Finding Sarah and Mary: Unraveling African American Genealogy from the Ground Up

In Finding Sarah and Mary, Jacqueline Jones Royster combines memoir, family lore, DNA data, local history, and national history to create an ancestral history narrative. Surveying a forty-year journey of discovery, Jones Royster weaves and reweaves data and details corralled from multiple sources and anchors the narrative with two women: Sarah Ashe (c. 1740-1820), a maternal ancestor, and Mary Craddock Wilson (1825-1907), a paternal ancestor. With these two women as anchor points, the volume offers a view of the lives and legacies of ordinary folk in the making and shaping of an American story and demonstrates the necessity of broadening, deepening, and often upending our vision to see how our ancestors lived. Finding Sarah and Mary offers a clearer and more vibrant understanding of what it has meant for people of African descent to live and work in a nation that often ignores them or leaves them out of their own story.