Finding Sarah and Mary

In Finding Sarah and Mary, Jacqueline Jones Royster combines memoir, family lore, DNA data, local history, and national history to create an ancestral history narrative. Surveying a forty-year journey of discovery, Jones Royster weaves and reweaves data and details corralled from multiple sources and anchors the narrative with two women: Sarah Ashe (c. 1740–1820), a maternal ancestor, and Mary Craddock Wilson (1825–1907), a paternal ancestor. With these two women as anchor points, the volume offers a view of the lives and legacies of ordinary folk in the making and shaping of an American story and demonstrates the necessity of broadening, deepening, and often upending the vision in order to see how our ancestors lived. Finding Sarah and Mary offers a clearer and more vibrant understanding of what it has meant for people of African descent to live and work in a nation that often ignores them or leaves them out of their own story.

Author Biography

JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER is professor emerita at the Ohio State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author and coauthor of several books, including Making the World a Better Place: African American Women Advocates, Activists, and Leaders, 1773–1900; Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900; Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women; Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803–2003; and Feminist Rhetorical Studies: New Horizons in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. She is also a coeditor of Double-Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters and Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture and the editor of Critical Inquiries: Readings on Culture and Community.