In his landmark manifesto Custer Died for your Sins, American-Indian activist Vine Deloria notes an increasingly popular phenomenon: people of white ancestry claiming...
Read moreThe Bahamas DNA Project
Are the Long Island Deans in the Bahamas descended from the Queen of Sheba? Do the Sweetings of Green Turtle Cay trace their heritage to a Roman soldier? Are the...
Read moreFound – And Lost: 1786 Slaves’ Freedom Site Discovered, Now Doomed by Developer
Black history is again bittersweet in this old Hudson River city. On May 1, 1786, seventy-six years before the Emancipation Proclamation, the very first liberation...
Read moreSome Americans Directly Confronting Legacy of Slavery
Woodstock, Virginia, resident Phoebe Kilby suspected there was a connection between her white family and the black Kilbys who lived in nearby Front Royal. After...
Read moreForks marks 176th anniversary
April 27 marks the 176th anniversary of Natchez’s ordinance causing enslavement traders to relocate at Forks of the Road. The ordinance made it illegal for...
Read moreHistory in black and white
Chris Haley has always been interested in genealogy. But at least when it came to his father’s side of the family, he figured things were pretty much covered...
Read moreGenealogists at mercy of information pirates
In a perfect world, everyone would be honest, bad things wouldn’t happen to good people and private genealogy research wouldn’t be spread across the...
Read moreUp Close: Tangled Roots
You hope for a surprise or two when you map your genealogy: an exiled count, perhaps, or a plank-walking pirate. But when journalist David Wilson, 32, began to trace...
Read moreExamining Michelle Obama’s Lowcountry roots
Tiny fingers stitched a quilt Wednesday morning in a Georgetown elementary school up the South Carolina coastline. But they were actually piecing together something...
Read moreLIFE Magazine Presents: Never-Before-Published Photos From Memphis, April 4, 1968
On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the...
Read moreBlack and white branches of McCain family tree share stories in Flint
It was a powerful image, one that told the centuries-old tale of a family with two races and one name. On a platform at Mott Community College on Tuesday night, two...
Read moreArchaeologist: Graves ‘always significant’
Archaeologist Carter Hudgins was scraping around in the dirt outside Drayton Hall’s old slave cemetery last fall, checking out the ground where they planned to...
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