In 1838, Georgetown University sold 272 slaves to the state of Louisiana.
And Jeremy Alexander — an executive assistant at Georgetown University — is a direct descendant of one of them.
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Alexander learned of his lineage thanks to an AncestryDNA test that he took in 2014. It was an astonishing discovery and one that gave him a clearer picture of his identity and, more importantly, the history of his family.
“It’s a good sense of mind just to be able to call their names,” he says. “To identify, to make them human.”
What followed is a moving story of self-discovery — for Alexander, for the descendants of the 272, and for Georgetown. Check it out right here:
It all started when Alexander wanted to know just how far back his roots go.
Since 2008, Alexander and his wife, Leslie, started building their Ancestry family tree right after their son was born. They wanted to trace their family history back as far as they possibly could in order to learn the names of distant ancestors over multiple generations.
He’d been curious about where he came from and would even ask his elders to tell him stories about relatives he was never able to meet.
So it was no wonder that Alexander was ecstatic when he was finally able to take the AncestryDNA test to dive deeper into his heritage. And Ancestry made it easy to connect with a family member Alexander had never met, who had some interesting information about her own story — that turned out to be part of his story as well.
