For the past year, my partner has been relentlessly building her family tree.

It isn't the first time. Sharita grew up in the 1980s, at the corner of 73rd and Loomis on Chicago's South Side—a mile away from where my own Swedish-Irish grandmother grew up at 66th and May, before white flight and redlining tore the city to pieces. Discouraged from playing outside for fear of gang violence, Sharita spent many of her days basking in the golden era of MTV, practicing rhythm tap dance routines, and watching The Price is Right with her grandma, Henrie Lou.

But for the first year of her life, Sharita's home actually spanned four generations. Her mother's grandmother, Carrie Lee Walker Washington—"Old Grandma," as the family (still) calls her—was born in Harris County, Georgia in October 1880, four and a half years after Alexander Graham Bell first beckoned for Watson via telephone wire. Carrie Lee moved to Chicago from Columbus in 1972, after the state paid her $8000 to demolish her home on Beallwood Avenue to make room for an expanding intercity expressway. She died at her family's home in February 1986, four and a half years after MTV began its first broadcast with "Video Killed the Radio Star."

Carrie Lee's life was long on intrigue, but short on detail. To this day, we still don't know why she cut off contact with her younger sister, Mamie Ethel Walker; my partner's mother and aunt didn't even know Mamie existed until Carrie Lee died. (Mamie had—somehow—set up shop as a doyenne of Black high society in Macon, Georgia. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, the Macon News ran breathless articles about her elegant Christmas parties, ponderously-named social clubs, and "chop suey suppers.")

But vintage clips from Newspapers.com weren't on offer to a nerdy, nostalgic Black girl in pre-Y2K Englewood. Ancestry.com wouldn't launch until 1996, and 23andMe didn't debut its first saliva-soaking cheek swabs until a year after Sharita graduated with a full-ride degree in film and photography (before pivoting, like so many artsy science nerds, to a nursing degree). For someone who grew up surrounded by photos of the dark-skinned centenarian who once cradled her newborn body, and ended up working in film archives throughout college, the only clues she had about her family's deeper history were vague hints about Southern life that nobody seemed rushed to preserve.

Many Black Americans still labor under an enduring myth, not of their own making, that the lives and lived experiences of their distant ancestors are unknowable, lost to the grinding void of transatlantic enslavement. It's a myth underpinned by white history-making, in a land that mandated a decennial census but deliberately chose not to name the enslaved until after the Civil War.

And yet, glimmers of these Antebellum histories do exist. Just not in the census.

They're in the property records.

"As a Southerner myself—loving the South, loving our history, for the good and the bad of it—it's the place where our history is probably most under threat," Dr. Elizabeth West said over Zoom, on a frigid January morning in which an ice storm had shuttered Georgia State's campus.

As the Academic Director for the Center for Studies on Africa & Its Diaspora at Georgia State University, Dr. West is no stranger to weaving back together the shattered, disparate strands of Black history. But it was a deep-dive into her own ancestor—the subject of her 2022 book, Finding Francis: One Family's Journey from Slavery to Freedom—that set the stage for the public debut of a database built upon the foundation that Francis' legacy had laid in April of last year

"Data Mining and Mapping Antebellum Georgia" (DMMAG) has compiled a searchable database of the thousands of wills, probate records, and legal documents of Harris County, Georgia. Amid thousands of pages of handwritten, baroque legal jargon about guardianship and executors, these records include the precious data not included in pre-1870 censuses (or their associated "Slave Schedules," which catalogued an enslaver's "property," but exclusively by age and gender).

In a capitalist world where economic transactions have been valued über alles, these legal documents, carefully crafted to safeguard hoarded wealth, contain not only an immense amount of detail but the social architecture to ensure their careful preservation even two centuries later. And Harris County is only the test case, the first of over 100Georgian counties on the docket for building a similar Black archive.

Here, the archive proves that, despite every attempt to erase the identities of the enslaved, they still had their names.

"Grandma didn't tell us a lot. When grandma moved in with us, she was in her nineties," recalled Rhonda, my partner's mother, from the family home near 95th and Kedzie, its halls still chockablock with the family photos that so captivated Sharita as a child. "But she'd have told us, if we asked."

"We were in our 20s," interjected her sister, Renita. "We were partying a lot, and so we weren't really into asking about things. Which I regret now." As an adult, Renita did request her parents' birth certificates from the State of Georgia; the records had been lost in a courthouse fire.

