 Welcome to the Heritage Exchange video series hosted by WikiTrees US Black Heritage Project. Video number one, an introduction to the Heritage Exchange Program. In this video, you will learn the answer to this question, what is the Heritage Exchange Program? The US Black Heritage Project's Heritage Exchange Program is a sharing of information between the descendants of slave owners and the descendants of people who were enslaved. Because slaves were not documented by name on any national documents until the 1870 census, we must look at documents of slave owners such as wills, bills of sale, deeds, mortgages, estate valuations, and even diaries. By using this information, we can create profiles for the enslaved ancestors and connect them to their descendants. Heritage Exchange uses the fan principle, friends, associates, and neighbors, that by working with groups of people who are in close proximity to each other, we can more easily build their family trees. We identify clusters of enslaved people, find additional documents for each cluster, and then connect the entire cluster to their family trees. Heritage Exchange uses its own special system of linked family profiles, categories, space pages, and naming conventions on wiki tree to make the work easier and help descendants find their enslaved ancestors. Let's look at an example. If I start on the profile for slave owner John Randolph and go to the Slave section, you will see two space pages linked, one for the Roanoke Plantation and one to a general page for other enslaved ancestors. If I scroll down to the category section, I will also find categories for the plantation and slave owners in Charlotte County, Virginia. Those categories will lead to others who are in contact with the plantation and other slave owners in the same county. Let's go to the plantation page. At the top is a link back to John Randolph's profile. If I scroll down to the categories, you can see there's a very long list of enslaved ancestors on this page, which is why the unique feature of free space pages is very helpful for this work. Here, there are the same categories for the plantation as well as slave owners in Charlotte County, Virginia. In addition, there is a category for slaves in this county because they are also listed on this page. Going back up, you can see that many profiles have links and there are many that still do not have profiles yet created. I'm going to click on a profile, I'm going to choose Frank Brown. You will find again there's a link to John Randolph's profile. And when I go down to the categories, the same category for the Roanoke Plantation is on his profile as well as the category for the Charlotte County, Virginia slaves. These two categories are very helpful because it's very possible that Frank could be related to others who were on the Roanoke Plantation as well as others who were enslaved in this county. Scrolling back up and looking at Frank's profile itself, you can see that we have all of the known family to Frank, his wife and children are attached to this profile. As you can see, we have linked and grouped everyone together in as many ways as possible to make finding them easier. It is also common for people in slavery communities to be related, so grouping them in these ways can lead to additional family members in a tree. Our ultimate goal in heritage exchange is to connect every American enslaved ancestor with black heritage to their descendants. Here are ways you can help us with this goal. First, add any documentation regarding slavery to the wiki tree profiles of the people they belong to. Second, learn the heritage exchange system to help us connect clusters of enslaved ancestors together as you come across them in documents. See the Heritage Exchange Portal for links to the help pages that can help you with this. More videos will also be available by January 2023. Third, join the U.S. Black Heritage Project and work with the Heritage Exchange team. If you would like to join the project, go to our project homepage, click on the link to the G2G post and tell us you would like to join and what you are most interested in. Our new members coordinator will send you a message on what to do next. In summary, Heritage Exchange is a systematic way of sharing information between the descendants of slave owners and the descendants of people who are enslaved with a goal of connecting them to their enslaved ancestors. According to population estimates by researcher J. David Hacker, there were more than 10 million people enslaved in the history of the United States of America. It will take all of us doing our part to identify, document, connect, and honor them all.