Episode Details

What does it mean to be an American when your family has been here longer than America itself? Lisa Fanning, a board member of the National Genealogical Society and DNA expert, has spent decades uncovering a story so layered, so uniquely American that it stopped me in my tracks. She descends from four of the six families who packed up a covered wagon and caravaned from North Carolina in the 1820s to build a thriving free Black settlement in southern Indiana called Lost Creek. But the story doesn't start there. It starts with an enslaved woman named Kate Anderson, a contested will, and 600 acres of prime Virginia land that was rightfully theirs. Land that is now the site of a U.S. Naval installation. This is also our 100th episode, and I can't think of a better story to mark the milestone. Some families don't just live through history. They are history.

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