This was a unique partnership we entered into with descendants of plantation owners and their slaves. The committee evolved after the publication of Edward Ball’s best-selling Slaves in the Family, an extraordinary accounting of the history of one of the largest slave-holding families in South Carolina – his own. Mr. Ball not only researched the lives of his ancestors and life on their plantations, but also the lives of their slaves and their descendants. Members of both groups hoped to explore news ways in which the scars of the past might be healed.