From These Roots, by Tamara Lanier

Updated July 13, 2025: Harvard University has settled with Ms. Lanier over the ownership of her ancestors’ photos.

Tamara Lanier’s mother, Mattye, was the family history keeper. She knew the names and stories of relatives going back to one of their oldest known ancestors, an enslaved man known to the family as Papa Renty. After her mother’s death, Lanier tackled the enormous task of searching the historical record for her family and finally writing it all down. In From These Roots, Lanier tells us what happens when a genealogist acquaintance finds a remarkable and troubling collection of daguerreotypes at Harvard’s Peabody Museum¹ that may contain the only known images of Lanier’s ancestors, including Papa Renty.

Genealogy is a fascinating thing. We all know that we have to come from somewhere but it’s always amazing to find evidence of your ancestor’s paths through the world: a birth certificate, an entry on a Census form, a name on a passenger manifest. This evidence isn’t always easy to find. (My grandfather was named Joe Smith and I like to mess with ancestry software vendors at library conferences by having them try to find Grandpa Smith².) Accidents and wars have destroyed a lot of records. Some families, like mine, upped stakes almost every generation and moved to new countries or states, making them hard to find. For families with enslaved ancestors, there is the emotional burden of learning that the only records of their family might be bills of sale or inventories from slave auctions. Lanier traced some of her relatives through the probate records from individuals who claimed ownership over her family members and willed her ancestors to their descendants. The thought of seeing the name of an ancestor on a list like that makes my mouth fill with bile.

The amateur genealogist who first helps trace the Lanier family using what Lanier can remember from her mother’s stories is able to create an impressive initial family tree for her. The most amazing thing about this research is the possible discovery of Papa Renty among a series of daguerrotypes created in 1850 for Louis Agassiz, a glaciologist and biologist who was also an appalling racist. Agassiz hired a photographer to take pictures of enslaved people to prove his theories that the different “races”³ of human beings had different origins, making these races actually different species. Lanier digs into Agassiz’s pseudoscience and connects with scholars who are forcing academia to reconsider his work (including trying to get a Swiss mountain named after Agassiz renamed). When Lanier goes to the Peabody Museum to see the daguerrotypes with one of her daughters, she runs into some strange barriers. She has to make an appointment to see them with a justification. She’s not allowed to make copies of the daguerrotypes. And, strangest of all, when Lanier shares her history and what she and her friendly genealogist have found, curators at the Museum and two of Harvard’s presidents ignore her.

I think Lanier makes an incredibly strong case that she and her relatives are descendants of two of the people in the daguerrotypes (a man named as Congo Renty, who is probably Papa Renty, and Renty’s daughter, Delia). As such, I think she and her family should be, at minimum, included in decisions about how the images are used. (Harvard regularly licenses the images for book covers, as well as using them in their own media and advertising.) Lanier ends up engaging the Koskoff firm⁴ in Massachusetts to try and gain ownership of the images of her ancestors. From These Roots may be a little premature as the case is far from settled. I understand publishing now, however. It will be years before the case is decided and this book will undoubtedly be helpful in bringing important attention to Lanier’s case.

Readers interested in the complexities of genealogy—not just finding one’s ancestors but also the challenges of proving ancestry, uncovering dark history, and so on—may enjoy this book. I wish Lanier had included more stories about more of her ancestors in From These Roots but there is plenty of interesting material here.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

1. The daguerrotypes are findable in the museum’s online collection search if you type in “Zealy daguerrotype.” ↩︎
2. They always ask if I know more because, good lord, there are a lot of Joe Smiths out there. They start to sweat when I tell them that he was from Texas. ↩︎
3. I’m using quotation marks here because the concept is incredibly complicated and I loathe Agassiz and others’ usage of the term to discriminate against members of H. sapiens who have different colored skin than they did. ↩︎
4. Fun fact: This is the same firm that helped some of the Sandy Hook parents sue the absolute pants off of Alex Jones for spreading lies about their children, which led to years of harassment. ↩︎