Out of all the emails Yvette LaGonterie received in 1998 from colleagues and bosses at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, where she worked as an overseas office director and regional attaché south of the border in Mexico City — only one was impossible to forget. It came from an unknown sender. And the subject line contained a single word, posed as a question.
“Cousins?”
The sender said her name was Cathy and that she lived in Arizona. She was looking for descendants of distant relatives, including, she said, descendants of a man named Ralph, a cousin of her great-uncle. She’d hit a roadblock in her quest to uncover more of her lineage and was asking for help. Yvette hadn’t delved much into her own family history, but the same Ralph happened to be her paternal grandfather. Which would make the two women third cousins.
Yvette, in her early 40s at the time, knew of few relatives on her father’s side. In fact, she understood the surname LaGonterie to be particularly rare, belonging to only about a dozen people in the United States. She’d always wanted to learn more about that familial line, to feel a part of something larger than herself. Yet she doubted her own ability to lead that charge; she also had every reason to feel skeptical of this stranger. But curiosity got the better of her. She wrote back.

That decision would take her on a journey halfway around the planet with the most unlikely of travel companions. It would open up to her a whole world, of not just her own lineage, but the ever-growing technological advancements in family history research, from digitized public records to DNA testing sites to video archives — what now, nearly 30 years after that first email, amounts to what experts consider a golden age for genealogy. And for no other demographic is family history research more needed or showing more promise than it is for Black Americans like Yvette.
The earliest census records to list African Americans as citizens date back only to 1870, five years after the country officially abolished slavery. This obstacle is known as the “brick wall” among genealogists, a barrier to drawing ancestral knowledge before the start of the Gilded Age. Most of the available records dated before the 1870s are slave trade documents with few humanizing descriptors and little information to offer descendants, which leaves modern archives across museums and educational institutions nationwide largely lacking in Black primary resources.
The trickle-down effect of that scarcity manifests most in younger generations. Pew Research Center surveyed four age groups of Black Americans in 2022 to gauge their understanding of Black history. The share of those who felt well informed was low among every age group, but fell more among younger respondents. Fewer than 40 percent of Black adults under 30 consider themselves particularly informed of Black history. It takes citizen archivists and family historians to break through that brick wall, to preserve and pass down the artifacts that make histories beyond those of enslavement and struggle possible.
In the months that followed Cathy’s email, Yvette became entranced by this search to trace her family across centuries and continents. And though she didn’t know the extent of what she would uncover, she knew enough to understand it mattered, and that any answers she sought would not come easy.
Yvette’s decision to answer the mysterious email would take her on a journey halfway around the planet with the most unlikely of travel companions.
Nine years after Yvette received the mysterious email, another woman, Pia Jordan, came across an artifact that sent her on her own family history journey. She didn’t recognize the scrapbook. It was blue, embellished with three silver airplanes, two tassels and an unfamiliar insignia. Pia, then in her early 50s, had found it stowed away in a trunk at her mother’s apartment in Maryland — not quite kept secret, yet still hidden out of view. The mixed medium of metal and ribbon gave the book heft; it felt important. Valuable. When she opened it, she could see why.
It held medals, stamps, invitations to dances. Newspaper clippings, handwritten love letters, aged photographs. Party invitations, matchbooks, punch cards. Memorabilia from her mom’s time as a nurse in the military. But when she looked closer at its contents, at the text and the faces within the scrapbook’s adorned pages, she realized her mother, Louise Virginia Lomax Winters, hadn’t just served in the armed forces. She’d served in Alabama during World War II alongside the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American flying unit in the United States military. Moreover, Pia found, Louise was one of the first Black nurses, in 1943, to ever serve in the Army Nurse Corps, just a couple years after the corps became the first branch of the military to formally allow Black nurses. She was a first lieutenant.
This all came as a shock to Pia. By the time she’d made this discovery, in 2007, she was packing up her mom’s apartment to place in storage. Louise had suffered a series of strokes, seizures, hallucinations and early dementia and was moving into a nursing home. Her voice had changed almost beyond recognition as a result of a tracheotomy and she struggled to speak for long stretches at a time. So Pia had to swallow, for now, the curiosity that scrapbook stirred.
