Celebrating Black History Month – Black Excellence in My Family – Trisha Mays-Cummings

As I celebrate Black History Month and the Black excellence found throughout my family, it feels important to pause and include someone I often overlook in these stories: Trisha Mays-Cummings. That’s right this blog post is all about the researcher.

For more than a decade, I have been researching my family’s history and their communities, following paper trails, piecing together fragments, and listening closely to what the records reveal to me. What began as curiosity became my purpose. And at the foundation of that purpose has always been my love for history, especially Black history.

Black history taught me early on that our stories are rarely handed to us neatly. They must be searched for, protected, and sometimes fought for. That understanding shaped how I approach family history research. I don’t just look for names and dates, I look for context, community, resilience, and humanity. I want to know how my ancestors lived. That belief continues to guide my work as a family historian and writer.

My research journey has shown me that Black excellence doesn’t require wealth, fame, or public recognition. It shows up in ordinary people who made extraordinary choices, to seek education, build institutions, lead churches, raise families, migrate for better opportunities, and endure systems never designed for them to thrive. Telling those stories has become both my responsibility and my joy.

Along the way, I’ve learned that the act of researching Black families is itself an act of preservation and resistance. My research is my protest in a world that has often tried to rewrite our history and ignore our stories. Every record found, every story documented, and every ancestor named pushes back against erasure. By sharing my family’s stories, publicly and unapologetically, I challenge narratives that have minimized, distorted, or dismissed Black lives. Through this work, I assert that our histories matter, that our people mattered, and that their lives deserve to be remembered in full.

This Black History Month as I honor my ancestors, I also honor the researcher who has committed herself to remembering them. My love for Black history is not separate from my family history journey; it is the very foundation on which it stands.