Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- Genealogy is experiencing a golden age, driven by technological advancements.
- For Black Americans, genealogy is crucial due to historical record gaps.
- Yvette LaGonterie's journey highlights the importance of family history research.
MEXICO CITY — Out of all the emails Yvette LaGonterie received in 1998 from colleagues and bosses at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, where she worked as an overseas office director and regional attaché south of the border in Mexico City — only one was impossible to forget.
It came from an unknown sender. And the subject line contained a single word, posed as a question: "Cousins?"
The sender said her name was Cathy and that she lived in Arizona. She was looking for descendants of distant relatives, including, she said, descendants of a man named Ralph, a cousin of her great-uncle. She'd hit a roadblock in her quest to uncover more of her lineage and was asking for help.
Yvette hadn't delved much into her own family history, but the same Ralph happened to be her paternal grandfather. Which would make the two women third cousins.
Yvette, in her early 40s at the time, knew of few relatives on her father's side. In fact, she understood the surname LaGonterie to be particularly rare, belonging to only about a dozen people in the United States.
She'd always wanted to learn more about that familial line, to feel a part of something larger than herself. Yet she doubted her own ability to lead that charge; she also had every reason to feel skeptical of this stranger. But curiosity got the better of her. She wrote back.
Yvette Lagonterie's globe-trotting family history journey began with a mysterious email she received three decades ago.
That decision would take her on a journey halfway around the planet with the most unlikely of travel companions. It would open up to her a whole world, of not just her own lineage, but the ever-growing technological advancements in family history research, from digitized public records to DNA testing sites to video archives — what now, nearly 30 years after that first email, amounts to what experts consider a golden age for genealogy.
And for no other demographic is family history research more needed or showing more promise than it is for Black Americans like Yvette.
The earliest census records to list African Americans as citizens date back only to 1870, five years after the country officially abolished slavery. This obstacle is known as the "brick wall" among genealogists, a barrier to drawing ancestral knowledge before the start of the Gilded Age.
Most of the available records dated before the 1870s are slave trade documents with few humanizing descriptors and little information to offer descendants, which leaves modern archives across museums and educational institutions nationwide largely lacking in Black primary resources.
The trickle-down effect of that scarcity manifests most in younger generations. Pew Research Center surveyed four age groups of Black Americans in 2022 to gauge their understanding of Black history. The share of those who felt well informed was low among every age group, but fell more among younger respondents.
Fewer than 40 percent of Black adults under 30 consider themselves particularly informed of Black history. It takes citizen archivists and family historians to break through that brick wall, to preserve and pass down the artifacts that make histories beyond those of enslavement and struggle possible.
In the months that followed Cathy's email, Yvette became entranced by this search to trace her family across centuries and continents. And though she didn't know the extent of what she would uncover, she knew enough to understand it mattered, and that any answers she sought would not come easy.
Nine years after Yvette received the mysterious email, another woman, Pia Jordan, came across an artifact that sent her on her own family history journey. She didn't recognize the scrapbook. It was blue, embellished with three silver airplanes, two tassels and an unfamiliar insignia.
Pia, then in her early 50s, had found it stowed away in a trunk at her mother's apartment in Maryland — not quite kept secret, yet still hidden out of view. The mixed medium of metal and ribbon gave the book heft; it felt important. Valuable. When she opened it, she could see why.