When her son had a high school project in 2002 that required an interview with his grandmother, Pia decided to conduct and record it. Over the course of 33 minutes, mother and daughter discussed what life was like for Louise in Virginia during the 1920s, at the height of segregation and Jim Crow.
Louise’s voice rasped as she spoke, slowly and with frequent pauses. She held a display case Pia made for her that showcased a portrait of Louise in uniform, framed by two of her medals. The two discussed aspects of Louise’s military career, as well as her many years spent nursing off the airfield. How, after her more than three years as a military nurse, she worked at the St. Elizabeths Hospital for forensic patients in Washington, D.C., the first federally funded mental hospital nationwide, formerly known as the “Government Hospital for the Insane.”
The work was both emotionally and physically demanding. Pia remembered her mother coming home on at least one occasion with a blood-drenched uniform after a patient punched her in the nose. But she never wavered. Pia admired this. Like her mother, Pia too had experienced segregation. In the 1960s, she’d even been part of the inaugural group of students to integrate her local white primary school in third grade, and had always looked up to her mother as a force to be reckoned with, even without knowing her whole story.
After finding the scrapbook and realizing the extent of history her mother made, Pia felt grateful she had at least one interview logged with Louise. Especially since her ailing health made it difficult to record more. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had to, somehow, dig deeper.
Another decade went by before the guilt began to bear down on Pia. She was her mother’s only child. The only person to shoulder the responsibility of passing on her story. Louise had contributed to one of the most pivotal moments for the advancement of civil rights in the United States. Not spreading that knowledge felt like a betrayal to herself, her family and her country. She had to share that truth before it vanished. So she set out to do just that.
Technological advancements, from digitized public records to DNA testing sites to video archives, amount to a golden age for genealogy. And for no other demographic is family history research more needed or showing more promise than it is for Black Americans.
On the ride from Paris to the province of Dordogne, Yvette LaGonterie looked out the train car windows as castles, limestone churches and ancient farmland blurred by, the locomotive carving its way through rural France. Catching glimpses of this landscape’s history — present but fading — Yvette wondered how she figured into it. Were any of her ancestors here? Would they have lived in the manors? Would they have been tasked with maintaining them? She’d traveled thousands of miles to answer those questions and others. So did her newfound family members.
After about a year of email exchanges, phone calls, remote public records requests and online searches, Yvette planned to meet Cathy and Cathy’s aunt Marie — Yvette’s newly discovered second cousin — in person for the first time. The team of amateur historians had hoped to answer how the surname LaGonterie made its way to the Caribbean.
They knew the history of enslavement differs wildly outside the United States, and figured the lives of their ancestors of color might be less difficult to trace as a result. They’d been able to confirm Yvette’s grandfather was born in Saint Lucia, and in 1913, when he was 16 years old, his mother brought him to Manhattan to live with his sister.
But still, anything beyond those details eluded them. The internet was still in its infancy, and they’d hit a wall with what information they could glean from it. When the digital tools at their disposal failed to take them further, Yvette asked a French teacher how best to trace her origins. That’s how she learned of a tiny village in France called La Gonterie-Boulouneix. She shared this finding with her cousins. And in 1999, they decided to travel to the nearly eponymous hamlet together, to root around for records in archives and seek regional experts.

It didn’t feel like a first meeting. Yvette had by then heard her cousins’ voices during their many phone calls, had learned about their lives and shared details of her own. If anything, it felt more like a reunion than an initial encounter. Joyous and hopeful, but with the purpose of dogged pursuit.
The group went to the departmental archives in Périgueux, where they found only one record which contained Yvette’s surname — and it didn’t even belong to their ancestors. They traveled to the village of La Gonterie-Boulouneix, where the mayor confirmed none of the current locals carried the same name.
