User:Efsacco

Mabuika (Welcome) I'm Dr. Ellen Fernandez-Sacco PhD (Boriken Taino) and I help connect people to their ancestors. I grew up in New York City and became fascinated by my mother's stories of growing up in the rural town of Moca, Puerto Rico. Hearing these stories eventually became the challenge of finding my family's relatives across various records. Now I am a genealogist & independent scholar with a focus on Puerto Rico, New York and the Southern US for over two decades.

My current book project explores the connections between slavery, genealogy and family histories in nineteenth century Puerto Rico based on my blog. I'm also working on a series of articles on the Missing Volume of the Registro de Esclavos for NW Puerto Rico in Hereditas, a journal published by the Sociedad Puertorriquena de Genealogia.

How can we best bridge the past and its ties to the present? Archival records for Puerto Rico can be a challenge, particularly when ancestors are connected to the institution of slavery. Finding alternative record sets and approaches, together with any surviving oral history is a must for anyone doing this research. Develop your research questions, make timelines, as these will guide you through the materials, and ask- together we'll hopefully find an answer.