Finding Your Roots

(gentle music) -

Henry

As we pored over the archives of Christchurch, we discovered a slave register from the year 1817 indicating that Lena's fourth-great grandfather, Primus, was the human property of someone with a very familiar name. He was enslaved by a woman named Mary Murrel Waithe. Whoa. And that is where you get your surname from. Wow. The Waithe family. It was always such an odd last name, growing up. It wasn't like other Black kids I was around, like Washington or Johnson, things like that. It was always, people always struggled spelling it, pronouncing it. Like, I was just always trying to help people understand it. But, yeah, wow. -

Henry

What's it like, finally, to know? You know, it's painful because your name is such a huge part of your identity so for someone to put their identity onto your family, it just feels unjust.