The same proved true in Saint-Priest-les-Fougeres, which they’d read about in the archives. Several LaGonteries lived there throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. None did by the time of their visit. It became clear just how easy it is to lose access to history. If they had traveled years earlier, would they have encountered any remaining descendants? Would they have gotten more leads? They’d only budgeted a week together for their trip to France before they had to part, and by the final fruitless search in Saint-Priest-les-Fougeres, that time had run out. The cousins ended their trip with little more information than when they started.
She realized her mother hadn’t just served in the armed forces. She’d served in Alabama during World War II alongside the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American flying unit to serve in the United States military.
What happens when the written word fails to convey unseen truths? When paper trails, past a certain point, follow only certain demographics? When the writers of history have a tendency to skew? These are questions the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture aimed to answer when it opened its doors in Washington, D.C., in 2016. And rather than simply lean on retellings and recreations of history to do so — artifacts and documents subject to interpretation — the museum chose to prioritize, with equal weight, an oft-overlooked medium. Home videos.
Even outside the confines of race, home videos and other primary sources offer a bottom-up approach to analyzing history. They’re divorced from preconceived notions and interfering bias; they even record details not usually found in written texts like body language and fashion. Perhaps even more than film, television or other forms of media, home videos are vital to understanding and appreciating a person’s place in the timeline of all things.
“The coming together of family and the capturing of genealogy and family history — you need it to tell your whole story,” says Doretha Williams, director of the Center for the Smithsonian’s Digitization and Curation of African American History. “Everyone doesn’t get that. A lot of people, their elders pass when they’re young children, and it’s not until after they’re gone that they think, ‘I should have asked this person this question.’”
That kind of curiosity and connection is essential to gathering and preserving authentic experiences; to tamping holes in knowledge that, when left alone, pose dire societal consequences.

An ongoing analysis by Johns Hopkins University found that more K-12 schools across the country teach Black history than ever. At least 12 states require it, an effort that started with some 10 states in 2017. Yet most of those programs stop short of discussing any positive developments or contributions people of color have had on society. They also account for less than 10 percent of instruction in history classrooms, a share that threatens to shrink with at least 18 states creating bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race within the last few years. Educational attempts fail when they aren’t founded on stories that are holistic and well-rounded. When they fail, students miss out on the opportunity to build empathy and critical thinking skills; to boost mental health, heal intergenerational traumas or find a sense of purpose; to learn how to coexist and grow as informed citizens.
That’s part of the reason why the museum created a Family History Center to teach visitors the basics of tracing African American genealogy, as well as digitizing and archiving their own primary documents. Visitors who make an appointment can digitize their home movies at the museum for free. These captures aim to make up for a void of historical representation or misrepresentations of Black people on screen. When people of color were still largely excluded from media in the United States, it was up to families to put their own lives in front of the lens by recording home videos.
“I never saw home movie footage of Black families. Every time, it had to do with civil rights or protesting,” says Jasmyn R. Castro, creator of the African American Home Movie Archive, an online aggregate of African American home movie collections. “I really think it’s important for people to hold onto their own family history and have control over that. Home movies save the visual memory of America.”
Home videos are like etchings on a cave wall, cuneiform on clay or oil on canvas — a way for humans to fulfill the innate urge to leave record of their existence. To inform, warn, delight, entertain. To help shape the world as it turns forward. Even, perhaps especially, when it’s hard. “The stories that we tell currently are also grounded in history,” says LaCharles Ward, a curator for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “The goal is to preserve history so that in the future it can continue to be told. And that’s really important because, if not, those objects, those artifacts, are lost to the world.”
Pia Jordan set out to tell the definitive story of her mother, as well as of the Tuskegee Army nurses. That meant talking to family members, friends, archivists, experts and veterans. It also meant taking her mother’s scrapbook and VHS tapes to the National Museum of African American History and Culture to get digitized, including the tape where she interviewed Louise. It became one of the many resources she’d gathered in order to write and publish a book, “Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse and Her Military Sisters,” in June 2023.
