National Geographic explorer in residence Tara Roberts has now spent many days in the past eight years searching the deep blue with a group of Black scuba divers.
Their mission? To assist maritime archaeologists in surfacing the names and stories of the approximately 1.8 million African lives that were lost in an estimated 1,000 sunken slave shipwrecks around the world.
Diving to uncover and then retell these lost stories has “been an incredible journey,” Roberts told the hundreds of RootsTech 2026 attendees gathered for the family history conference’s Friday general session.
This journey, she said, began near 2017, when an experience at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., “literally changed the trajectory” of her life.
At this time, Roberts said she had found herself searching for an adventure with purpose. A picture she found in the archival floor of this museum would eventually lead her to the adventure she had been searching for.
The picture showed “a group of primarily Black and brown women in wet suits,” she said. And it was just a “simple snapshot.”
It was “not a poised, glamorous portrait” of these women riding a boat in the ocean, “but when I saw it, it literally stopped me in my tracks,” she said.
Roberts explained there was something about the “free and joyous” countenances of the women in this picture that connected with her and sparked her interest. So, she dug in to find out who they were, she said.
What she learned is that they were a part of a group called Diving With a Purpose, and that what they did was to help search for and document trans-Atlantic slave trade shipwrecks through a technique called “underwater archaeology mapping.”
“To me, it felt like they were actually on a real life quest to help save our kingdom,” Roberts said, noting her lifelong interest in sci-fi and fantasy books.
Roberts subsequently reached out to the group, she said, and eventually received their invitation to dive with them.
“I never could have predicted that scuba diving would be the thing to enter my life and change it so completely,” she said. “But it gave me a way to have adventures, and it gave me a way to encounter the ocean.”
Roberts’ adventures since then have taught her the breadth of knowledge about the trans-Atlantic slave trade that has stayed hidden, and the power there is in surfacing the names and stories of those lost.
As she trained, Roberts said she learned there were 12,000 ships that participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, bringing approximately 12.5 million Africans to the Americas.
Of the participating ships, an estimated 1,000 ships sunk — killing approximately 1.8 million Africans.
“We’re not talking about the number of people who died on the march to the ships, or the number of people who died once the ships arrived and they were enslaved,” she said.
“I began to realize as I went deeper into this work, that there are just whole chapters of history that are missing, and I wanted to help bring those chapters back into memory.”
Roberts eventually applied and received a National Geographic grant that would enable her to travel with divers, ages ranging 16 to 86, to document their work, their findings and her own transformation.
Slowly, Roberts said, she began to think that by speaking the lost ancestors’ names and raising their stories “from the depths” — with love, honor and respect — she could ultimately help heal the “wound that has festered in this world for far too long.”
“That, to me, is the promise of this work,” she said.
She then acknowledged that on some level this type of research and discovery might seem like hard, sad and “traumatic” work. But she explained that, to her, it isn’t.
This work “isn’t only about the pain and the shame and the heaviness of the past,” she said. “To me, this is more about moving through the pain to get to a new place.
“I feel nothing but agency and power when I’m below the surface and helping to bring up these stories.”
And that, she said, is because “we’re saying that this history matters and that we volunteer to bring it back into history right now.”
Roberts explained that out of the estimated 1,000 shipwrecks there are, less than two dozen have been found and properly documented.
She invited listeners to follow her work and efforts to surface this history on Instagram at @tararoberts_explorer, and also spotlighted some of her already published works, including her “Into the Depths” National Geographic podcast series and her memoir “Written in the Waters.”
“The work we do now isn’t only for the future,” Roberts later said in a media interview. “It is for the past” and the “releasing” of the souls lost.
