Archeology is Genealogy

Matthew P. Rooney, ARAS-UAM Research Station
"Archeology is..." series - August 2025

Archeologists generally seek to understand people who lived in the past by studying the material residues of their lives—artifacts, ecofacts, structures, landforms, and any other human-made cultural creations. Another major task is collaborating with communities to construct that understanding of the past. These include Indigenous communities, local communities, and descendant communities. One of the ways to connect these communities with archeological projects is to perform genealogical research. This has been an especially fruitful avenue of study in my plantation research project in southeast Arkansas.

Before I put shovels or trowels in the ground at the Hollywood/Valley Plantation in Drew County, one of my first self-appointed tasks was connecting with African Americans who either grew up on the plantation or were descendants of those who grew up on the plantation. I started by going to local Black churches and was soon put in touch with people who were born and raised on the plantation in the 1930s and 1940s. When I first sat down to interview these people, I found that they framed their stories around their genealogy. They thought archeology was interesting and were happy to look at artifacts to help me interpret them, but they all expressed a greater desire to have me perform more genealogical research on their families.

The initial folks I encountered were the locals who remained in Arkansas, but I felt that surely there were many more who had left Arkansas during the Great Migration. I was able to get a couple of contacts in other states who were still in touch with those who remained here locally, but I had additional success by turning to the plantation’s lost cemeteries. I started researching the individuals whose names I could find on markers, and once I had got down as many details as I could from various records, I started searching for the individuals in public member trees on Ancestry.com and writing to their owners to talk about the project and their ancestors. I added photographs of the markers I found to findagrave.com, where I sometimes connected with their descendants in faraway U.S. states.

The results were astounding. I talked to several people who provided me with firsthand accounts of plantation life in the first half of the twentieth century. They talked about their families, they talked about churches, they talked about what they ate and who they knew, and they talked about their schools. Most of them provided me with photographs of themselves and their ancestors so that I could start matching up my archeological research with people’s faces. I was able to connect various individuals who lived at the Valley Plantation with larger events in the region, like the formation of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. I ended up with more than two dozen contacts from seven different U.S. states who have family connections to the plantation, and more pop up all the time as word spreads about the project. I asked members of that descendant community to give me feedback on the archeology and tell me what questions were the most important to them as I was conducting my research. The result has been a rich multimedia project that marshals knowledge from many different avenues of research: archeology, history, oral history, and genealogy.

In my experience collaborating with descendant communities, I have found that it is important for me to be flexible and willing to turn my skills toward avenues that each community wants and needs. Sometimes this can mean backgrounding traditional archeological methods in favor of things like genealogical or cemetery research. Shortly into my tenure with the Arkansas Archeological Survey, I joined the statewide organization Preserving African American Cemeteries (PAAC), and I have participated in several of their annual conferences and workshops. Genealogy is so important to them that they also formed a statewide chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), and virtually every PAAC panel discussion and presentation focuses on at least one of the following: community history, family history, and church history. Genealogy is a primary contributor to all three, and I have found that PAAC members are always looking to have archeologists apply their skillsets in the telling of those histories.