Oral family tradition preserved Renty’s name decades before commercial genealogy tools

Evidence

On January 8, 2010, I lost my mother, Mattye Pearl Thompson-Lanier. Her death predated the popularity of Ancestry.com, 23andMe, or any of the other social media sites designed to assist families with their genealogy. But my mother was the keeper of our family story, and from as far back as I can remember, she talked of our ancestry. She talked of an African-born enslaved man named Renty, whom she fondly referred to as Papa Renty. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 21

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s case: Papa Renty is the man photographed by Agassiz in 1850. This oral transmission matters for the legal standing she claims as descendant.
• CANDY: The detail that the mother’s death predated Ancestry.com’s popularity — she kept the story by word of mouth — is a clean hook.