for those interested in tracing their ancestry, it’s not uncommon to encounter sudden gaps in information. that’s especially true for african americans descended from the enslaved, whose link to their ancestral past was so violently shattered. the quest to recover that lost heritage is at the heart of the stories in our special report. travelers in possession of dna tests describing their genetic history embark on personalized trips to their ancestral homelands in africa. a photographer re-stages old portraits of black heroes of the civil war, some unknown to the public and even to their descendants—until now. forensic anthropologists use advanced isotope analysis to examine the remains of the first generation of enslaved people and create uniquely precise maps of their places of origin.