Hugo Maynard grew up in the worst part of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, built a pharmaceutical company, won an Olympic medal, and acquired everything the world told him to want. Then he sat in his Bentley and felt nothing. His reconnection to his West Indian roots did not start on a plane back to the islands. It started with brutal honesty with himself. From that truth, his family's story — a father on a piece of plywood with $17, a mother homeless and pregnant, a bloodline stretching back to a prime minister — started to make sense.

This episode is about what happens when the life the world sold you stops working, and you finally go back to where you actually came from. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.

Kim Lawson took a DNA test after her mother passed — hoping to find family. What she found was a Nigerian family, a Ghanaian queen mother who looked exactly like her, royal roots on both sides of her family, and a Ghanaian citizenship she earned by going to Ghana three times in five months. Her family thought she had lost her mind. The passport proved otherwise.

This episode covers the DNA test that started everything, the moment she walked into a room and saw an older version of herself, what it means to reconnect with Africa rather than reclaim it, and exactly what to do after your DNA test this week.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.

His mother gave him her rice-and-beans recipe. She never gave him the measurements. He has tried to get it right ever since.

Roberto Hannibal grew up in New Jersey while spending his summers in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas. Last year, he left a full-time career in public health to become a full-time creative — including a cooking show called Flavors We Inherit, where friends teach him recipes passed down in their families while the stories, memories, and people behind every dish get told out loud before they disappear.

This is a conversation about what a family recipe actually holds. What happens to our culture when corporations package it and sell it back to us? And the one step anyone can take this week to make sure a family tradition does not go with the person who holds it.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com or search for Roots Renwed.

Tamara Buzyna Adams always knew her grandmother's diaries were there. Five volumes. Over 100 years old. Written in Russian by an 11-year-old girl living on a steamship in the Black Sea during the Russian Civil War.

Nobody ever opened them. Nobody asked. Then COVID hit, her mother made a decision, and Tamara spent the next five years finding out what was inside.

What she found changed everything. She tracked down descendants of people who were on the same ship and gave strangers the story of their own people.

Her one tangible step for anyone who wants to start: digitize what you have before it is gone. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com or search for Roots Renewed.

Marla Teyolia grew up four miles from the Mexican border, the only one in her family born in the United States. In her 20s, she was meditating behind a locked bedroom door so her mother would not see her. Thirty years later, she runs a coaching firm, works with executives at some of the world's most powerful institutions, and still communes with her ancestors every morning. She never had to choose between those worlds. She just had to wait until the roots were strong enough.

This is a conversation about curanderismo and what it actually is, about the gold necklace that broke in the ocean when she was ten and what it meant, about the night the ancestors woke her up at 2:58AM with instructions, and about why she believes you cannot AI your way out of the need to reconnect with your humanity.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamideegarcia or search Roots Renewed.

She code-switched so completely that one day a childhood friend said — "I forgot you were Chinese."

Lisa Dare grew up Chinese at home and white everywhere else. In this episode she talks about what it cost to fit in, what a trip to China changed in her, and what she is doing now to stay connected to where she comes from. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.

Part 1 was the reckoning. Part 2 is what you do with it.

Natalie Berthe found out her family were active participants in the administration of the Belgian Congo. In Part 2 she talks about reconciling love for her family with the truth of what they did, what her responsibility looks like going forward, and why she is not looking away. Including her heritage fragment, one step for anyone whose heritage includes harm, and why this is not courage — it is just really uncomfortable, which is not the same thing as hard.

Watch Part 1 first on YouTube

Watch Part 2 on YouTube

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She was born in the United States. Her parents are Panamanian. She goes back every year. She cooks the food, plays the music, and speaks the language in her house. She has done everything right.

And then her four-year-old told her to speak regular.

Her family came to Panama to build the canal. They planted there and never left. Jessica Fisher Golden has never once doubted that she is Panamanian.

In this conversation she and host Tami Dee Garcia talk about what it means to hold your culture when the world around your children does not see it, the Afro-Latina identity that American culture still does not know what to do with, and a dying Caribbean lineage inside a Panama that most people have never heard of.

New episodes every Tuesday. Host Tami Dee Garcia is a Heritage Reconnection Coach and Amazon bestselling author of Rediscovering Your Roots.

Learn more at tamigarcia.com.

She spent her life calling out racism and fighting for justice. Then she found out her family were the colonizers she had been fighting against her entire life.

Natalie Berthe is Belgian and Italian, born in the United States with Belgian citizenship. She always knew her family had ties to the Belgian Congo. She did not know what that actually meant until recently.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Natalie sits with the reckoning — what it felt like to find out, what her father told her about Bon Papa, and what it means to love someone and then learn what they did.

Part 2 continues Thursday.

Watch on YouTube: [your YouTube link]

Join the Cultural Roots Reconnection Club: tamigarcia.com/membership

Chlarissa Harrison can only trace her family back to her grandparents. Slavery erased what came before. And yet she moves through life as if her ancestors are present every day.

In this episode, she talks about grief as the doorway into heritage reconnection, what her grandmother's hoodoo practices actually mean and where they came from, the ancestor tree dream that gave her a glimpse of faces she had never seen, and why their comfort is no longer her concern.

Watch the full episode on YouTube. Search Roots Renewed. New episode every Tuesday.

Join the Cultural Roots Reconnection Club: tamigarcia.com/membership

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