Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History

A Book Launch Conversation with Dr. Lori Ginzberg, Krystal Appiah, Beverly Brown, Elsa Lora, and Erika Piola

Thursday, September 19, 2024
5:30 pm
In-Person Event | Free

In 1830, Richard Walpole Cogdell, a Charleston bank clerk, purchased a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Sarah Martha Sanders. Until her death in 1850, she bore nine of his children, five of whom reached adulthood. In 1857, this all-too-ordinary story took an extraordinary turn when Cogdell and his enslaved children moved to Philadelphia, where he bought them a house. Virtually overnight, they became part of the African American middle class. In Tangled Journeys, Lori D. Ginzberg tells a sweeping transatlantic family history, a multi-generational, multi-racial story that is both traumatic and prosaic. Ginzberg combines exhaustive archival research of the Library Company’s Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning/Chew Collection with “whispers” —questions that the available evidence cannot answer but that force us to confront what was unseen, unheard, and undocumented. Readers are invited to grapple with an American history that puts the Sanders ancestors and descendants at its center.

Join Dr. Ginzberg, former Library Company curator Krystal Appiah, Sanders family descendants Beverly Brown and Elsa Lora, and Library Company curator Erika Piola in a celebratory reception and conversation about the stories behind the publication of Tangled Journeys.

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