If Your Last Name Is on This List, America Erased Your Family's Race in 1930

What if your family name carries a story that was deliberately pushed out of American history?

https://youtu.be/omEqe9m27S4

This video takes you into Cane River and Isle Brevelle, Louisiana, to uncover the remarkable history of Marie Thérèse Coincoin, a woman born enslaved in 1742 who was eventually freed and built an estate of more than a thousand acres. Her descendants became part of a powerful community of free people of color, owning land, building a Catholic church, and creating an eighteen-thousand-acre world along the Cane River. But their story was never simple: the Metoyers also became slaveholders, and this video confronts that uncomfortable reality rather than romanticizing it. From the French and Spanish colonial system to the Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and the one-drop rule, this story follows how a legal identity that existed for generations was gradually squeezed out of existence. The 1930 census became a major turning point when the “mulatto” category disappeared, forcing many families into a racial box that did not reflect how they understood themselves. And then there are the names. Metoyer, Balthazar, Rachal, Dubreuil, Guillory, Fontenot, Batiste, Broussard, and others still appear in Louisiana family trees today. But a surname alone cannot prove ancestry. The real story lives in parish registers, land grants, court records, notarial acts, church records, and family documents. If one of these names appears in your family tree, this video may give you a reason to look deeper. Watch to the end for the documented surname list, the history behind it, and a final question: how much of a family’s identity can disappear when the government changes the box on the form? 📚 Sources & Further Reading ■U.S. Census Bureau — 1930 Census Instructions https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/technical-documentation/questionnaires/1930/1930-instructions.html ■U.S. Census Bureau — 1930 Census Questionnaires & Instructions https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/technical-documentation/questionnaires.1930_Census.html ■U.S. Census Bureau — Measuring Race & Ethnicity Across the Decades https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010.html ■National Archives — Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/plessy-v-ferguson ■National Park Service — Creole Literature & Cane River Creoles https://www.nps.gov/articles/creole-literature.htm ■Library of Congress — Coincoin-Prudhomme House / Marie Thérèse Coincoin https://www.loc.gov/item/la0417/ ■Library of Congress — Historic American Buildings Survey: Coincoin-Prudhomme House https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/la0417/ ■Cane River Creole Genealogy — For CoinCoin https://www.forcoincoin.com/ Subscribe to Stone & Bone for more deeply researched stories hiding in the paperwork of American history. #LouisianaHistory #CaneRiverCreoles #CreolesOfColor #AfricanAmericanHistory #BlackHistory #MarieThereseCoincoin #LouisianaCreole #AmericanHistory #HiddenHistory #Genealogy BS204AR