How to understand your family history (w/ Keith Rushing)
episodePreviously titled “Who are you descended from? (w/ Keith Rushing)” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. It's become a joke in my family that my dad has done all this really intense, painstaking genealogical research, tracing our family back generations, and no one else cares about it at all. He'll be telling me this discovery he made about how our great-great-great-grandparents had just moved to Gillespie, Illinois, and I'll say, uh-huh, yeah, wow, fantastic. Um, when is dinner again? What are we having? You know, I've never been that interested in the past, especially the past of my own family. But today's guest, Keith Rushing, has convinced me that I have been wrong. I know my dad will be very glad to hear this introduction. Keith has convinced me that there is a lot of value in understanding where we come from, our ancestry, our culture, and our heritage.
Maybe I've also just crossed some sort of invisible line of aging where all of a sudden genealogy becomes much, much more alluring. I don't know. What I do know is that I love Keith's perspective. He views family history as a way of understanding our present and our future. How does understanding where we came from in the past make us better humans right now? Well, Keith's book, Descended, Searching for My Gullah Geechee Roots, is a beautiful exploration of that question and so many more. To get us started, here's Keith reading an excerpt from his book.
Soon after ABC first aired the TV series Roots, my seventh grade teacher asked us to pursue our own mini-Roots projects. We had to ask our oldest living relatives about the oldest ancestors they could remember. The story of Alex Haley's family, tracing back to an African ancestor named Kuntukente, who came to America from the Gambia, had sparked tremendous interest in origin stories among Black people. Although the book later proved fictional, for African Americans, it ignited conversations about slavery and particularly the origins of ancestors who were captured and bound for the United States aboard ships carrying the enslaved. Aunt Angie, short for Agnes, seemed like the perfect fit for my assignment.
At the time, she was 80 years old. Born in 1897, she was the oldest of my grandmother's five siblings who were all born on the family farm in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. My parents invited Aunt Adgie, who lived not far away in Jamaica, Queens, over to our house in Springfield Gardens to spend the night. As we sat mostly in silence around the kitchen table, she racked her brain, digging up names long buried in her memory. Her mother would add them to the family tree spread out in front of her. Adgie remembered many cousins in the surnames of people who married into the family. Mom remembered names she had heard and people she may have met who lived in the South, not New York City, where we lived.
Aunt Angie could go back as far as her grandparents, St. Coe and Margaret Molly Christopher. I later learned they were born into bondage on a cotton plantation in Hilton Head in the 1840s. After St. Coe served in the Civil War among the U.S. College troops, they transitioned to life as freed people. That knowledge would surface decades later, however, after archival documents revealed details of St. Coe's life during and after the war.
We are going to talk a lot more about Keith's family and how we can all understand and learn from our ancestors. But first, we are going to take a quick break and we will be right back after this.
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