Thomalind Polite in front of a drawing of what her 7th generation ancestor, Priscilla, would have looked like as a ten-year-old girl in 1756

Thomalind Martin Polite, a young speech therapist from Charleston, South Carolina, led “Priscilla’s Homecoming,” in 2005. Ms Polite is the 7th generation descendant of a 10-year-old girl, later named Priscilla, who was taken from Sierra Leone to Charleston in 1756 in a slave ship, called the Hare. Ms. Polite’s family is in a unique position: They are the only African American family that can trace their ancestry back to a specific point in Africa using an unbroken paper trail of 250 years that includes slave ship records, slave sale records, and plantation records. One scholar of the Atlantic Slave Trade described the dovetailing of all these records as a kind of miracle, “like lightning striking three times in the same place.”

A brief documentary video, called Priscilla’s Legacy, chronicles Ms Polite’s historic family journey.

Standing in the Women’s Slave Yard at Bunce Island. Where Priscilla, her 7th generation ancestor may have spent time before being put onboard the ship Hare for the three-month-long journey to Charles Towne, SC. (1756)