Dedication: The Unconscious Inheritance

For generations my family lived as blue-collar Democrats entirely unaware of the older code folded inside them. The founding line — Jeffersonian, Washingtonian, Madisonian — did not disappear. It was dimensionally compressed: a coordinate system flattened by the class divide, enfolded inside hard labor, and carried forward without a map. It fell to a grandmother with an archive, a genealogy, and a set of genetic tests to retrieve it. The founding inheritance was never lost. It was waiting to be recognized.