Sharita's family has a handful of well-worn artifacts: a century-old photo of Carrie Lee's mother, Jane Jones, lounging in sepia-toned regality, and a faded image of her father, Henry Walker, in a suit and collared shirt. Henry's face feels reminiscent of a Disney rotoscope: at some point, Henrie Lou tried to conserve the dulled portrait in pen, like her own private, well-intentioned Ecce Homo.

"Grandma wrote on everything," Sharita explained. 

Henry and Jane first appear on the 1870 census, albeit with a mildly concerning 16-year age gap: at 38 to her 22, it's more than conceivable that Henry had fathered an entire other family by the time the war ended. But Henry's surname alone had already pointed us towards a likely origin: the vast plantation complex of William "Rich Billy" Walker, a veritable village made up of gin mills, brick kilns, blacksmiths, tanneries, and enough forced labor to sustain it all.

While emancipation did enable some mobility, sharecropping kept most Black Americans firmly rooted in the South. Throughout the 1870s, Henry Walker is listed on property tax digests, alongside many other Walkers, working for a local doctor with an exceedingly 19th-century name: Erastus Claiborne Hood.

Wealth like Hood's, however, leaves a paper trail. On an 1861 property transfer, Hood and former Walker plantation overseer Elijah Cook (who somehow managed to woo Rich Billy's daughter) came to an agreement: the sale of not only land, but the dozens of people along with it. Columns of names, across multiple elaborately scripted pages: "Milton, 35"; "Old Rose, 70"; "Missouri, 8."

And, at the very bottom of one column: "Henry, 27."

"Grandma liked light-skinned men," Renita recounted. "Grandma was real dark-skinned. She said she saw Fort, and she just had to have him. So she stole him from his girlfriend."

("I didn't know that," Rhonda admitted, breaking into a laugh.)

This classic tale of colorism—the colonized mantra of "light is right," the traumatic calculus born from navigating a pigmentocracy—belies some twisted math. My partner, and all of her extended family, are Black—and yet, on a purely genetic level, her ancestry registers as one-quarter European.

That's one full grandparent, two great-grandparents, or four great-great-grandparents. But as far back as we know Sharita's ancestors—dutifully documented in 1870 or 1880, from Cataula, Georgia to Leake, Mississippi—not a single one of her 16 great-great-grandparents qualified as white: thirteen are listed as Black, and three as Mulatto (itself a controversial term, even then).

The further back you go, the tally of Sharita's European, genetic forebears only grows. Until, by sheer statistics, her blood contains the mark of—minimum—a baker's dozen of terrible white men.

As with all math, outliers exist. We have extended conditional grace to Sharita's paternal great-great-great-great-grandfather, Isaiah Parker Jr, who purchased his enslaved wife, Charity Ann Graves, in 1862. By all accounts, these two navigated the wake of Civil War Georgia as a common-law couple, eventually raising an OBGYN-mortifying 17 biracial children. Over a century later, one of their descendants—Karen Batchelor, one of Sharita's countless third cousins—became the first Black member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

For decades, this reality—anathema to the enforced delusion of racial hierarchy—literally colored Southern states, living evidence of generations of unlawful intimacy.  In her history of a 1912 lynching during which her great-grandfather served as sheriff, veteran journalist Karen Branan discovered that one of the Black men lynched was her cousin. This relation hardly came as a surprise. Even as a teenager, Branan's mother once quickly reprimanded her after she observed that the faces of her Black neighbors so closely resembled those of her white ones.

Fort's mother and Sharita's great-great-grandmother, Martha, lived in that liminal space, on the border between white wealth and Black existence. In 1880, a mixed, 40-year-old Martha lived with her mixed husband, Lafayette "Fate" Washington, and seven children. They lived alongside—and in Martha's case, worked for—a white doctor, Tomlinson Fort Brewster. Fort was two years old.

In 1883, a local paper even announced the wedding of Martha's daughter, Cora Washington, "at the residence of the bride's mother, Kaetala Mills." Tomlinson bought the mills in 1862, possibly from an army buddy, while literally on leave from the Civil War. He would later be court-martialed; a superior officer described him as "wanting to quit service for fear of a bullet and love of a dollar."

Within family lore, Rhonda and Renita often spoke of Martha's waist-length red hair; they suspected she may have been part-Irish, and Fate part-Native (a common legend among the lightly-melanated of apartheid-era America—doubling as both plausible denial of Black heritage, and perverted claim to Indigeneity on settled land). Tomlinson's existence also gave credence to suggestions that Martha's father had actually been a doctor, and Martha's children's death certificates listed her maiden name as Beale—compellingly close to that of Tomlinson's own wife, Margaret Beal. But among the millions of Ancestry.com users who have submitted DNA samples in search of their own histories, none seemed to share any precious centimorgans with both Sharita and this particular Beal.

