 I found a genealogist to help me out. Her name is Nika Sewell Smith. And the first thing she told me. One of the sort of hallmarks of genealogy is that you have to literally like go down a rabbit hole. This is not going to be easy. Genealogy keeps you in a perpetual state of being Alice. In particular, when you're focusing on African-American people, people who descended from a formerly enslaved. Because government documents or records of these family histories are