Every family carries a story: that we descend from a king, from royalty, from someone the world remembers. Nia brings back the legend she mentioned weeks ago — and asks the elder, at last, if it's true. Jeliba won't answer true or false. He teaches her to weigh it: where did the story come from, and what kind of knowing is it? A tale can be false without a single liar in the chain — memory grows in the direction of dignity, and for a people whose names were taken, "we come from kings" was not vanity but armor. Then the reframe: kings are cheap in a story; to trace a real ancestor, by name, from a real record, is the harder and greater thing. One is a wish; the other is a resurrection. And a second story handled with more care still — the claim of Native ancestry — because a nation is not gone, and belonging is the nation's to grant, by their rolls and their rules, not a DNA estimate's. Honor why we carry these stories. Test what they claim. Don't crown yourself until the evidence does.

Resources for this episode:

• Record the story first. Before testing a family legend, capture it fully — who tells it, and how far back it goes. Free interview guides: StoryCorps (storycorps.org).
• Test oral tradition against the record using the databases from earlier episodes: FamilySearch (free, familysearch.org), the National Archives (free, archives.gov), and Ancestry (often free at your library).
• On Native ancestry — start with the nation, not a DNA test. Belonging is determined by tribal governments. Learn the difference between ancestry and citizenship through the National Congress of American Indians (ncai.org) and each nation's own enrollment office.
• On DNA and tribal claims: a percentage or a haplogroup cannot make you a citizen of a nation, and cannot name a specific tribe. Use it as a compass, and let each nation's rules stand.

After freedom came, for a brief and precious time, someone wrote our names down. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands kept labor contracts, marriage and cohabitation records, ration rolls, letters, and school registers — and in them, people who had been invisible in the old records appear at last as themselves. In this sitting I show you what the Bureau left behind, where it survives today, and how to read it. These records are uneven, scattered, incomplete — the work of overwhelmed clerks in a hard season. But for many seekers, they are the bridge across 1870, and the first time an ancestor is called by name.

Resources for this episode:

• National Archives (free) — archives.gov — Freedmen's Bureau records, Record Group 105.
• FamilySearch (free) — familysearch.org — digitized and searchable Bureau records.
• Smithsonian NMAAHC — nmaahc.si.edu — the Freedmen's Bureau transcription and search project.
• Ancestry (subscription; often free through your public library) — ancestry.com.
• Tip: search by place, not just name — start with the state and the field office that served your ancestor's county, since much of the Bureau's paper isn't name-indexed.

Who was the greatest griot who ever lived? Jeliba names Balla Fasséké Kouyaté, griot to Sundiata Keita and the one from whom the office descends — and honors Toumani Diabaté, who carried seventy-one remembered generations of kora players. Then he declines the question itself. The office of the jeli is not won; it is inherited, and Salif Keita's controversy proves it. Among the jeliw, greatness is measured not in performance but in memory: the one whose recitation of the lines can be trusted. Nia presses him on what that means for those who trace back four generations and find a wall — and Jeliba answers that the griot who remembers seventy-one and the descendant who has fought back to six are doing the same work.

Resources for this episode:

• The Sundiata epic — Look for D.T. Niane's Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, the most widely available written version of the story Balla Fasséké carried.
• Toumani Diabaté — His albums Kaira and The Mandé Variations (solo kora), and In the Heart of the Moon with Ali Farka Touré. Widely available on streaming.
• Sidiki Diabaté — Toumani's father, "the King of the Kora"; seek out his recordings to hear the generation before.
• The jelimusow (women griots) — Listen for Kandia Kouyaté, Ami Koïta, and Bako Dagnon.
• UNESCO lists the oral traditions of the Mande (the Mandé Charter / Kouroukan Fouga) among the world's intangible cultural heritage — a starting point for the tradition's history.