See the man seated in the photo? That is my grandfather, the photo was captioned Gabe Perley, but while doing genealogy research I got stuck at the turn of the century (1900) and called my mom to find out if she could help me out. She said that she heard that around that time we changed our family name. It used to be “Joe”. She also said that she heard that we had a black ancestor. I found the records for my grandfather and great grandfather, but then I got stuck at my great great grandfather. He came out of nowhere and with a weird name like Joe, since most of the rest of my nation have French names (or native approximations of French names).
