How to Find Your Ancestors in Africa

In Africa, many countries have limited ancestral records available for family history research. One reason for this is because in most African cultures, ancestral history was memorized and recited orally by a designated member of each local tribe or village. Except for written records captured and maintained by European colonizers, transition to written records for the most part has only started in the past 100 years as Africans began to move from village or tribal rule to national governments that required written records for administrative purposes such as recording property ownership and collecting taxes. In many places oral records are still being used.

Now in our day, as young people leave their tribal or village home to seek employment, it is difficult to find new tribal or village custodians to memorize and maintain the oral records. As current custodians grow old and pass on, many of these precious records are being lost forever.

To find information about their ancestors, Africans would go to their home tribe or village and talk to the person who had memorized their ancestry, and often that is still the case. For many, visiting their homeland is a dream but not a reality, either because of distance or costs for travel. However, FamilySearch has ongoing efforts to visit and record these oral histories throughout Africa. They have conducted over 2 million interviews in Africa. The oral records are saved digitally and transcribed. Though many of these records have been available and posted under Oral Genealogies in FamilySearch, in the past, it was quite difficult to search and find the records pertaining to your personal ancestors.

The recently introduced FamilySearch.org/Africa website or app available on Android phones has a special new tool “Find Your Ancestors in Africa” that truly helps African members search for and find ancestor records.

After clicking to start the tool, you are asked to select the country you want to search records in. The tool only shows countries where records are released for use and searchable. If your country isn’t there, pray that the records can be released soon and keep checking back to see if they became available. New records are being added all the time, so even if your country is shown, you may not find records you are looking for, so periodically check back to see if the record you hope to find has been added.
Once your country is selected, you have the option of starting your search using a family name, a place such as a village or region, or a tribe if you know the tribe your ancestor was from. If you know the family name, that is often the easiest place to start.
Gather your family around and share what you find. For example, if you are in Ghana and search for the surname Adonteng, you are given a wealth of information about persons with that surname. You are shown a list of tribes that include records for that surname and the regions where interviews were recorded that include the name Adonteng, including how many different persons were identified in the interviews. Some of these might be your personal ancestors. Clicking on these regions shows just results for that region. It is amazing how many people are remembered and recorded in some of these interviews, usually in the hundreds and occasionally over 1,000 different persons are named.
You see the results of persons who were found with the surname Adonteng with their immediate family members and any vital statistics. Recordings are shown that mention the Adonteng name. If you see a specific person you are interested in and click on their name, the specific interview that mentions that person is shown and you can see photos of the persons interviewed and the number of ancestral people named in the interview. Recordings you can listen to are in the native language of the person interviewed. It can be thrilling when you actually hear the name of your relative mentioned!
The first ancestor is noted. The first ancestor is the furthest back ancestor that is remembered, and the recordings typically start with the first ancestor and work down through their descendants. In most instances, the information box shows “Family History PDF” with a link to view the descendants as they were transcribed. Depending on the tribe or village, descendants follow either maternal or paternal lines. Think how much fun it might be for your family to trace generations back to the first ancestor!
Search by the tribe or village to visit it virtually by listening to the interview for that tribe or village as well as see photos of the village and people living there at the time of the interview. Clicking on Refine Results allows you to filter on more specific locations or include specific names and relationships such as spouse or parents that help identify specific families.

Find Your Ancestors in Africa is a wonderful tool for families to learn more about and show their children at least a little information about their ancestral homeland and hopefully will also help them find ancestors they can do temple work for. Are you ready to start searching for your ancestors and share temple blessings with them?