In a quiet attic in New York, Blanche Moses carefully preserved two miniature ivory portraits. She believed they depicted her noble Jewish ancestors, that is to say, in the best light possible: refined, European, and elite. For Blanche, these portraits were more than heirlooms. They were proof of belonging, of status, of a family history that fit neatly into the story she had always been told.

But when historian Laura Arnold Leibman followed the trail, she uncovered a very different past. The portraits were not of European aristocrats, but of Sarah and Isaac Brandon, siblings born into slavery in Barbados. They would later become free, wealthy, and Jewish in New York, navigating a world where race, religion, and class collided in complex and often hidden ways.

In Once We Were Slaves, Leibman traces the extraordinary journey of the Brandon family, revealing how identity is not fixed but forged, through migration, reinvention, and the stories families choose to tell. Today, Laura joins us to explore how family history can challenge the narratives we inherit and reshape our understanding of who we are and where we come from.

In the red clay fields of Georgia, a man named Solicitor rose before dawn to tend the land he did not own. He was a sharecropper, a laborer, and a father. His name was passed down along with stories of endurance and pride. Generations later, his great-granddaughter, Blair Kelley, would begin her book Black Folk with his story, grounding the history of the Black working class in the life of one man whose labor helped build a world.

Elsewhere in the United States, Kellie Carter Jackson was tracing her own family’s legacy, stories of resistance, of quiet defiance, of choosing dignity in the face of oppression. In We Refuse, she writes not just about protest marches and speeches, but about the everyday acts of refusal that shaped Black life and freedom.

For both historians, family history is more than inspiration. It is method. It is archive. It is truth-telling. Today, Blair Kelley and Kellie Carter Jackson join us to talk about how personal memory becomes political and social history.

Welcome to Reunion, a podcast about how family history helps us understand the past and why it still matters today. This series is sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy and the Family History Program at Brigham Young University, which offers the world's only undergraduate degree in family history. I’m Joey Stuart, and I’m here with my cohost and colleague Christopher Jones. We’re both assistant professors of history and faculty in BYU’s Family History Program.

SHOWNOTES:

Every two weeks, we talk with scholars, educators, and storytellers who use family history to explore big questions about history, kinship, and identity. Studying families helps us see what mattered most to people in the past and how those values shaped the world we live in now.

Family history is more than names and dates. It is a way to explore memory, emotion, power, and connection. It gives historians a flexible method for understanding everything from slavery and migration to religious conversion and cultural memory.

This is Reunion. We’re glad you’re here.

In the early hours of a September morning in 1789, a sixteen-year-old girl prepared to leave Paris. Her name was Sally Hemings. For nearly two years, she had lived in the city, part of Thomas Jefferson’s household. In France, slavery was illegal. She could have stayed. She could have claimed her freedom and begun a life beyond Jefferson’s reach. But she did not. Instead, she agreed to return to Virginia—a place where her body and her children would belong to Jefferson by law. She bargained for what she could: a promise that those children, born enslaved, would one day be free. In choosing to go back, Hemings surrendered the certainty of freedom for a fragile hope, binding her future to Jefferson’s word—and to the kin she left behind, still enslaved on Virginia soil.

Sally Hemings was enslaved. She was also the half-sister of Jefferson’s dead wife. The children they would have together came into a world that refused to recognize them fully—as kin, as citizens, as free. And yet they were a family. A family made in secrecy and shaped by power, but a family nonetheless. Her choice, quiet and unrecorded, reverberates still—through the lives it shaped and the nation it unsettled.

Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello tells this story with extraordinary care, revealing how the lives of one Black family were entangled with one of America’s most revered founders. Today, we explore what their story teaches us about race, kinship, and the meaning of family under slavery, and how family history can uncover truths that challenge the myths we inherit. Sign up for shownotes here: https://reunion-a-podcast-about-family-histories.ghost.io/

In a Virginia courtroom in the mid-1700s, a woman named Mary Aggy stood before a judge, not to defend herself with a lawyer, but with a lineage. She traced her ancestry back to a free woman, arguing that her own enslavement was unlawful. Her case rested not on testimony or character, but on genealogy. In early America, family history could mean the difference between bondage and freedom.

But Mary Aggy wasn’t alone. Across the colonies, people used family trees to claim land, assert status, and protect privilege. Genealogy wasn’t just a record of who begat whom; it was a form of power. It shaped who belonged, who ruled, and who was remembered. In her book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, historian Karin Wulf uncovers how family history was used to build nations, enforce hierarchies, and sometimes, challenge them. Today, we talk with her about how the past was organized through kinship, and why understanding those structures still matters in the present.