Chief Historian Kendra Field Uses AI to Restore Voices Lost to History

In one of the most ambitious historical recovery efforts of our time, Chief Historian Dr. Kendra T. Field is leading a groundbreaking project to recover the names and stories of the estimated 10 million men, women, and children of African descent who were enslaved in what became the United States before emancipation. The initiative known as the 10 Million Names Project draws on cutting-edge tools, including artificial intelligence, expansive archival datasets, genealogical records, oral histories, and community contributions, to piece together identities that slavery systematically erased.

Dr. Field, an associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, serves as the project’s Chief Historian, coordinating historians, genealogists, data scientists, and families to build a digital archive of names and histories. By integrating AI-assisted search technologies with traditional research methods, the project aims to accelerate the painstaking process of identifying individuals whose existence was too often reduced to numbers or property listings in bills of sale and plantation ledgers.

The effort follows pioneering work such as the Georgetown Memory Project, which first sought to restore the names and family histories of more than 300 men, women, and children sold by Georgetown University in 1838, and expands that methodology to a national scale. The use of AI, linked genealogical databases, and crowdsourced material allows researchers to cross-reference sources, detect patterns, and reconstruct identities in ways that manual archival research alone could not.

In practical terms, this means combing through thousands of historical sources — from bills of sale and plantation documents to legal records and family stories, to find recognitions of actual people, rather than nameless figures. As Dr. Field and her collaborators note, restoring these names is not just an academic exercise, it is an act of historical justice that acknowledges the humanity of those who were enslaved and opens doors for their descendants to reconnect with their ancestral past.

The 10 Million Names Project represents both a scholarly innovation and a deeply human mission: to honor and remember those long lost to history by giving them back one of the most fundamental aspects of personhood, their name