PRODIGAL — THE PODCAST Episode 36: "Who Named You?"
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Where did your last name come from? For a lot of us, the answer we were handed is one sentence long: they took the master's name, or Smith means a blacksmith. It's about half true, and the missing half is the whole point.
Don Jackson and Daysha Voss take the quick version apart using the National Archives, the Smithsonian's African American history museum, the WPA slave narratives, and the Freedmen's Bureau records. Enslaved people rarely had surnames in federal records, but a missing name in the archive is not a missing name in the family. Freed people took the former…
The skinny
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