Toni Carrier

Toni Carrier is the Director of the Center for Family History. She has been a consultant to the museum since 2015. Prior to joining the museum’s efforts, she was the Founding Director of Lowcountry Africana, a nonprofit research project and free website dedicated to African American genealogy in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Ms. Carrier is the founder of the USF Africana Heritage Project and Co-founder of the website Mapping the Freedmen’s Bureau: An Interactive Online Finding Aid. Ms. Carrier has served as a panelist on the BlackProGen LIVE Internet broadcast since 2016 and is a regular speaker at national genealogy conferences.

In the 16 years she has been working in and teaching African American genealogy in the Lowcountry, Ms. Carrier conducted research for the PBS series African American Lives II, researched the history of the Point of Pines slave dwelling on behalf of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and traced Michelle Obama’s ancestry on behalf of the Obama for America campaign.

In 2012, Ms. Carrier was the Wood Family Fellow and Charisse R. Cecil Intern at Drayton Hall Plantation, where she conducted research on the post emancipation African American community at Drayton Hall. Ms. Carrier has conducted research for Michael Twitty’s book The Cooking Gene and is currently conducting genealogy research for Dr. Edda Fields Black’s forthcoming book ‘Combee’: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and the Gullah Geechee Transformation.
Ms. Carrier earned her Master’s Degree in Applied Anthropology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of South Florida.