Jennifer Mendelsohn found genealogy by accident. She stumbled upon a documentary about a matzo factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mendelsohn remembered her mom had cousins who lived on the same street, but hadn’t thought about them in years. So, she did what anyone would do—Googled their names and “Rivington Street,” and the 1940 census listing from Ancestry.com popped up. It piqued her journalistic curiosity, so she started looking up other family members.

“The next thing I knew I had completely fallen down the rabbit hole,” says Mendelsohn, an occasional Baltimore contributor and now an expert in the field of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic genealogy.

In partnership with the Center for Jewish History in New York City, you are leading a new worldwide effort to reunite families separated by the Holocaust. The pilot program you co-created, known as the Holocaust Reunion Project, will make commercial DNA kits available free of charge to survivors or their children. How did that come about?
Over the past few years, I’ve taken on a number of pro bono cases helping Holocaust survivors find family—the last few with my research partner, Dr. Adina Newman. We both felt like there should be genealogical support, and particularly genetic genealogical support, available on a wider scale to the survivor community to help restore, in part, precisely what was taken from them: family. We hoped that partnering with an existing Jewish organization would provide resources that would allow us to help more people, and we were thrilled to be able to make that happen through the Center for Jewish History.

Why is it so important to get DNA kits into the hands of survivors?
DNA can be an incredibly powerful tool for making connections and filling in gaps when the genealogical paper trail has been severed. And the Holocaust severed paper trail connections in myriad ways. Part of this project is just making people aware that DNA testing can link you to relatives. So many people don’t bother testing because they mistakenly think it will only tell them their ethnicity, which they already know. Many Holocaust survivors are in the twilight of their lives and have been haunted for decades with questions about relatives. We want to give them the reassurance of knowing they did absolutely everything possible to find family—and the possibility that they might actually make a connection—while we can.

What is your personal connection to the Holocaust and genealogy reunification?
My mother lost her uncle, aunt, and four first cousins in the Holocaust; they were the subject of a well-known book by my brother, Daniel Mendelsohn, called The Lost. But the very first genealogical research project I undertook on my own was discovering that my husband’s 95-year-old grandmother, a Polish Holocaust survivor who lost her entire nuclear family and 99 percent of her extended family, had three living first cousins in the U.S. that she had never known about. Reuniting them after more than 70 years was an incredibly powerful experience for our entire family, and I was hopelessly hooked. We joke that my book will be called The Found.

The first old photograph Chris Whitaker reunited with its family, he discovered in a Montana antique shop. The black-and-white picture is a coming-of-age portrait of a boy, attired in a wool suit, tie, and pressed, white, short-collared shirt in the style of the day—about 1890. His hair is parted, there’s a hint of a smile above his dimpled chin, and on the back of the photo someone long ago scrawled the boy’s name and hometown: Samuel Reynolds, Kingman, Kansas.

The few words on the back also described young Samuel as “my cousin.” The vacationing Whitaker decided to track down the boy’s family, searching census records and ancestry databases. A grateful descendant on Samuel’s family tree came across his research and blog, which included the picture of Samuel, and later drove across the country to the same store and unearthed more than 40 other lost family photographs. Whitaker was elated.

“I just thought if someone found a photograph of my great-grandfather, I’d be thrilled,” says Whitaker in his north Baltimore home office. “It was really that simple.”

Over the past three years, the retired Whitaker has fleshed out the identities of hundreds of wayward vintage portraits, most of which he has stumbled across in the dustbins of Hampden’s antique, book, and curio shops. Placing these mysteriously adrift portraits with their loved ones, at times, has proved difficult for unexpected reasons.

Shortly after his initial success with Samuel’s portrait, for example, Whitaker contacted the West Virginia daughter of a woman in a lovely 1940s portrait via Facebook. Not only did the woman not respond, she blocked him. “I think it creeped out the woman when I messaged her and I told her I had a picture of her mother,” Whitaker recalls with a laugh. Ever since, he just scans the photographs and posts them on his blog, including the subjects’ names and the location where he found the photo, encouraging people to email him if they discover an ancestor. “It’s rewarding,” he says. “And I like the detective work.”

In one case, Whitaker provided a woman in her 80s with the last photograph of her dad—taken four days before he was killed in a plane crash when she was a girl. He connected Reed Young to a youthful portrait of his grandfather, who died before the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory program manager was born.

