This record is built from what can be found. You may know a piece of it that was never written down. Send it in.
The official record of Black towns is incomplete, and everyone who works in this history knows why. Records were never kept, or were lost, burned, flooded, or thrown away when a town was taken. A town can be missing from every book and database and still have been real, with families, a church, a school, and a cemetery.
So this project listens two ways: to the written record, and to the people who carry the story. If your family comes from a Black town that is not on this site, or you know something about one that is, we want to hear it: a name, a place, a story passed down, a photograph, a headstone. Family tellings count here. They are often the only record a town ever got.
Every submission is researched before anything changes on the site.
We run what you send through everything we can search: the open internet, public libraries and archives, historical databases, maps, and records. Then we write back with an honest readout: what we could confirm, what we could not, and where that leaves the town.
If we cannot find a town in the searchable record, we will tell you exactly that: we do not know. Not finding a town in the record is not the same as your information being wrong, and we will never tell you it is. Some towns will stand on community memory, credited as such, while the search continues.
As much or as little as you have. Even a name and a county is a start.
The town: its name, the state and county, and where it stood if you can point to it on a map.
What you know: when it was founded or lived in, who lived there, what stood there: homes, a church, a school, a store, a cemetery.
How you know it: family history, a story passed down, documents, photographs, a place you have stood. Tell us plainly; it helps us search the right way.
How to reach you: your name and an email, so we can send the readout.