After her mother’s death in 2010, Lanier took a renewed interest in her family’s history, and with the help of a friend, she made an incredible discovery: Renty and his daughter, Delia, had been photographed. In fact, the 1850 daguerreotypes of them are believed to be the first images ever made of enslaved people. Lost for decades, they were found in an attic at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976.
