Cape Cod families are difficult to trace because only the probate records survived the burning of the Barnstable County Courthouse in 1827, and similar disasters have taken their toll on the Cape's town records. Many of Chatham's records, for instance, were lost in a fire, and Yarmouth's records of the Revolutionary War period have been missing for years. Even so, many important Cape Cod town records still exist; the problem is that so few of them...

"For fifteen years, Mr. Sitwell has worked as the groundskeeper for the Barclays, a well-to-do white family. He is part of the household's all-black staff, along with "Miss Mamie, " the talented cook, and new maid Jennie Williams. But the Barclays' fortunes have fallen, and their money is almost gone. When a business associate proposes selling Miss Mamie's delicious rib sauce under the brand name "The Rib King" -- using a caricature of a wildly grinning...

Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting myth. Nicole believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as she grew up - facing prejudice...

"Fearful of violating Indiana's anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry. Johnson searched her father's black genealogy and then was amazed to suddenly realize that her mother's whole white side was missing in family history. Johnson went searching for the white family who did not know she existed. When she found them, it's not just their shock and her mother's shame...

Guie’dani is dragged to Mexico City by her mother to help in her work as a housekeeper for an upper-middle-class family. There, the subtle psychological subjugation inflicted by the white family functions as a metaphor for the oppression of the old world by the new. Yet, Guie’dani rejects the life of servitude and seeks her own identity through a friendship with another rebellious teen. A striking contrast to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, GUIE'DANI'S...

Coming-of-age as rude awakening: one high school senior’s dawning sexuality is shadowed by the discovery of his upper-class white family’s looming financial ruin. Polished and penetrating, CASA GRANDE renders a sharp social canvas of contemporary Brazil through the eyes of young Jean, who struggles with newfound knowledge of his racial and class privilege as he sweetly courts a mixed-race girl from a lower-ranked school than his, and sows his...

"Seventeen-year-old Farrah Turner is one of two Black girls in her country club community, and the only one with Black parents. Her best friend, Cherish Whitman, adopted by a wealthy white family, is something Farrah likes to call WGS--White Girl Spoiled. With Brianne and Jerry Whitman as parents, Cherish is given the kind of adoration and coddling that even upper-class Black parents can't seem to afford--and it creates a dissonance in her best friend...

TERRA NULLIUS begins in the 1960s, offering glimpses into the life of a young Aboriginal girl, Alice. She has been adopted into a white family. Her Aboriginality and her history are denied and hidden. This shared, unspoken void underscores the film. A trauma that permeates all of colonised Australia. Denial, shame and fear, passed down from one generation to the next, and from one culture to another. Vignettes from different periods in Alice’s life...