In the fall of 1949, a young evangelist named Billy Graham pitched a tent in Los Angeles for what he hoped would be a modest three-week revival. Attendance was sparse, and Graham was discouraged. Then, seemingly overnight, everything changed. William Randolph Hearst, the powerful newspaper magnate, sent a two-word telegram to his editors: “Puff Graham.” The next morning, headlines blazed with his name. The tent filled. The revival stretched for weeks and Billy Graham became a national figure.

That moment wasn’t just about media savvy. It was about the convergence of faith, family values, and political ambition, a convergence that would shape the rise of the Religious Right. In We Gather Together, Neil J. Young traces how evangelical leaders like Graham helped build a movement that reached from the pulpit to the ballot box. In Partisans, Nicole Hemmer explores how those media, religion, and family fueled the conservative revolution of the 1990s. Today, Nicole and Neil join us to talk about how political movements are born not just in campaigns, but in living rooms, churches, and family trees and how the personal and the political have always been intertwined in the making of American conservatism.

In a quiet kitchen on the Diné (Navajo Nation) reservation, a grandmother begins to speak. There’s no script, no microphone, just her voice, steady and rich with memory. She tells of boarding schools, of ceremonies held in secret, of laughter shared under desert skies. Her story isn’t written in books or stored in archives. It lives in her words, passed from one generation to the next.

For Farina King, these stories are history. In her work as a historian and citizen of the Navajo Nation, she listens to voices often left out of official records. Oral histories, she shows us, are not just sources. They are relationships. They carry emotion, identity, and the power to connect past and present in deeply personal ways.

Today, Dr. King joins us to discuss how oral histories transform our understanding of families, communities, and the significance of history itself. We’ll explore how listening, truly listening, can be an act of scholarship, of care, and of cultural survival.

In eighteenth-century England, not every family story turned on courtship and heirs. Many households were held together by single adults who managed budgets, cared for nieces and nephews, and kept the letters and ledgers that became a family’s memory. Their lives were both social and practical. Music in the parlor. Trips on the Thames. Decisions made around a shared table rather than an altar. When we shift our view from marriage and descent to the bonds among siblings and cousins, we see a different map of kinship. It is lateral. It is durable. It shapes how families work.

In today’s episode of Reunion, we explore that world through Amy Harris’s Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried, a study of the Sharp family across three generations that shows how unmarried kin shaped household economies, caregiving, philanthropy, and abolitionist work; it asks us to see aunts and uncles and single siblings as central actors in family governance and legacy, suggests genealogy is about values as much as property, and invites us to read portraits, epitaphs, and paper trails for the stories singles preserved; and Amy Harris joins us to discuss single sociability, householding beyond marriage, and how re-centering lateral kin changes what family history can do.

In the 1930s, while her husband, Elijah Muhammad, was imprisoned, Clara Poole (later known as Clara Muhammad) quietly stepped into leadership. She wasn’t given a title. She didn’t stand at a pulpit. But she taught the children, organized the women, and held the Nation of Islam together. In a movement that promised both protection and patriarchy, Clara found a way to lead from within. Her story is not unique. Across the early years of the Nation of Islam, Black women built schools, sustained families, and shaped theology, often behind the scenes, always at the center. They navigated a religious world that asked them to submit, even as it relied on their strength.

In The Promise of Patriarchy, historian Ula Y. Taylor uncovers the lives of these women, showing how they negotiated faith, family, and gendered expectations to shape a movement that would transform Black religious and political life in America. Today, Ula joins us to talk about how power moves through families, how women lead in spaces that don’t always recognize their leadership, and how history remembers (or forgets) them.

In a quiet attic in New York, Blanche Moses carefully preserved two miniature ivory portraits. She believed they depicted her noble Jewish ancestors, that is to say, in the best light possible: refined, European, and elite. For Blanche, these portraits were more than heirlooms. They were proof of belonging, of status, of a family history that fit neatly into the story she had always been told.

But when historian Laura Arnold Leibman followed the trail, she uncovered a very different past. The portraits were not of European aristocrats, but of Sarah and Isaac Brandon, siblings born into slavery in Barbados. They would later become free, wealthy, and Jewish in New York, navigating a world where race, religion, and class collided in complex and often hidden ways.

