Dealing with the lack of records is one thing, but how do you confront multiple records of crimes such as robbery, horrors visited upon the indigenous, child abuse, rape, pogroms, murders, enslavement, massacres, genocides, and other disasters? I think we all encounter family history that is difficult to handle.  The discovery of a child rape left my mother, sister and me sobbing as we read the court records of what my mother's father had done.   Years ago, when I  found a record indicating that a probable direct ancestor owned other human beings as slaves, my response was simple. I stopped researching for a while.  Eventually I decided that I needed to learn more about the institution of slavery in the US, the records I would find, and the harder part; doing the work to document the enslaved people and their descendancies. In this way, descendants of enslavers can help repair some of the historical damage, because many of the records which can help descendants are o...