06/10/2026
She started out preserving the things history tried to bury. Then she became the one who tells you what they mean.
Dr. Cheryl LaRoche trained as a conservator, the person whose hands stabilize what comes out of the ground before it can be lost again. That is the work that put her on the African Burial Ground in New York City, the colonial cemetery of free and enslaved Africans hidden under Lower Manhattan for two centuries. She conserved what was recovered there before most of the country knew the site existed.
She did not stop at preservation. She earned her PhD, became a historian, and went looking for the rest of the story. She served on the archaeological team at the President's House in Philadelphia, where the home of the first president sat on the labor of the people he enslaved. She spent three years as principal investigator at Hampton in Maryland, recovering the names and lives of the enslaved and connecting them to descendants living today. She was lead author on the National Park Service study that shaped how Harriet Tubman's landscapes are protected and told.
Archaeologist. Historian. Writer. Author. Across every title, one job: find the history, prove it, and refuse to let it disappear.
You cannot protect what you cannot remember.
