In some ways, Nicka Sewell-Smith’s path to becoming a genealogist was pretty typical: It all started with her family. She grew up in a tight-knit one where family history reigned supreme, and the concept of distant cousins wasn’t a thing. “It didn’t matter if I was someone’s fourth cousin; we were all just family,” said the member of Jackson-Madison Chapter in Jackson, Tenn.

 

And that family came together like clockwork for big reunions. “Because of the Great Migration, our family is spread out across 23 states and four countries, so we’d rotate where the reunion was held every two years,” she recalled.

 

But that’s where Ms. Sewell-Smith’s path diverges from that of most genealogists. She caught the bug from the unlikeliest of places—a temp job working in the medical credentialing department of one of the nation’s biggest health systems.

 

“My job was to check the credentials of all of our doctors,” she said. “Did this doctor really get a degree from that school? Why did this doctor leave that hospital? It was basically medical genealogy.”

 

It was also there that a coworker introduced her to the world of online genealogy research.

 

“The first record I saw was the 1930 U.S. Census with my grandmother as a 13-year-old,” she said. “It blew my mind.”

 

She joined the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California and would spend days off work with her “geneabuds” at the National Archives branch near San Francisco. They combed through the Freedmen’s Bureau, a massive collection of post-Civil War marriage records, employment registers, school reports, ration lists, and personal letters of formerly enslaved Americans and free people of color before the war.

 

The records were all on microfilm, which translated into “tedious is an understatement” work that went on for years and helped Ms. Sewell-Smith hone her skills as a researcher and investigator.

 

Fast-forward to today, and Ms. Sewell-Smith, who now lives in West Tennessee, is still researching her own family history, which has led her from a plantation in Louisiana all the way to an elite college in Massachusetts.

 

She is also helping others discover details about their own ancestors. She hosts a web show focused on the genealogy and family history of people of color. She offers on-site genealogical research services in the mid-South, providing one-on-one coaching to help individuals break through their brick walls. She maintains an online community for genealogists and family historians. And she speaks frequently on her work and her desire to debunk the myth that people of color can’t trace their family history.

 

“It’s possible to find this information, especially now that the Freedmen’s Bureau collection has been digitized,” she said.

 

But it’s about so much more than just locating information, she said: “It’s also about adding it to your life to give you a clearer picture of who you are—who we all are. My mission is to help people understand that American history is multifaceted, and it doesn’t just belong to one race of people. It’s a multitude. And the quicker and faster we can understand that, the better it will be for everyone.”

 

While researching her Cherokee lineage—Ms. Sewell-Smith is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma—she was clued into the possibility that an ancestor may have fought in theAmerican Revolution. She joined the DAR, she said, because she could. But the experience has turned out to be much more than checking a box. “It has been very welcoming,” she said. “My chapter is just awesome, and it’s so much fun to meet other women who are as interested in genealogy and family history as I am.”

 

In her spare time, she loves to sew and grow her own food, including spinach, soybeans, corn, watermelon, cantaloupe and eggplant. Moving from her home state of California to her husband’s rural hometown of Bolivar, Tenn., was an adjustment for Ms. Sewell-Smith. But she immediately saw at least one advantage: “I have so much space to garden."