Searching the DMMAG database, however, turned up other ideas. We didn't recognize the name "EH (Elias Harold) Beall," but he wasn't hard to find: his father (also named, inventively, Elias Beall) served as a general in the War of 1812, and today is considered a "co-founder" of Columbus, Georgia. In her book, Branan definitively pinpoints Elias Harold as the father of Curtis Beall, a mixed school teacher and later a Reconstruction politician. He almost certainly wasn't the Bealls' only illicit progeny.

Elias Harold himself may have had nothing to do with Martha—but with enough time, luck, and unobscured records, we may actually have a chance of finding the men who did (Also, we can't help but notice: Sharita shares ample DNA with quite a few white descendants of Elias Harold's mother). 

Sometimes, genealogy feels like knitting a blanket in the dark, feeling along every thread in the hopes of eventually weaving together the truth. Every clue to every riddle unearths a hundred more.

Even within the bounds of Harris County, the database is not yet comprehensive. Alongside 5600 enslaved names, the database included documents from 120 enslavers—the big fish, with the mightiest estates and the most extensive roster of enslaved humans, like the Walkers.

Ironically, this threshold wouldn't have included the enslaver in West's own history, Jacob Sistrunk.

"Without her, he would have been just a poor white Southern Joe in the 19th century," West said. Sistrunk was one of the countless nickel-and-dime enslavers, whose quest for wealth began with a single step on trafficked backs—particularly those of Black women. Or even just one woman.

"Compared to the super wealthy planters, he was really middling. But what brought him even to middling was this one enslaved girl who came into his possession, and had six children," West said. "The greatest extent of his monetary wealth was the valuation of Francis and her children."

"Now multiply that, millions of times, throughout the South. Millions," West stressed. "And you begin to appreciate the magnitude of how this place was built by the labor of Black people."

Navigating the thousands of names and records that now make up Sharita's family tree, we both reckon with the jarring, painful echoes of the records we peruse—this potent sense of loss. One that resurfaces every time we search for a deceased family member's address, in a historically Black neighborhood in Columbus or Macon, and Google Maps drops us directly into a carpool lane.

Birth certificates from within living memory? Lost in a fire. But the deeds and promissory notes of long-dead, rich white men? Immortalized. Between Sharita and myself, I am the unyielding optimist—but her family's astonishing rolodex of setbacks still regularly tests my resolve.

Thankfully, Dr. West and her team—a nerdy cadre that included her GSU co-investigator Dr. Ras Michael Brown, graduate research assistant Joshua Jackson, former student John Washington​​, software developer Shreya Tadipaneni (who coded the database as her graduate project), Troy University collaborators Dr. Robert D. Carlson and Dr. Timothy Buckner, and countless curators of dusty but unforgotten archives—chose to continue their work with the necessary grace and aplomb.

"Ironically, I came out of this with deep hope and inspiration," she said. "A needed orientation. Even beyond personally, it gave me a greater sense of the rights of Black Southerners and the acknowledgement of their great contribution to the success of this country—and of the South."

There is another thruline in this story, which speaks to an entirely different trajectory.

In the thick, viscous air of this political moment, we're defending Black legacies from a white power structure in crisis, looking to erase them: Tuskegee Airmen tossed down the memory hole, gleeful attacks on the euphemistic slur du jour, and slavery exhibits removed from the home of the same president who literally became the namesake for countless Black Americans fresh from bondage.

My partner and I live in a country that has, from its inception, treated Black folks more as assets on a balance sheet than humans who deserve balance. She knows—better than anyone should—the extent of America's antiblack racial violence. We've seen it in the harsh appraisal of real estate agents, the sidelong, demanding glances of old employers—and now, in the needless pain from nurses, cavalierly fishing for usable veins through which to inject her monthly chemotherapy.

But even in her roughest hours—recuperating in bed, through a winter better known for human ICE storms than forecasted ones—she hopes to chronicle who came before her, like tracing the branches of a weathered but sacred tree. Because, in passing these stories on to the next generation, like her own daughters, now 12 and 14, witnessing her history serves as an act of resistance.

"The uplifting part to me is always how, in spite of all of this, the enslaved carved out meaningful lives," West told me. "They left us with a very deep, meaningful sense of our own spiritual selves."

"Through those centuries of enslavement, we were holding our humanity together."

Jonathan spent most of his adult life as a vagabond nerd before a pandemic prompted him to reinvent himself as some kind of science, history, and arts journalist. You can find some of his nerdy ramblings at jonathanfeakins.journoportfolio.com