In Once We Were Slaves, Leibman traces the extraordinary journey of the Brandon family, revealing how identity is not fixed but forged, through migration, reinvention, and the stories families choose to tell. Today, Laura joins us to explore how family history can challenge the narratives we inherit and reshape our understanding of who we are and where we come from.

In the red clay fields of Georgia, a man named Solicitor rose before dawn to tend the land he did not own. He was a sharecropper, a laborer, and a father. His name was passed down along with stories of endurance and pride. Generations later, his great-granddaughter, Blair Kelley, would begin her book Black Folk with his story, grounding the history of the Black working class in the life of one man whose labor helped build a world.

Elsewhere in the United States, Kellie Carter Jackson was tracing her own family’s legacy, stories of resistance, of quiet defiance, of choosing dignity in the face of oppression. In We Refuse, she writes not just about protest marches and speeches, but about the everyday acts of refusal that shaped Black life and freedom.

For both historians, family history is more than inspiration. It is method. It is archive. It is truth-telling. Today, Blair Kelley and Kellie Carter Jackson join us to talk about how personal memory becomes political and social history.

Welcome to Reunion, a podcast about how family history helps us understand the past and why it still matters today. This series is sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy and the Family History Program at Brigham Young University, which offers the world's only undergraduate degree in family history. I’m Joey Stuart, and I’m here with my cohost and colleague Christopher Jones. We’re both assistant professors of history and faculty in BYU’s Family History Program.

SHOWNOTES:

Every two weeks, we talk with scholars, educators, and storytellers who use family history to explore big questions about history, kinship, and identity. Studying families helps us see what mattered most to people in the past and how those values shaped the world we live in now.

Family history is more than names and dates. It is a way to explore memory, emotion, power, and connection. It gives historians a flexible method for understanding everything from slavery and migration to religious conversion and cultural memory.

This is Reunion. We’re glad you’re here.

In the early hours of a September morning in 1789, a sixteen-year-old girl prepared to leave Paris. Her name was Sally Hemings. For nearly two years, she had lived in the city, part of Thomas Jefferson’s household. In France, slavery was illegal. She could have stayed. She could have claimed her freedom and begun a life beyond Jefferson’s reach. But she did not. Instead, she agreed to return to Virginia—a place where her body and her children would belong to Jefferson by law. She bargained for what she could: a promise that those children, born enslaved, would one day be free. In choosing to go back, Hemings surrendered the certainty of freedom for a fragile hope, binding her future to Jefferson’s word—and to the kin she left behind, still enslaved on Virginia soil.

Sally Hemings was enslaved. She was also the half-sister of Jefferson’s dead wife. The children they would have together came into a world that refused to recognize them fully—as kin, as citizens, as free. And yet they were a family. A family made in secrecy and shaped by power, but a family nonetheless. Her choice, quiet and unrecorded, reverberates still—through the lives it shaped and the nation it unsettled.

Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello tells this story with extraordinary care, revealing how the lives of one Black family were entangled with one of America’s most revered founders. Today, we explore what their story teaches us about race, kinship, and the meaning of family under slavery, and how family history can uncover truths that challenge the myths we inherit. Sign up for shownotes here: https://reunion-a-podcast-about-family-histories.ghost.io/

In a Virginia courtroom in the mid-1700s, a woman named Mary Aggy stood before a judge, not to defend herself with a lawyer, but with a lineage. She traced her ancestry back to a free woman, arguing that her own enslavement was unlawful. Her case rested not on testimony or character, but on genealogy. In early America, family history could mean the difference between bondage and freedom.

But Mary Aggy wasn’t alone. Across the colonies, people used family trees to claim land, assert status, and protect privilege. Genealogy wasn’t just a record of who begat whom; it was a form of power. It shaped who belonged, who ruled, and who was remembered. In her book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, historian Karin Wulf uncovers how family history was used to build nations, enforce hierarchies, and sometimes, challenge them. Today, we talk with her about how the past was organized through kinship, and why understanding those structures still matters in the present.