In January 2024, for reasons she’s still not sure of, Lela Jenkins, AB’20, decided to update her address in UChicago’s alumni directory. Before long, the Winter/24 issue of the University of Chicago Magazine made its way to her New York City apartment and then to her coffee table.

A few weeks later, while her mother was visiting from Georgia, Jenkins began flipping through the magazine. A story about Cora Belle Jackson, AB 1896, the University’s first Black graduate (“An Unseen Life,” Winter/24), caught her eye; as a fellow Black alumna, Jenkins was curious about women like Jackson who had come before her.

Jenkins was reading the story out loud to her mother when she stumbled upon a familiar name: Harvey Cook Jackson, Cora’s brother and Jenkins’s great-great-grandfather. The three women—the two sitting in Manhattan and the one on the page—were related. In fact, Jenkins and Cora had each, more than a century apart, made their way from Hyde Park to Harlem.

Jenkins and her mother “both got a little bit teary-eyed,” Jenkins says. Realizing she had attended the same school as a great-great-great-aunt she hadn’t known about was “so surreal. I can’t really explain that level of coincidence after a certain point.”

That Jenkins recognized the relationship at all was its own piece of happenstance. After her grandfather died in 2021, she’d begun researching her family tree and discovered that Harvey Cook Jackson had been one of the first known Black photographers and studio owners in Detroit. Jenkins, who works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, got interested in resemblances between Harvey’s work and that of another important early Black photographer, James Van Der Zee, whose work is held at the museum. (Jenkins wrote an essay on Harvey and Van Der Zee that was recently published on the Met’s website.)

“All of these family members’ names were already in my mind, which they hadn’t been before I’d been doing this research,” Jenkins says. Without such familiarity, “I might not even have drawn that connection.”

Energized by the discovery of a fellow Maroon among her relatives, Jenkins has continued her research project—“my mom calls me the family historian”—and discovered that a cousin even has pictures of Cora, a rarity for the era. She’s also exchanged emails with John Mark Hansen, the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and the Magazine article’s author, who connected her to another member of the Cook family interested in genealogy.

Jenkins’s investigation has revealed familial similarities beyond the shared UChicago connection with Cora. For instance, Jenkins got interested in film photography at age 12 and learned how to develop and print her own images, with no idea that her great-great-grandfather had owned a photo studio. One of his photographs was even exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2018, a fact Jenkins did not know when she began her own museum career two years later.

She hadn’t initially considered that path—“I really thought that to be at a museum, you had to be a curator,” a role that usually requires a PhD. She was pleased to discover how many kinds of museum jobs were available.

Today she’s on the Met’s video team, coordinating exhibition tours, artist interviews, and other informational material for the museum’s YouTube channel. “I do a little bit of everything,” she says. (Her involvement with the museum’s social media channels means she’s even gotten to work at the star-studded Met Gala.)

Jenkins is still deciding how to interpret the many connections and resonances with the past she’s discovered in her own life over the past year. “I think this,” she says, “more than anything that’s happened to me in my life, has made me think a little bit more spiritually about coincidence.”