Andrew Lawler

Three hours after Thomas Jefferson died at his Monticello home on July 4, 1826, his personal secretary, Nicholas Trist, snipped a lock of the Founder’s gray hair, still faintly reddish blond. Trist then tied the hair with orange thread and placed it in a paper packet, along with a short note describing what he’d done.
In an era before photography or modern embalming, hair was an easily preserved reminder of a beloved friend or relative who’d died.

In 1976, Karen Batchelor was a young mother desperate for mental stimulation. One day, she went to a library in Detroit to explore her family’s history and unexpectedly found an Irish ancestor who had served as a Revolutionary War soldier on the Pennsylvania frontier. Batchelor, who is Black, was even more surprised when a librarian told her that this discovery qualified her for membership in Daughters of the American Revolution.