Reunion: A Podcast About Family Histories

In the fall of 1949, a young evangelist named Billy Graham pitched a tent in Los Angeles for what he hoped would be a modest three-week revival. Attendance was sparse, and Graham was discouraged. Then, seemingly overnight, everything changed. William Randolph Hearst, the powerful newspaper magnate, sent a two-word telegram to his editors: “Puff Graham.” The next morning, headlines blazed with his...

In a quiet kitchen on the Diné (Navajo Nation) reservation, a grandmother begins to speak. There’s no script, no microphone, just her voice, steady and rich with memory. She tells of boarding schools, of ceremonies held in secret, of laughter shared under desert skies. Her story isn’t written in books or stored in archives. It lives in her words, passed from one generation to the next. For Farina...

In eighteenth-century England, not every family story turned on courtship and heirs. Many households were held together by single adults who managed budgets, cared for nieces and nephews, and kept the letters and ledgers that became a family’s memory. Their lives were both social and practical. Music in the parlor. Trips on the Thames. Decisions made around a shared table rather than an altar. Whe...

In the 1930s, while her husband, Elijah Muhammad, was imprisoned, Clara Poole (later known as Clara Muhammad) quietly stepped into leadership. She wasn’t given a title. She didn’t stand at a pulpit. But she taught the children, organized the women, and held the Nation of Islam together. In a movement that promised both protection and patriarchy, Clara found a way to lead from within. Her story is...

In a quiet attic in New York, Blanche Moses carefully preserved two miniature ivory portraits. She believed they depicted her noble Jewish ancestors, that is to say, in the best light possible: refined, European, and elite. For Blanche, these portraits were more than heirlooms. They were proof of belonging, of status, of a family history that fit neatly into the story she had always been told. But...

In the red clay fields of Georgia, a man named Solicitor rose before dawn to tend the land he did not own. He was a sharecropper, a laborer, and a father. His name was passed down along with stories of endurance and pride. Generations later, his great-granddaughter, Blair Kelley, would begin her book Black Folk with his story, grounding the history of the Black working class in the life of one man...

In the early hours of a September morning in 1789, a sixteen-year-old girl prepared to leave Paris. Her name was Sally Hemings. For nearly two years, she had lived in the city, part of Thomas Jefferson’s household. In France, slavery was illegal. She could have stayed. She could have claimed her freedom and begun a life beyond Jefferson’s reach. But she did not. Instead, she agreed to return to Vi...

In a Virginia courtroom in the mid-1700s, a woman named Mary Aggy stood before a judge, not to defend herself with a lawyer, but with a lineage. She traced her ancestry back to a free woman, arguing that her own enslavement was unlawful. Her case rested not on testimony or character, but on genealogy. In early America, family history could mean the difference between bondage and freedom. But Mary...