About Krio Griot
Krio Griot is an AI-assisted research workspace for African American and African diaspora genealogy, built to handle the specific gaps, silences, and record structures that other tools ignore.
Krio
The language of the Sierra Leone Krio people: a creole that carries West African grammar and vocabulary into its English-based structure. It is the language of a people who survived the crossing and built a new tongue on the other side.
Griot
The keeper of the family line in West African tradition. Not a passive archivist, but a living carrier of the story. The griot holds the names of the dead so the living can know where they come from. That is this tool's purpose.
A Krio Griot is a keeper of the line, working in the language of the people and the logic of the archive. The name holds both what the tool does and where it comes from.
I am an archivist and professional genealogist. I have spent years working with the specific record structures of African American and African diaspora research: Freedmen's Bureau documents, slave schedules, plantation records, probate inventories, the silences in county deed books where my ancestors' names should be.
I built Krio Griot because I needed it for my own research and nothing else did what I needed. The other tools either ignored the 1870 break, the point where most formerly enslaved people first appear in records under their own names, or they papered over the gaps with fabricated connections. I needed a workspace that would hold the uncertainty honestly and help me search methodically through it.
DNA testing traced my maternal line to the Mende and Temne peoples of Sierra Leone, the Djola and Fula peoples of Guinea-Bissau, and the Kru people of Liberia. In 2022 I became a citizen of Sierra Leone. That tracing is how I came to understand that the records do not end at the water. They just require different tools to follow.
Krio Griot started as a tool for my own research. Every family that crosses the 1870 break needs a workspace built for that crossing, one that holds the uncertainty honestly, knows what the archive does and does not hold, and does not pretend otherwise. This is that workspace.
Krio Griot is a research workspace, built around how genealogical research actually works: not a passive tree, but an active investigation. Everything in it is private to your account. This is a workspace built for us, by us, not for public display.
Legacy Search is the research engine. You describe an ancestor once, and it searches the archives it is connected to, reads what comes back, and writes a report that cites every record it used. Every search is kept, including the ones that found nothing, because a null result is still evidence of where you looked. Speak to Me walks you through the same work in four guided stages.
The seven ways of knowing mark every person and fact: Documented, Inferred, Oral, Carried, Contested, Absent or Synthetic. What a record holds, what was reasoned, what kin remember and what the engine wrote are never blended together.
The family tree and profiles hold your people, drawn only from the links you save. Each profile carries a timeline, life events, sources, relationships, a life story written from the records, notes, and an Ancestor Dossier.
The Archive Scanner reads scanned photographs and documents and suggests a description for you to review. Nothing is written to your records without your approval.
DNA, archives and collections keep your tests and matches, your archive items, and your family's collections, each linked to the people they concern.
The research engine does not fabricate. It does not invent record collections, give names to unnamed people, or produce confident answers when the evidence runs out. It says what the record holds and what the record does not hold. That distinction is the most important thing this tool does.
The 1870 federal census is the first to name formerly enslaved people as free individuals. Before 1870, most African American families are documented, if at all, only in records that identified them as property: slave schedules that record ages and sex but not names, estate inventories, tax lists, plantation records held by the enslaver's family.
The 1870 break is not a failure of your family. It is a deliberate record structure imposed by a legal system that did not recognize enslaved people as people with names worth recording. Getting through it requires specific knowledge of specific record sets (Freedmen's Bureau documents, Freedman's Savings and Trust ledgers, marriage registers, cohabitation registers, the records of enslavers, county probate) and a research strategy built around what those records actually hold.
Every feature of Krio Griot is designed with the 1870 break in mind. The AI assistant knows these record sets. The workspace is built to hold the uncertainty and the silence honestly, and to search through them methodically, without inventing what the archive does not provide.