Amateur kin networks can outmatch professional genealogists at tracing enslaved families

Evidence

I had been interviewing historians and working with a world-renowned genealogist, and in one interchange this total stranger gave me more useful information than anyone had in all my years of searching. It was as if she already knew my story and so where to look for clues. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s theme of archives designed to prevent reconstruction — here, the workaround is living memory embedded in place, echoing scholarly debates about Black genealogical methodology.