By Monique Norington Joseph
There is something I’ve come to understand through years of researching my family history.
Most families are remembered through the names of men.
Family trees often begin with fathers, grandfathers, military service, land ownership, wills, and deeds. History tends to preserve the people who signed documents, owned property, or held positions of power.
But in my family…
It was the women who carried the story.
Not because they had the most written about them.
Because they refused to let our family disappear.
As I traced my lineage back through generations, I found myself returning to the same women over and over again.
Women who raised children through impossible circumstances.
Women who buried loved ones and kept moving.
Women who crossed mountains, counties, and state lines in search of a better life.
Women who adapted when the world changed around them.
Women who protected their children when history offered them very little protection.
They may not have written books.
Most didn’t leave journals.
Some couldn’t even read or write.
Yet somehow…
They preserved everything that mattered.
They kept recipes alive.
They remembered who belonged to whom.
They knew which cemetery held the family.
They could recite names that never appeared in official records.
They remembered stories no census ever captured.
They carried history in conversations around kitchen tables, on front porches, in church pews, and during long Sunday dinners.
Long before there was Ancestry.com…
There was Grandma.
There was Auntie.
There was Miss Mary.
There was Lucy.
There were the women who could point to an old photograph and tell you everyone’s name before you even asked.
Those women became our archives.
As I’ve written This Well Runs Deep, I’ve thought often about the responsibility they carried.
Many of them lived during times when their identities were constantly being defined by someone else.
One census called them Black.
Another called them Indian.
Another recorded them as Mulatto.
Sometimes White.
The records changed.
The women did not.
They knew who their mothers were.
They knew where they came from.
They knew the stories behind the names.
Even when history didn’t.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if they had stopped telling the stories.
If they hadn’t remembered.
If they hadn’t repeated the names.
If they hadn’t gathered the family together.
Would I have ever found my way back?
Would I know who Almeda Cole was?
Would I know about Eliza?
Miss Mary?
Lucy?
Or would they have simply become names buried beneath generations of forgotten history?
The older I become, the more I realize that every family has women like this.
Women who quietly hold everyone together.
The ones who organize reunions.
The ones who call everyone on birthdays.
The ones who remember the family Bible.
The ones who save photographs in old boxes.
The ones who insist that children know where they come from.
Often, they don’t receive recognition.
They simply keep doing the work.
Generation after generation.
Today, I understand something I didn’t understand when I began this journey.
Genealogy isn’t only about finding records.
It’s about honoring the people who made sure those records meant something.
Because a birth certificate cannot tell you how someone laughed.
A census cannot explain sacrifice.
A marriage license cannot describe unconditional love.
Only family can do that.
Only storytellers can do that.
And in so many families…
Those storytellers are women.
As I prepare to share my family’s story with the world, I realize I have become part of that lineage.
I am doing what the women before me did.
I am gathering names.
Preserving photographs.
Asking questions.
Recording stories before they disappear.
Not because I want to live in the past…
But because I believe every generation deserves to know the shoulders they stand upon.
Perhaps that is our greatest inheritance.
Not the land.
Not the heirlooms.
Not even our DNA.
But the stories.
The stories that teach us who we are.
The stories that remind us where we’ve been.
The stories that help us understand where we’re going.
Those stories survived because women carried them.
Now…
It’s our turn.
“This Well Runs Deep is more than a journey into my family’s past. It is a tribute to the women whose memories became our history, whose resilience became our inheritance, and whose stories continue to flow through every generation that follows.”
This Well Runs Deep 