American Descendants

A British photographer finds striking similarities between his portrait subjects and their famous forebears

FOR AS LONG AS HE CAN REMEMBER, Kenneth Morris has been told he looks just like his great-great-great-grandfather, Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, author, orator and social reformer. Morris has carried on his ancestor’s mission by fighting racial inequity and human trafficking through the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, which he co-founded. But when he actually dressed up as Douglass—complete with a magnificent gray-streaked wig—a strange feeling came over him. “I looked at myself in the mirror, and it was like I was Frederick Douglass. It just transformed me.”

Morris was taking part in an extraordinary history experiment by a British photographer named Drew Gardner. About 15 years ago, Gardner started tracking down descendants of famous Europeans—Napoleon, Charles Dickens, Oliver Cromwell—and asking if they would pose as their famous forebears in portraits he was recreating. Then he looked across the Atlantic. “For all its travails, America is the most brilliant idea,” says the Englishman. He especially wanted to challenge the idea that history is “white and male.”

He found Elizabeth Jenkins-Sahlin through an

“I was really trying to imagine the pressure she felt. She had her life’s work ahead of her.”

MIXED I N H E R I TA N C E Shannon LaNier, a TV journalist, has complex feelings about being descended from Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. “He was a brilliant man who preached equality, but he didn’t practice it. He owned people. And now I’m here because of it.”

A PORTRAIT OF ONE’S OWN One of Gardner’s biggest challenges has been finding influential women from earlier centuries who also have descendants. For most of history, he notes, “if you achieved anything as a woman, you didn’t have kids.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a striking exception—she had seven children and still managed to lead the nascent women’s rights movement. But each time Gardner found a photo of her as a young woman, she always had at least one child in her arms. To recreate this 1850s portrait, Gardner had to crop closely around Stanton’s face and photograph her descendant in a tight shot.