American University, took part in Thursday\u2019s sessions and described feeling more credible to become her family\u2019s historian, following what she learned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI want to tell my family members, here\u2019s a bunch of family members that we should really try to connect with,\u201d said Parks, emphasizing the need for people to be educated about their origins. \u201cWho knows, maybe there\u2019s some things people have done in history that we want to be proud of.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NABJ\u2019s opening ceremony wrapped up with the announcement of the 10 Million Names project, an initiative to recover family history for descendants of American slaves. Ryan Woods, who\u2019s the American Ancestors\u2019 chief operating officer and […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":3058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,399],"tags":[405,406,400,33],"class_list":{"0":"post-3051","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-features","8":"category-nabj23","9":"tag-10-million-names-project","10":"tag-alabama","11":"tag-birmingham","12":"tag-nabj"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3051"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3060,"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3051\/revisions\/3060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabjmonitor.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}