When Washington DC was being surveyed in 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man: Benjamin Banneker, a mathematician and a gifted astronomer. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring him to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learned that Banneker is her distant relative, and here she draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations.