An excerpt from the memoir A Tree in a Storm (unpublished)

“You don’t know your own cousin?”

There’s a particular gift that some people possess, a way of asking a question that feels less like curiosity and more like cross-examination. The kind where guilt is already assumed, and all that’s left is your confession before sentencing. It was 1993 and I was casually shopping in store in St. Louis when it happened. I was living back at home and had just started my first year of graduate school. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t recognize her. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. But she recognized me.

Her name was Dorothy, my second cousin. She was the daughter of “Wash”, legally Washington Neal, my grandfather’s younger brother. While my grandfather had only one child, my father, Wash had at least five, with Dorothy being the third. She was seven years younger than my father and, from what I later learned, had even lived with my grandparents for a time. But I didn’t know her. Not then. Not by sight. Yet she had been in our home more than once, one of those rare guests my father allowed.

She was one cousin, but there were others that I knew by nicknames,  rather than legal names, I had heard tossed around for years. My Atha Jamar Neal Jr. was always Mickey. I never knew the origin, but never heard family call him anything else. There were others, Baby Sister, Uncle Pint, Wash. Laws. Names without faces. Stories without context. Living in St. Louis, I probably walked past relatives all the time without knowing it. My father wasn’t big on family gatherings. Most of the reunions I remember were accidental or grief-driven, someone died, and suddenly the names resurfaced.

After my father passed, I realized how little I truly knew about that side of the family. What I did know came in fragments, scraps of documents, whispered stories, half-remembered names. So, I started digging. I quickly learned that “Cousin” became a catch-all term that rarely qualified in the technical sense. It wasn’t until later that I understood many were second cousins, some third, some half cousins, some even more distant, but “cousin” was close enough. What mattered was that they were family. Just not family my father had stayed close to.

Maybe I would see resemblances between them and the relatives I regularly saw. Grandma Zelma was fuller in her later years, dark-complected, fond of wigs and the occasional dip of chewing tobacco. My grandfather stood just shy of six feet, but always seemed taller, lean, not quite skinny, the kind of man whose strength lived in his hands rather than his frame. Watching him crush walnuts in his palm was a childhood marvel, a quiet display of power. His skin was a bronzed brown that turned ruddy under direct sunlight, and his hair, shockingly bright white, stood out in stark contrast.

My father was a blend of them both. Thin and wiry in his youth, he eventually surrendered to the soft swell of a middle-aged pot belly. He wore a beard most of his life, much to Grandma Zelma’s dismay.

I suppose I could be accused of also keeping family at arm’s length. I’ve always been present for my immediate family, but beyond that, things get iffier. Like father, like son. However, maybe, I’m beginning the process of absolving myself by doing the work now, mapping names, tracing connections, reconstructing stories that were never passed down. Maybe this is my way of answering a question no one thought to ask. Maybe this is my best way of getting closer. I have always been better with paper than people.

I turned to data because I didn’t inherit many stories. I gathered what I could, but I kept digging. Often, the stories didn’t match the documents anyway. Names were twisted. Nicknames are confused with legal ones. Folklore mistaken for facts. Some new pieces brought clarity, others shift in identity. Some brought great inspiring discoveries others brought uncomfortable truths.

There’s a tradition that echoes across the African diaspora, a sense of kinship that transcends bloodlines. Family is who you say they are. But sometimes, DNA tells a different story. In my own ancestry search, which started causally in the late 1990’s, I kept hitting walls, blockers built from false or incomplete information. While resources were there, the technology was basic and access limited. DNA has been the blessing and the curse to many families out there. Sometime connections are made, sometimes long-told lies revealed. I am one of the lucky ones. I largely emerged unscathed.

Up to my great-grandfather, the lineage felt solid. Beyond that, it was fog, best guesses, hopeful calculations, and a quiet understanding that some mysteries would remain. DNA testing has built on that strong foundation, but sometimes it just gives you two points on a map. You see them both but have no idea how to connect the two. One of the hardest truths I’ve had to absorb, and share, is that sometimes, definitive answers will never come. You get as close as you can and let that proximity guide you forward.

My DNA haplogroup originated in Western Europe. That was the first thing and earlier DNA test taken around 2005 revealed. This meant that part of my family line, following the tradition of taking the name of the last enslaver, might not just reflect ownership, but paternity. I knew that my family name might have come from a transaction, the last owner before emancipation, but this also let me know that I might also have an actual blood relation to that enslaving ancestor. It was handed down through an unconventional route, but it was still a clue that might help guide me back through one branch of my ancestry.

There are gaps and unexplained disappearances. What happened in the years when ancestors vanished from the census? On my father’s side of the family there is a bleak almost eerie emptiness between 1910 and 1930. What became of the children, parents, or spouses who sometimes disappeared without a trace, without explanation? Was it a pandemic like the Spanish influenza that raged across the United States between 1918 – 1920, the same pandemic I believe claimed my great-grandfather? Or was this something else entirely?

I suspect that my ancestors didn’t often have the luxury of long moments of reflection or dwelling on past pains. I suspect that often they had to mourn, stand up, and let the dead take care of the dead, and the living take care of the living. Sometimes you hope that if you don’t shine light on the pain, it will eventually wither away. I wonder if that is the strategy they followed. Let it wither and walk away while trying not to look back.

As I gather facts, I also recognize that I’m not just collecting names, I’m disturbing graves. I’m resurrecting stories that were laid to rest, sometimes intentionally. And I wrestle with that. I want to respect the sanctity of their silence. But I also feel called to unearth what was buried. I want to give them in death what they were denied in life: recognition, acknowledgment, and truth.

The journey I am taking has been done by others before. Many have done it far better. Alex Haley’s Roots awakened an early desire to trace the links that might connect me to an African ancestral home. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns became both an intellectual and spiritual guide, reminding me that much of my family’s critical history lives in the 20th century. Her work helped me see the northern migration of my relatives not simply as a relocation, but as a profound struggle for survival.

Saidiya Hartman, “The archive is always incomplete, always insufficient, always a trap.”  This is a trap I had to step in for myself. What you uncover, what is captured, often says as much about the recorder as those recorded. I have to remind myself that just because I can’t find it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Just because I have found something doesn’t mean I have found everything. I constantly must remind myself that the peep hole is small and my vision weak.

Often the answer to one question can lead you away from the truth of another. It seems to fit, but it is still in the wrong place. Still, I reconstruct with what we have and to the best of my ability. The gaps in the historical record can discourage, but they cannot stop the search. Absences and silences are the norm in lives shaped by slavery and migration.

When absolute certainty is out of reach, evidence and probability must take the stage. Oral tradition may not offer a perfect replication of the path, but it often points us in the right direction, northward, toward truth. I honor their presence and lives by always striving to mark the boundary between where the archival trail ends and interpretation begins. Some bricks are foundational; others are meant to be moved when a better placement is discovered.

How do you honor the dead? Sometimes the only way to is to keep their names alive, bring them back from the abyss if you must. The stories I capture are not isolated. While I don’t know all the characters’ names, my ancestors did not walk alone. Even if I don’t know them, even I can’t mention them, I hope you can still sense their warmth and presence in the pages.

There is one question that haunts me. Beyond the losses, I wonder: Did they laugh often, smile much, or was there only time for survival? What did they dream of? What did they hope for themselves, for the children who followed? As they traveled north along what would one day be called the Blues Highway, were they fleeing something behind, or chasing something ahead?

Not every page in a life story is easy to read. Some, you flip past quickly, hoping to move on, but they still leave their mark, especially if you’ve lived them. They’re not so easily forgotten.

There’s a prevailing belief: never speak ill of the dead. I understand the caution. How do you hold someone accountable when they can’t defend themselves? Who am I to deliver a final verdict on someone who can’t respond?   Still, I bring judgment, I must, not to condemn, but to understand. I want to know who they were. How they lived. What they chose. Why they made the decisions they did. I wonder how they might have been shaped by today’s world, with its broader horizons. And I wonder how I would have fared in theirs, with its limitations, its quiet battles, its daily negotiations with dignity.

Perhaps the question is simple, but the answers never are. How did I get here? Why am I here? These are the questions that sit at the center of every genealogical search, every act of remembrance. But they quickly unravel into something deeper: Who were they, really? And what parts of them live on in me?

I return often to Voltaire’s words: “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” That’s all I can offer, my truth, held up against the truths others have known or discovered. I need to know them. And the only way to do that is to shine a light on everything I can find. I hope to uncover the good. But I know I’ll also uncover the painful, the flawed, the human.

It’s not my role to condemn. It’s my role to understand. And if I get it wrong? Mistakes can be corrected. That’s part of the work.

The truth is a frightening thing. We are all many different things at once. There’s always the risk that someone will focus on one aspect and miss the others. That they’ll see only the weight, and not the balance. But missing pieces, even when unintentionally, distorts the story, often a little, sometimes a lot. I believe that honoring someone means telling the whole story, even when it hurts. It is a step of faith that when place side by side the balance will redeem them.

In the middle of my research, I found a new source of inspiration and motivation in August Wilson’s plays. They often travel on very similar roads as my own family’s journey. His stories remind me that African American history after slavery is an emotional continuum between: Reconstruction, sharecropping, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the slow, quiet collapse into ghettoization. These aren’t just historical phases, they’re grueling rounds in an emotional boxing match.

This work is also about reckoning with generational trauma. I believe those held in bondage, and those who endured Reconstruction, likely suffered what we now understand as PTSD. And I believe its symptoms, spoken and silent, carried forward. Each generation bore its own trauma while trying to shoulder the weight of survival, inherit what couldn’t be dropped, and pray not to pass it down again.

I especially think of Fences. I’m a generation removed from that world, but I recognize its contours. I see the hardness born of necessity, the father who provides, who protects, who loves, in the that is often difficult to understand as a child: pragmatic. He applied the lessons learned from his own childhood and life experience to the framework he raised his own son. What the son understood that the father didn’t, is that the world had changed and a different world begs different approaches. I see those patterns in my own family. I also see the adaptations that my own parents made. While there is always a lagging gap, in time you appreciate the effort they made to close it.

When I look to my ancestors, I feel called to honor their traumas, not soften them. To search for the things passed down like unwanted gifts. I study the mistakes that make me wince. I try to understand their decisions, sometimes forged in desperation, sometimes in despair, sometimes in ignorance. That’s the real story. Not the sanitized version. Not the myth. But the truth that lives in the tension between survival and hope. I am older now than some of them would ever be. If they were here today, I might have more wisdom to share with them than they could ever share with me. Still, I revere them. They lived lives I am not sure I could.

After years of research, I finally see you, my beautiful imperfect tree. Some branches missing, some withered,  some dead, and others blooming gently, striving, stretching toward the sun with leaves so thick and green they cast shadows on the ground beneath them.

I trace the limbs and branches down to the roots. They stretch east to west, south to north, field to factory, from the sharecropper’s agreement to the promise of urban labor. And as they traveled, I imagine what they carried: how it echoed in gestures, rippled through choices, repeated itself in patterns. That’s the missing piece. The connective wood.

I had the names, the facts, and the figures, but they were only the cover page. I thought this search would be a purely intellectual exercise, an archaeological dig for data. I was prepared for the documents, but not for the discovery that history was still breathing. That raspy sound in the back of my head was every labored breath.

DNA is a spotlight on the evidence, an undeniable blessing. I followed the trail of facts, but I fatally underestimated the feelings. These weren’t new feelings at all. They were the same aches I had seen on the faces of my older relatives when their voices changed while recalling old memories.

I was searching for the past, but I found the persistent pain of the present, the fresh aches of history still playing out in my day-to-day life and interactions.

– Lamont Neal

Author’s Note: This work is really about me coming to the terms with the uncomfortable truth that I really didn’t know very much about my family. I found myself chasing records and DNA matches because I lacked the stories that are typically handed down. At its center was the hope that I could find those lost pieces and put them back together.