This month is Juneteenth, and I’ve started volunteering on a project I learned about from the Wake County Parks department, which I follow on social media.

The project is researching slave deeds and other legal documents for the Enslaved Persons Project.

For many Black and African Americans researching their genealogy, the search ends when they hit Colonial times. That’s because in those times, enslaved persons didn’t get birth certificates, marriage licenses, or death certificates — their lives were documented instead in property deeds.