In the past year, Ancestry changed its search engine to detach the history of slavery from basic genealogical inquiries. When searching for an individual’s name, Ancestry.com stopped including results from the 1850 or 1860 United States Census Slave Schedules.

…Before this change occurred, Ancestry.com subscribers would often have to face the uncomfortable fact that their family kept others enslaved. …Attempting that research today would hide this distressing (though important) aspect of [a] family’s history.

The search engine functions to hide both slave ownership and enslaved people from the eyes of contemporary genealogists. 

…Even if a casual observer did suspect a family history of slave ownership and had the inclination to then search the slave schedules themselves, they found the schedules no longer searchable by name on Ancestry.com. 

…While Americans who are descended from enslavers are now less likely to discover the full truth of their family histories, this change also presented similar difficulties for professional historians. The 1860 Slave Schedule represents the gold standard among Civil War historians wanting to establish whether someone owned another human being. 

…These recent issue with the census slave schedules do not appear to be a conspiracy to hide slave ownership, but instead the byproduct of trying to please a small group of customers without thinking through the societal ramifications of those choices. …The tech world is overwhelmingly populated with white men. Diversity isn’t just about doing the right thing morally—although perhaps that should be enough. It is also about making certain that products function well and don’t accidentally reinforce racial disparities by privileging one group’s search for the past over that of another.

…Bad historical knowledge can lead modern inequities to appear as solely the fault of the impoverished and not the product of centuries of discrimination. In this twisted world view, affirmative action can be understood as reverse discrimination because historically created inequality does not appear to even exist. Denying the existence of institutional racism, produced by a long history of oppression, serves to maintain inequality today. The danger of hiding slavery’s extent, horrors, and legacy is that it leads Americans to fundamentally misunderstand why racism remains such a problem. And you can’t solve a problem if you do not understand its roots.

Beyond Romantic Advertisements: Ancestry.com, Genealogy, and White Supremacy – AAIHS

sigh…