DAR is proud to be one of the founding collaborating institutions supporting the 10 Million Names project, which aims to recover the names of up to 10 million people enslaved in America between the 1500s and 1865. The project is being led by American Ancestors, a national center for family history, which will centralize genealogical and historical information about enslaved people of African descent and their families on a free website with a publicly accessible database.
In 2023, DAR donated $350,000 to support the project and licensed information from the DAR Patriots of Color database to be searchable within the 10 Million Names project. The DAR Patriots of Color database is a digital extension of the long-term DAR Forgotten Patriots Project to research and identify Revolutionary War Patriots of color. The DAR data will be included in one of the 10 Million Names Pilot Projects: “On the Battlefield – Records of Soldiers, Veterans, and Refugees”
The collaboration with American Ancestors is part of the DAR’s ongoing E Pluribus Unum Educational Initiative to increase awareness of often underrepresented Revolutionary War Patriots and support new scholarship, educational programming, and research tools. Future efforts of the 10 Million Names project will include further research on names from the Patriots of Color database to discover descendants and additional details about the individuals.
The public is invited to explore the free, public website at 10MillionNames.org, where a small but growing number of datasets are available at present, with more to be added on a regular basis. The site offers resources for self-directed research into African American genealogy and interactive historical context for the 10 Million Names project.
Watch this ABC News video on the 10 Million Names project:
‘10 Million Names’ documents enslaved people of African descent
Learn more about other relevant DAR information at the links below.
