The Name Before The Chains. Reclaiming Our Ancestry - Andrea Burke

What was your ancestor’s name before the chains?

For millions of descendants of Africans brought to the Americas through slavery, this question reaches into a past that can be difficult to recover. Names were changed. Families were separated. Records were created by people and institutions that often failed to preserve the identities of those whose lives they documented. Generations later, descendants are left searching through fragments of history to understand who their ancestors were before slavery altered the course of their lives.

But our ancestors were never nameless.

Before enslavement, they belonged to families, communities, cultures, and societies with their own languages, traditions, occupations, beliefs, relationships, and histories. They had names given within the worlds they knew, and those names could carry connections to family, ancestry, spirituality, circumstances of birth, and hopes for the future.

The Name Before the Chains: Reclaiming Our Ancestry explores what happened to those identities when the transatlantic slave trade disrupted lives across generations. It examines the capture and forced journey across the Atlantic, the transformation of people into entries within ledgers and other records, the circumstances under which names changed, and the cultural traditions and identities that survived despite extraordinary disruption.

But this book is not only about what was lost.

It is also about what remained...