An amateur genealogist outperformed Harvard’s commissioned researchers

Evidence

And to the man who changed the course of my family’s history, Rich Morrison, the ice cream shop owner from the small rural community of Franklin, Connecticut, I commend you and thank God for you. Although you were not commissioned by Harvard to research the history of those captured in the slave daguerreotypes, you, in your spare time, succeeded where Ivy League scholars failed. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 1386

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how institutional resources fail where motivated amateurs succeed — parallels themes in the reader’s archival-reconstruction argument.