In late 2024, I sat cross-legged on the floor of Sharon Morgan’s home office in Macon, Mississippi, while she flipped through stacks of files and books. Sitting on the floor was my own decision because I wanted to pet her three beloved cats as they wandered in and out during our visit.
I would be visiting the Noxubee County courthouse that afternoon to search for records related to Isham Stewart, an African American man who represented the county in the state Senate and House of Representatives during Reconstruction. I knew of a will I wanted to look up, and Sharon was searching through her indices of courthouse records so she could suggest other documents that might be hiding in the courthouse ledgers and heavy record cartons.
Sharon had prepared us a lunch of delicious chicken curry salad. She loved cooking for people. When I mentioned craving a certain food in my Facebook posts over the years, Sharon frequently commented, “I could make that for you!”
She knew the power of sharing a meal, both literally and figuratively, as a means of connection. Her 2013 memoir, “Gather at the Table,” co-written with Thomas Norman DeWolf, chronicled the pair’s travels as a descendant of enslaved people in Mississippi and a descendant of a wealthy American slave-trading dynasty.
Sharon was already a world traveler when she and DeWolf started their journey. Since her birth in Chicago, she had lived all over the United States and abroad, including Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Whenever she revealed a new tidbit, such as her job as a chef in Paris, I told her that her life should be a movie. Her house was filled with artwork from her travels, along with racist depictions of African Americans in vintage advertisements. These she collected, she told me gleefully, as a kind of middle finger to the culture that produced them.
Sharon moved to Mississippi, to the county where her ancestors were enslaved, in 2018. As she wrote in her 2026 essay, “I Have Chosen to Die in Mississippi,” published only a month before her death, it was a deliberate choice to make her home in the place that had traumatized her ancestors. She wanted to learn more about them, to connect with them, and to facilitate healing for future generations.
After a long and varied career in the business world, Sharon devoted herself to genealogy, which is what brought our paths together. I met her through the Mississippi State University Libraries’ annual genealogy fair, where she was a familiar speaker. Through these occasional meetings and our regular interactions on Facebook over the years, I got to know her as a generous and deep well of information.
She ran the website Our Black Ancestry and its active Facebook group of the same name, where family historians all over the world could reach out for connections and research help. She was an active member of the Noxubee County Historical Society. In 2023, she published “Finding Your Family Tree: A Beginner’s Guide to Researching Your Genealogy.”
Skilled researcher that she was, Sharon also had a wicked sense of humor. I often introduced her to friends as “a character,” “a cut-up,” “hilarious.” Whether in Facebook posts or in whispered comments at various events, she always made me laugh—the surest path to my heart.
Businesswoman, family historian, mother, chef in Paris, world traveler, fellow cat lady, proud member of Mensa, writer, mischievous cut-up. I only got to see a sliver of the kaleidoscopic life led by Sharon Leslie Morgan, but even that small sliver guaranteed her a place of affection and admiration in my memory forever. She succeeded in, as she put it in her January essay, turning “Mississippi Goddam” into “Mississippi Hallelujah.”
After I left Sharon’s house in October 2024, the last time I saw her in person, I went to the courthouse in Macon and dove into the records. Two men came in while I was there, and I overheard them telling the office assistant that Sharon Morgan had sent them.
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