Finding Sarah and Mary

Unraveling African American Genealogy from the Ground Up

Jacqueline Jones Royster author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Georgia Press

Publishing:1st May '26

£124.95

This title is due to be published on 1st May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Finding Sarah and Mary cover

A history of two African American families that showcases the potential of finding success in pursuing one’s ancestry

In Finding Sarah and Mary, Jacqueline Jones Royster combines memoir, family lore, DNA data, local history, and national history to create an ancestral history narrative.

In Finding Sarah and Mary, Jacqueline Jones Royster combines memoir, family lore, DNA data, local history, and national history to create an ancestral history narrative. Surveying a forty-year journey of discovery, Jones Royster weaves and reweaves data and details corralled from multiple sources and anchors the narrative with two women: Sarah Ashe (c. 1740–1820), a maternal ancestor, and Mary Craddock Wilson (1825–1907), a paternal ancestor. With these two women as anchor points, the volume offers a view of the lives and legacies of ordinary folk in the making and shaping of an American story and demonstrates the necessity of broadening, deepening, and often upending our vision to see how our ancestors lived. Finding Sarah and Mary offers a clearer and more vibrant understanding of what it has meant for people of African descent to live and work in a nation that often ignores them or leaves them out of their own story.

It is a personal story, but as we know from Carol Hanisch’s commonly repeated refrain, 'the personal is political.' Thoroughly researched, Finding Sarah and Mary exemplifies this sentiment, illustrating how the lives of individual citizens were directly affected by the socio-political climate at state and national levels. In telling the personal story of her family and her quest to know more fully her roots, Royster offers readers a nuanced way of understanding the nation’s past and its impact on the present.

-- Patty Wilde * author of Winning Our Wonder: Rhetorical Re/Constructions of American Civil War Women on the Web *

Through persistence, rigorous research, and imagination, Royster reclaims these figures, revealing their complex subjectivities and the strategies they forged for survival and resistance. In her hands, the quotidian becomes exceptional, and the past becomes present for us.

-- Tamika L. Carey * author of Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation of Contemporary Black Womanhood *

A capstone for the innovative investigative methods Royster has been developing throughout her career, this masterpiece of genealogical research illuminates her meaningful family history within the dense context of African American experience from at least as far back as 1740. As she foregrounds the survival and agency of subjugated American people, at the same time Royster enlarges the many dimensions of important words such as 'citizen' on which discussion of our national democratic values pivot.

-- Patricia Bizzell * Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, College of the Holy Cross *

Presented with care, nuance, grace, and rigor, Finding Sarah and Mary goes beyond academic research, inviting readers into a compelling story of ancestral discovery, and in the process, offering profound new insights into our nation’s history.

-- Gesa Kirsch * coeditor of Unsettling Archival Research and Beyond the Archiv

ISBN: 9780820375151

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

258 pages