In 2018, my nana and I decided we were finally going to sit down and figure out who our people were. What started as a simple family tree quickly turned into census records, old photographs, phone calls to elders, and the kind of discoveries that can change how you see yourself. Genealogy is beautiful work, but it can also feel deeply overwhelming at first. Someone dies and suddenly nobody remembers Big Mama’s maiden name. An elder mentions “the cousins in South Carolina” nobody talks to anymore