What must it feel like to grow up knowing your mother walked out the door when you were just three years old and never came back? After Nicole Palsa heard her great-grandmother’s heartbreaking story, she spent the next twenty years searching for answers. Nicole’s great-great-grandmother, Dessie Dulaney, disappeared from Virginia around 1914, leaving behind a little girl, a grieving family, and a silence that lasted generations. When a single DNA match arrived the Friday before Mother's Day 2018, everything changed. And what Nicole uncovered was far more complicated, tragic, and surprisingly triumphant than anyone expected. From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Floyd County, Virginia to a small Illinois village where people still remembered Dessie's name, this is a story about the secrets women kept to survive, the daughters left behind, and what it means to finally find someone your family spent a century trying — and failing — to forget.

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🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️ Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥ Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

What would you do if a single letter revealed that everything you thought you knew about your family was only half the story? Scott Pratt walked into a historic Brooklyn church as part of Ancestry's powerful documentary Railroad Ties expecting to find some connection to his Scottish colonial roots. Instead he discovered that he's a descendant of enslaved people who escaped to freedom on the Underground Railroad. In this deeply moving conversation, Scott and I trace the extraordinary arc of his family tree: from Sophia, the light-skinned Black woman who fled slavery through Brooklyn, to her grandson Frank, a silent film star who kept a journal about passing for white that now sits in the Harvard Library. Scott's story is about so much more than genealogical discovery. It’s about the grief of lost stories, the complexity of inherited identity, and the fierce resilience that echoes across generations when we finally let ourselves claim the whole truth of who we are.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️ Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥ Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

He buried a fortune in gold under a bent white oak. Then he died before anyone could find it.

My 6x great-grandfather Abraham Kuykendall lived 93 extraordinary years. He survived colonial America, fought in the Revolution, crossed the frontier with 13 children, and built an empire of 2,000 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. But when I found him on a Sunday night FaceTime research session with my dad, I discovered that history remembers him as a ghost story. There's still an iron wash pot full of coins buried somewhere near Pheasant Branch in Flat Rock, worth an estimated $8 million today, and treasure hunters are still looking for it. But in this episode, I want to tell you who Abraham actually was and why the gold isn't the real treasure that got lost. Your family has buried stories too. You still have time to unearth them.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️ Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥ Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!