What I Didn't Ask

A few years ago, I started looking at old family photographs very differently. I had seen many of them my entire life, but at some point I stopped simply looking at them and started studying them. I wanted to know who the people were, where they lived, how they were connected to us, and what kind of lives they lived before any of us were here.

That curiosity eventually turned into a much deeper interest in genealogy and family history, especially within Black families where so much history was either never documented properly or never openly discussed in the first place. Like many people, I heard fragments of stories growing up that I did not fully understand at the time. I remember my grandmother, who I called Mama, mentioning that her older sister died under suspicious circumstances. At the time, I was too young to realize how important that statement was. By the time I became seriously interested in family history in the early 2000s, everyone who may have known the full story was gone. Looking back now, I believe her sister may have been lynched, but I will probably never know for certain because I did not ask questions while I still had the opportunity. That realization changed everything for me.

I started digging through old photographs, funeral programs, obituaries, records, and family documents trying to piece together as much as I could. Sometimes I identified people through conversations with relatives. Other times I had to rely on context clues, locations, estimated ages, or simple process of elimination. Over time, I unintentionally became the historian of my family. Today, I have thousands of old family photographs, most predating the 1970s and some dating back as far as 1910.

As I began sharing those photographs and stories online through GrandmaGoneWild, I realized how many other people were facing the same problem. Families all over the country have albums full of unidentified photographs, stories that were only partially told, and entire generations of history that are slowly disappearing because nobody sat down and asked the right questions while elders were still here to answer them. That is one of the biggest reasons I created my guide, What I Didn’t Ask.

I wanted to create something specifically for people who are trying to preserve Black family history before more of it disappears. This is not a generic genealogy workbook filled with surface-level questions. The guide encourages people to have deeper conversations about migration, segregation, family relationships, suspicious deaths, burial locations, military service, church history, old family traditions, lost relatives, and the many subjects families often avoid discussing openly.

It also helps people understand how to approach those conversations sensitively, especially in Black families where certain subjects may still carry pain, trauma, secrecy, or silence. In many of our families, verbal history is the bridge between what has been lost and what can still be recovered. One conversation, one photograph, one obituary, or one small detail can uncover an entire branch of family history that would have otherwise disappeared.

I am still very much in the middle of my own journey. I am still researching, still identifying people in photographs, still uncovering stories, and still learning things about my family that I never knew before. But one thing I know for certain is that too many of us wait until funerals to become curious about our family history, and by then many of the answers are already gone. That is exactly why I created this guide.

You can learn more about What I Didn’t Ask by clicking the link below.