The Discovery of Lawrence Santos Jr.
Another ancestral anniversary today! It's the 101st birthday of my great grandfather Lawrence Santos Jr. His story is pretty interesting. Finding my great grandfather was a culmination of years of curiosity, oral history, research and genetic testing. When I was about 6 or 7 years old, my paternal grandmother Victoria, informed me that my biological great grandfather was "a darkskin man who was Portuguese and Puerto Rican". At the time, I didn't quite understand what she meant, but I accepted it as fact. My grandmother was raised by a man named Marvin Smith and her mother Elizabeth Lee Young. My grandmother was the oldest and Elizabeth had 8 more children after her. My grandma claimed to have met her biological father in the 90s. But that was all I knew of him for the longest. Over the course of my childhood, I just assumed I was African American, Afro-Puerto Rican and maybe Portugese but the latter always was a mystery to me. I didn't understand how Blackness and...