Farmers and laborers, housewives and mothers. People like the ones profiled on these pages. People who lived, worked and struggled through some of this country's most difficult and triumphant times and then vanished without a trace. People such as Eleanor Caldwell's great-grandmother, Sarah Hardy, born into slavery on the Alabama rice farm where she would later raise a family with the white son of the plantation owner. Or Bobby Joe Moon's ancestors, the Joe brothers from China, who built businesses from nothing in the Mississippi Delta.
Genealogy is more than a sentimental journey.
It is an expedition through the dates and events of American history and the stories of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times. Together, family tree by family tree, genealogists are rewriting history. Eric Walther, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston and the founder of the Texas Slavery Project, an initiative to document every slave in Texas, said genealogy teaches us not only that every human being is important, but also that every human being has a story worth telling. Some might call it revisionism. Yet look at what's missing from history books.