The engine that traced one Black American family from Las Vegas back to Mintey Handy, born about 1778 in Virginia, and by name across the Atlantic to Upper Guinea — opened as an API. Record search across 3.2M slavery-era rows, semantic bridge runs for your ancestors, lineage walks with every tier carried, GEDCOM out. Works from any HTTP client or as an MCP server inside Claude, Cursor, or your own agent.
New to this? Start with one name → free, no key: a plan in plain words, the free searches in order, and the slavery-wall bridge already started.
Have a key? Search in your browser → · See the worked case file → · Connect your AI →
What is in the box: record search and bridge runs work for your ancestors across the slavery-era record tables. Person pages, lineage walks and GEDCOM cover the families Code Black has documented (the Stewart-Handy line and its branches), as a worked example of the method. You cannot upload your own tree yet; the human research service does that for you.
Monthly base + metered units. A unit is one person lookup; heavier calls cost more (lineage 5, bridge run 10, GEDCOM 25 — full table in the docs). Overage is billed per unit through Stripe at month end. Cancel any time.
Need a custom engagement (a full human-reviewed lineage dossier on your family)? That is the Code Black research service. This page is the self-serve API.
| Capability | Endpoint | Units |
|---|---|---|
| Record search across the staging corpus (Hall Louisiana, Freedmen's Bureau, JSDP, Oceans of Kinfolk, Information Wanted, Accomack register…) | GET /v1/records/search?q= | 3 |
| Bridge run — your ancestor's name/year/place → ranked record leads (local embeddings, 208K vectors) | POST /v1/bridge/run | 10 |
| Lineage walk with tiers (RECORD / TRIANGULATED / HYPOTHESIS carried verbatim) | GET /v1/lineage/:id | 5 |
| Person pages with sourced claims | GET /v1/persons/:id | 1 |
| GEDCOM 5.5.1 export (QUAY = tier) | GET /v1/export/gedcom | 25 |
| MCP server for agents (same tools, Streamable HTTP) | POST /mcp | per tool |
After checkout, open codeblack-api.dajai.io/app, paste your key, and run searches, bridge runs and GEDCOM downloads from any browser. Copy the result and the ready-made prompt into free ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to have it explained.
claude mcp add --transport http codeblack https://codeblack-api.dajai.io/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer cbk_live_…"
Privacy by construction: presumed-living persons and private family lines are never returned by any endpoint. The method — graph walk, tiered claims, every edge with a source id — is the same one documented at dajai.io/codeblack.