In 1997, journalist and writer Leslie Tucker invited photographer Henry Horenstein to Maryland to meet the Wesorts, a little-known American family of multiethnic origin. What began as a genealogical inquiry—tracing roots to the founding of the first Catholic colony—expanded into a study of the mixed origins of America and an effort to preserve a family history at risk of disappearing. We Sort of People is the resulting collaboration.

Horenstein photographed the last generation of the Proctor family and the world around them, while Tucker recorded conversations with knowledgeable women within the family. The book therefore works through two closely related forms of witness: photographic portraiture and spoken recollection. Its subjects are not presented simply as entries in a lineage. Their voices convey the complexities of their lives from within the family, giving personal memory an authority distinct from the classifications imposed by conventional historical narratives.

The title itself carries the social tension at the project’s center: the language of “our sort” and “your sort” signals both belonging and separation. Through one family’s history, the book raises broader questions about how American identities are named, inherited, and remembered. Its importance lies not in proposing a single account of ancestry, but in holding together genealogy, portraiture, place, and oral history at a moment when the people able to transmit that knowledge were vanishing.

Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2023, the 136-page hardcover deserves attention from collectors of documentary photography and American social history for the specificity of its subject and the complementary roles of image and testimony. It preserves an encounter between photographer, writer, and family in which historical inquiry remains inseparable from individual presence.