Slavery broke up families causing genealogical loss that echoes across generations

Evidence

I thought of Harvard’s insistence that I could not prove my ancestral ties to Congo Renty. How upsetting that was considering the violent nature of slavery, how it broke up families. I thought of Tena and her “increase,” my great-grandfather, the third of five Rentys being “given” to Benjamin Franklin Taylor’s daughter. The inhumanity, the outrage. Yet my ancestors persevered. They found one another despite that violent undoing. They made families. They told stories so that we could remember where we came from. In doing this research, I felt like an adopted child trying to piece her family’s history together. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 552

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The grief and broken land-people link from Carlisle persists across generations. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 969