I've been watching the Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin in 20 or 30 minute bites and love it, starting with his family's stress on coming from "good people"

 Surprise! Surprise! the revered Maupin Confederate ancestor who died at Antietam, my 5th cousin, through the Cokers and Tuckers and Parhams and Branches. And Brig. Gen Lawrence O'Bryan Branch is kin to my Grandpa Joseph McGehee through the McGehees and Pruitts and Dabbs. I always assumed we had never been of "good people," but here Armistead and I are, kin, kin to the same families. When you go back to Virginia in the 1600s and 1700s and early 1800s--well, the thing is that when you arrived in Virginia early enough you are kin to everyone, even Armistead Maupin. You could live in Maryland on an estate between various streams running down into the Potomac--that is, Silver Springs, now. That's Rosalynn Carter's and my Pottengers. In  two generations you went from the best house in Kentucky to, well, a sod house in the Panhandle. You went from vast estates because the Crown wanted you to have land. Then you could divide plantations up among sons and some of the sons in law and a generation or two later you had a small farm with a big family still and no inheritances.

Armistead would approve what I am doing now--a hard look at racial encounters and belated racial reckonings. I've got a few chapters written--in great pain, almost all of them. But I have evidence I don't think anyone else has had--9,000 or so documents about kinfolks from the 1600s on. These documents I have been collecting for almost 20 years.  Every chapter is about family members. That's why writing it is so painful. RACIAL RECKONINGS. 

What's especially painful is that the Republican Party is making everything I am writing about the 1700s and 1800s absolutely up to date, and terrifying. 

But this is a terrific documentary, Cousin Armistead's Untold Tales.