A single photo changed the course of Tara Roberts’ life.
In 2016, while living in Washington, D.C., Roberts visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It was there she saw a picture of scuba divers, predominantly Black women, smiling together on a boat.
Despite the photo’s ordinary nature, Roberts said it stopped her in her tracks. Soon she learned that the scuba divers were part of a group called Diving With a Purpose — a nonprofit that explores sunken slave ships, recovers what artifacts they can and preserves the stories of lost passengers.
Though she’d never before been scuba diving, Roberts reached out to Diving With a Purpose, and the organization eventually invited her to join them. She also later received a National Geographic grant, which allowed her to travel to dives around the world. She’s now spent eight years diving for slave ship wrecks.
Roberts shared her experiences during her keynote address at RootsTech 2026 on Friday, March 6. Her remarks explored the importance of feeling connected to ancestors and how those connections impact living people.
RootsTech is a three-day global online and in-person family celebration conference hosted by FamilySearch International and is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other leading genealogy organizations. It is the world’s largest genealogy event, featuring keynote speakers, hundreds of classes and new technologies. The 2026 event is March 5-7, with an in-person event in Salt Lake City and online at RootsTech.org.
During her keynote, Roberts said the people who died on slave ships weren’t statistics or faceless victims; they were mothers, fathers, dreamers, farmers, poets, mathematicians, scientists and more.
“I began to think …, ‘What if I could help raise their stories from the depths in their fullness, in their wonder?’” Roberts said. “‘With love, with honor, with respect, and finally help heal a wound that has festered in this world for far too long?’ That, to me, is the promise of this work.”
Restoring history
Roberts said 12,000 ships participated in the transatlantic slave trade, bringing 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. She also said that 1.8 million Africans died during the sea crossings, which doesn’t include those who died on the march to the ships or who died in the Americas.
“I wondered who was mourning for those people,” Roberts said. “Where were the official, global memorials to honor their lives? 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 has worked hard to do exactly that. In her time with National Geographic and Diving With a Purpose, she’s produced numerous writings and a six-episode podcast, all aimed at sharing the stories of people lost to the transatlantic slave trade.
She recounted the story of a slave ship that left Mozambique Island and sank off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, in 1794. About half of the captives died, and the others were sold in South Africa.
The story might’ve ended there, but a team called the Slave Wrecks Project — an international network of researchers and institutions hosted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and which Diving With a Purpose is part of — discovered the wreck in 2015.
Many descendants of the captives from that ship still live on Mozambique Island, Roberts said, and they celebrated upon learning about the wreck’s discovery. The Makua people’s chief also requested that divers pour dirt from the island over the shipwreck site, “so that for the first time since 1794, [his] people could sleep in their own land.”
‘We are a part of each other’
Roberts said her work might seem hard, sad or traumatic, but to her, it’s about moving through the pain to reach a new place.
“We are a part of each other,” Roberts said. “So what if we could lean into that connection? Could it change how we see each other? And if how we see each other changes, could that change how people are responsible for each other?”
There’s a lot left to do — Roberts said historians believe there are approximately 1,000 shipwrecks related to the transatlantic slave trade, but to date, fewer than 20 have been found and properly documented.
“For me, this is a fresh story,” Roberts said. “It’s full of potential and opportunity for profound healing. I think it offers a road map to understanding the fullness of our collective heritage.”
