In this episode, we talk with sisters Alice Jones and Corrine Antoinette Smith. Alice and Corinne are the granddaughters of Corinne Antoinette Tureaud, great aunt of our earlier guest, AP Turead Jr., but a great aunt whom he never knew.

They were strangers to each other because in a moment of economic crisis when the elder Corinne was a young woman, she and three of her sisters Louise, Carmen, and Virginia, decided to leave the Tureaud family and live the rest of their lives as white women. The other eight siblings stayed. While that choice was known to all twelve siblings, they decided to mostly keep it a secret from future generations.

Over a century later, Alice bought her sister, Corinne, an Ancestry DNA subscription for Christmas, and the results raised questions for the sisters. Through their own genealogical search, the two of them managed to reconnect with their long-lost relatives. Over a century after four sisters made this choice, the Tureaud family has been reunited. They held the first complete family reunion in over 100 years in New Orleans in the summer of 2022. What follows is Alice and Corinne’s story, and in many ways their grandmother, Corinne Antoinette Tureaud’s story, of unequal opportunity in America.

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