  Determining the mechanisms that formed and grew the first supermassive black
holes is one of top priorities in extragalactic astrophysics. Observational
clues can be inferred from the demographics of massive black holes (in the ten
thousand through million Solar mass range) in nearby low-mass galaxies. This
chapter of the next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) Science Book describes
how an ngVLA can play a prominent role in developing large samples of weakly
accreting active galactic nuclei in low-mass galaxies (out to nearly 1 Gpc),
which will help constrain the types of objects that originally seeded the
growth of supermassive black holes.
