Thread by @funkybrownchick

Earlier today, I enjoyed a beautiful lunchtime visit to @NMAAHC! ❤ Here's the story ...

Henry McNeill (pictured here) was my great-great grandfather.

Around 1910, he moved the family from North Carolina to settle in Washington DC and Baltimore.

The two women pictured with me here, my cousins, are direct descendants from Henry's children. Their parents were brothers & those men's sister was my great-grandmother.

But, here's the thing ... Two years before the big move, in 1908, my great-grandmother married; then she & her husband (a Hines man) relocated to Chicago instead of moving with the rest of the family to DC / Baltimore in 1910.

If it wasn't for @Ancestry DNA testing & @uscensusbureau records, the Chicago & DC McNeill branches wouldn't have known each other existed.

More than 100 years later, us cousins met up & visited @NMAAHC ... where we saw yet another McNeill cousin, Henry McNeill's descendant Robert's photographs exhibited. (Here's a sample of one.)

Henry himself was the product of slaveowning white immigrant family from Scotland & and a black woman named Jane who was likely either enslaved or the daughter of an enslaved woman.

So these photos capture her hopes & dreams: son Henry McNeill, great-granddaugthers Ivy & Rose, and 3rd great-granddaughter (me).

This story of slavery & the Great Migration is my family's history, and it's this country's history.

Happy #BlackFutures / #BlackHistoryMonth