Finding Sarah and Mary
Unraveling African American Genealogy from the Ground Up
Published on 1. May 2026
Book
Hardback
258 pages
978-0-8203-7515-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 Archives *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Georgia
United States
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
36 bw images
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
574 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8203-7515-1 (9780820375151)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER is professor emerita at the Ohio State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author and coauthor of several books, including Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women; Making the World a Better Place: African American Women Advocates, Activists, and Leaders, 1773-1900; and Feminist Rhetorical Studies: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy and Double-Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters. She is also the editor of Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 and Critical Inquiries: Readings on Culture and Community. She lives and writes in Atlanta.