Whitaker’s found photos have taken him through time to the blocks of what was once “Little Bohemia” in East Baltimore, to the former stoop of former big-leaguer Edwin Americas Rommel, reportedly the first pitcher to deploy the knuckleball after the spitball’s banning in 1920. And to Fells Point, where a young wife named Ruth Collier sent photos of herself to her husband while he served in the South Pacific during World War II. (He returned home and the couple raised a family here.)

A Tennessee native, Whitaker became interested in genealogy in the mid-1980s when he couldn’t find pictures and found scant information about his maternal great-great-grandfather. He did, however, eventually locate his ancestor’s Civil War pension records at the National Archives. There, Whitaker read the firsthand account of the shot—from a Confederate rifle—that killed his great-great-grandfather at the Battle of Stones River.

Whitaker learned that his great-great-grandfather and both of his brothers had fled Tennessee after its secession to join Kentucky’s 9th Volunteers Infantry. All three gave their lives to the Union cause. “I don’t know if I fully absorbed their actions when I first came across that,” Whitaker says. “My appreciation, and pride in what they did, has continued to grow over the years.

“My younger brother, who is now deceased, and I grew up in Tennessee in the 1970s,” Whitaker continues, “when Confederate flags and Southern rock were all the rage and he gave me a lot of grief when I married my first wife because she was a Yankee from Philadelphia. [Learning about our great-great-grandfather] turned everything he believed on its head, which I thought was great.”

With all the news buzzing around immigration laws and the recent suspension of DACA, local journalist and aspiring genealogist Jennifer Mendelsohn (and occasional contributor to Baltimore) has been tracing the lineage of prominent ultra-conservative and anti-immigration personalities in a project she’s dubbed #ResistanceGenealogy.

How did you get into genealogy?
It was just sort of by accident. About four years ago, somebody mentioned on Facebook a company on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, on Rivington Street. I remembered we had cousins that lived on that street, and I Googled their names and a listing for the census popped up. It was so cool; I didn’t know you could search the census. One thing led to another, I got an Ancestry subscription and became hopelessly obsessed.

What about it drew you in?
It turned out to be a very natural fit for my skills as a reporter. I already knew how to follow an information trail, and look for clues, and solve puzzles. As a kid, I used to love those logic grid puzzles—and that’s exactly what genealogy is. You’re trying to make pieces fit and solve a mystery—I love it, it’s so satisfying.

Tell me about #ResistanceGenealogy.
I spent a lot of free time doing genealogy research—a huge part of what I do is because of my own background—Eastern European Jewish immigrant. My identity is very strongly connected to ‘hyphenated Americans.’ My understanding of what it means to be American is very closely tied to being an immigrant. So when I hear all these politicians slamming immigrants, I just know that unless you came on the Mayflower, you’re Native American, or your ancestors came in slave ships—you are an immigrant.

I think a lot of people who think of themselves as quintessential Americans are really just assimilated immigrants looking down on the next wave and not liking what they see. When I see these people spouting off how terrible these immigrants are and how we need to close our borders, I just thought it might be fun to start looking at their trees and point out the hypocrisy.

So, this is what led you to research conservative commentator Tomi Lahren?
After I saw her post about immigrants coming here legally, I found that Tomi Lahren’s great-great-grandfather was indicted by a federal grand jury for naturalization fraud. I put that on Twitter and Wonkette asked me to write it up as a piece. It went sort of quasi-viral and got picked up a million other places, and was tweeted by people with large followings—it became this big funny thing.

He was actually acquitted by the trial jury, but it’s pretty ridiculous that she’s talking about everybody who doesn’t come here legally should be thrown out, but by the grace of God, her own family is still here.

Have you looked into anybody else?
I think the first person I ever searched outside of my family might have been Congressman Steve King from Iowa because he made that statement, ‘We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.’ And sure enough, I found out that his own grandmother came as a child from Germany. And I thought, ‘It wasn’t that long ago, Congressman King, that your family would have been looked at as someone else’s babies.’

I’ve also looked into [Fox News’] Tucker Carlson, and Stephen Miller—President [Donald] Trump’s senior advisor who made the comment about how American policies shouldn’t favor immigrants who don’t speak English, when his own great-grandmother didn’t speak English [laughs].

What is your hope in uncovering this information?
It’s not to shame people, or make them feel guilty about what their ancestors did. It’s just to prove that the desire to be American has been so overwhelming and universal for centuries. Americans come from all places. We shouldn’t be pulling up the ladder behind us—we should be sending a hand continually because that’s what America is all about.