04/19/2026
Course 1: https://blairuniversity.org/courses/who-are-you-really-a-conscious-community-guide-to-genealogy-research/
Course 2: https://blairuniversity.org/courses/breaking-the-wall-pre-1870-research-colonial-records-and-the-reclamation-of-hidden-identity/
Your family hits a wall at 1870 in every genealogy database ever built.
They told you the record ends there. That before emancipation, your people were property and property was not named. That before 1870, there is nothing to find.
That is not the truth. And tonight, we are going to prove it.
In 1740, the colonial government of South Carolina passed a law declaring that dark skin was legal presumption of slave status. Not proof. Presumption. But the same law contained an exception that almost nobody teaches and colonial court records document dark-skinned people who stood before judges and successfully argued their freedom by proving Indigenous descent. Those records still exist. The families are named in them. The testimony is recorded. The history is there.
It has always been there.
Tonight Tony Vortex breaks down what Blair University's new Genealogy Series teaches the conscious community researcher, the 1740 Negro Act, the 80 million pages of Spanish colonial records in Seville that document your people by name from the 1500s forward, the denied Dawes Roll applications that contain the same genealogical testimony as the approved ones, the Free Negro Registers, the East Florida Papers at the Library of Congress, and the specific methodology for crossing the wall that every database builder decided you did not need to know.
This is not a genealogy hobby show.
This is the recovery of an identity that was legally and systematically taken and the documentation proving it was taken, where it was hidden, and how to get it back.
Blair University's Genealogy Series is live now at https://www.BlairUniversity.org.
Come prepared to take notes.
