Thirkelle Harris Howard’s family tree didn’t always have solid roots.

She realized that in third grade, after a teacher assigned the class to fill out a genealogy chart and return it to school.

Some of Howard’s white classmates had their family trees traced back anywhere from five to 12 generations. But Howard, the only black student in the class, wasn’t even able to come up with the names of all her great-grandparents.

“I realized my parents didn’t have all this information,” Howard said. “So I started asking other older African-Americans about it, and their parents didn’t want to talk about slavery. And if they talked about it, they sent the kids outside.”

Now five decades later, Howard not only has traced portions of her family’s genealogy back to the late 1700s, she’s using her experiences as a basis for pioneering research that shows black Americans may be more closely related than previously thought.

Howard, a 58-year-old Kansas University doctoral student in American studies, lives in Manhattan and is coordinator of multicultural affairs at the Kansas State University College of Human Ecology.

She’s wrapping up her dissertation research this year. Using slave sale records and other genealogical tools, she has determined that between 80 percent and 90 percent of black Americans are descendants of slaves brought to North America between 140 and 385 years ago. She said 400,000 to 600,000 Africans were brought to America, and about half of them had children.

That would make most black Americans seventh or eighth cousins.

“African-American families are very much intertwined,” she said.

Howard

Difficult research

Howard long ago realized that conducting genealogy research was not easy, especially for black Americans.

Census counts are typically a reliable source of information for those tracing their family trees. But slaves weren’t included in census counts; after slavery was abolished, the first former slaves began to appear in the 1870 census.

It’s a problem that Helen Krische, archivist and exhibit coordinator at the Watkins Community Museum of History, 1047 Mass., has been familiar with as she has assisted genealogists.

“You’d have to go to other sources and be creative,” Krische said. “It’s a problem not only for the black slaves but if you’re doing Native American genealogy.”

Using the Internet, family Bibles, slave records, obituaries and death certificates, Howard has been able to fill in much of her family tree going back more than 200 years. All of her great-grandparents were slaves, as were two of her grandparents.

Though many blacks in previous generations were reluctant to reopen the painful legacy of slavery, Howard says she thinks there’s a renaissance in blacks using genealogy to reconnect with their family lineage.

“So often people who are living now, and especially younger people, aren’t aware of what people lived like in the early 1800s,” she said. “Once they start tracing their ancestry and finding out where people lived, they don’t just get names, they find out how they lived, who lived in the household, and they understand more about what life was like in this country.”

Academic push

Maryemma Graham, professor of American studies at Kansas University and Howard’s doctoral adviser, says she’s hoping family trees branch out into academia.

Genealogy — like oral history — has been a “paraprofessional” topic for years. She said she was not aware of any dissertation similar to Howard’s project.

“It seems to some people like a hobby and not a professional area,” Graham said. “People have been doing it for a long time, but it’s never accepted in the academy as such.”

And that has meant some headaches for Howard while trying to convince those in traditional history fields of the project’s worth. Graham said that adding DNA testing could give future genealogy projects an even greater legitimacy in academia.

“The anxiety in being first is you’re going to run into all kinds of roadblocks,” Graham said. “She’s got to convince everybody every step of the way. It’s quite novel and new in the academy. She’s bringing a new body of knowledge to the discipline. We hope it will take off and other people will reap the benefits of her pioneering research.”