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You know, In honor of Black History Month, I wanted to tell the stories of women whose lives were stolen and whose murders were never held accountable because they lived in a time where murdering a black person was something you could get away with.

During this month, it is important to not only honor the accomplishments of our ancestors, but their sacrifices too.

The history of who we are and where we came from are important, even the ugliest parts of it.

Now, our first story is the story of Laura Nelson, who was lynched along with her son

in May 1911 in Okama, Oklahoma. If you're a black person in this country whose family was once

enslaved, then you know that trying to trace your ancestry can be a disappointing challenge.

If you can find any information at all, then count

yourself lucky. But even the information you can find tends to end somewhere. There's only but

so far back we can trace our roots. For Laura, there's no information about her before she married

her husband, Austin Nelson. Austin and Laura were married

sometime between 1896 and 1898. Now, the only way to be able to track a black family's

movements during this time is through census records. Austin and Laura entered on the 1900

census for the first time as a married couple, and they sent on the census that they had been

married at that time for four years. By this time, the couple had a son, too. His name was L.D., and he was

three years old. And they were living in Bosque County, Texas. Austin was now working as a farm

laborer, and both Laura and her husband were able to read and write.

...