Descendants of Black Civil war combatants

3 years ago I embarked on a journey to recreate photos of Black American civil war combatants with their descendants. This involved exhaustive research of libraries, archives and collections all over the USA to identified named contemporary photos. This gave us a starting point of just over 100 identified photos ands from there we worked closely with the black history unit of Wikitree, a volunteer genealogy organisation, to establish family trees. Once we had this information we traced the descendants and invited them to participate in the project. The photos were recreating using a tin type camera with the costume and props being made from scratch with the set built using traditional painted techniques. The resulting project was used in the black history month edition of the Smithsonian magazine and featured on the cover