Until recently, the popular perception of genealogy applied almost exclusively to tracing the family histories of the wealthy and the powerful. Today, it more realistically recounts the struggles of Americans of all stations, all ethnicities, and all races.

"Although several entrepreneurs established newspapers for Baltimore's large anti-bellum free African American community ... no issues have survived. ... Founded in 1837, the Baltimore Sun published numerous articles characterizing local, national and international events relating to and impacting people of color. Beginning with the Reconstruction year of 1870, Mrs. Pagan has performed the yeoman's task of scouring the newspaper for all such accounts...

"The Third Edition of Paul Heinegg's Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia was awarded the American Society of Genealogists' prestigious Donald Lines Jacobus Award for the best work of genealogical scholarship published between 1991 and 1994. The new Sixth Edition is Heinegg's most ambitious effort yet to reconstruct the history of the free African American communities of Virginia and the Carolinas by looking at the history of their...