The book honors her mother and the nurses who served with her. Despite how they overcame the same social obstacles in order to serve, despite how they held rank even while the pilots did not, their roles had gone essentially undiscussed at the national level. So had the ancillary roles of the more than 10,000 Black men and women who supported the Tuskegee pilots as flight instructors, medics, cooks and mechanics. They are what made the crew’s “double victory” possible — a win against the fascist forces during World War II, as well as racial discrimination stateside. That reality wouldn’t be public knowledge if not for Pia and Louise.
At least five movies about the Tuskegee Airmen have been made. None place any focus on the nurses. There’s damage in that beyond just the frustration of a missed opportunity.
The entire process of tracking that history taught Pia more about her mother than she’d ever known. Yet it also made clear that physical documentation — a scrapbook, an aged photograph, a home video — can change the trajectory of a life, of history. Pia’s account became the first holistic account of the Tuskegee nurses. “There are a lot of stories out there that are not being told,” she says. “I feel more thankful and grateful that I got them than anything else.”

Even now that the book is done and she successfully shared her mother’s story, Pia still occasionally returns to watch the home video where she interviewed Louise all those years ago. Each time she does, she smiles. Her son especially appreciates it; he was close with his grandmother and insists the family hold on to all photos and videos of her as possible. Along with other family memories. They may just become all the more valuable one day.
After Yvette returned from France, she continued to consult books, military records and Napoleonic War researcher groups. Seven years later, she traveled solo to the National Archives of the United Kingdom near London and Saint Lucia’s archives in Castries to sort through any records she could access: marriage, death, baptism. That’s how she discovered Charles LaGonterie, who served as a lieutenant for the British Army in Saint Lucia sometime around 1794 to 1801. He also later fathered a son by the same name, born to a free woman of color who owned her own property in Vieux, where colonial forces sought brute control over the Caribbean.
The whole process took about a decade, but Yvette discovered her lineage to be a product of strain and success, freedom and force. It was a piece of knowledge that brought her closer to family she never knew she had, and would never be able to reach or learn from any other way. “I find by uncovering their stories, I have a greater understanding of not only their lives, but about the era and the locations where they lived,” she says. “That’s the only way we’ll ever know the full story of life at any time.”
When her mother died in 2018, Yvette had already been researching her family history for two decades. She’d been tasked with going through the belongings her mom had left behind, deciding what to keep and what to discard. As she pored through that clutter, she happened upon rolls of abandoned film in a box on the floor of a closet. The label read, “Marcella and Donald’s wedding, 1949.” Yvette had never seen these films before, nor did she own a projector to view them with. So she converted the old film onto a CD format, and watched.
She saw her mother in black and white, her silhouette peeking through a delicate white veil as she stood beside her father, maid of honor and ring bearer. Wedding guests walked in and out of frame intermittently, their feathers stuck in caps and tailored evening dresses spilling 1949 all throughout the steps and pews of St. Augustine’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, New York. Five generations of her family attended that church, founded a decade after the United States abolished slavery as a place of worship for Black congregants. It burned down in 1969, incinerating all of its known records — evidence of baptisms, of services. Of weddings.

Had Yvette not found these films and chosen to digitize them, she might have lost both one of the last remaining pieces of evidence to prove this place existed, as well as one of her final chances to experience a new memory with her mother. “Finding the film of my parents’ wedding was like finding a treasure,” she says. One she wanted to share with others by donating the film to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
Most interested in learning about their families might not have the means to cross several different countries in search of stories. Yvette knows this. Every record she’s found, every family photo she’s inherited, she safeguards for future use. She keeps a filing cabinet filled with documents in her home despite the dawn of the digital age; she’s a member of organizations like the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and National Genealogy Society; she’s written about her findings, which includes personal ties to her great-great-grandmother’s uncle Jacob Clement White, the first secretary of the Underground Railroad.
“Why didn’t someone ever tell me that? We’re related to this incredible man who has been largely forgotten by history,” she says. “His own obituary said that to tell the story of his life and all of the accomplishments and the things that he was involved in would take volumes, but I have found not one book about him.”
This story appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.