NEW YORK, NY.- Shared histories and stories help keep families together. Families that have the wherewithal may even chart genealogies, craft symbolic imagery (think crests and shields) and convey what the English have called heirlooms.

As valuable objects passed down over multiple generations, though, heirlooms are not often associated with Black people in America, a population marked by dislocation as well as legal and financial barriers to accumulating things of value. Many Black families have been hard pressed to learn the names and birthplaces of their ancestors, let alone pass down objects accumulated by previous generations.

The “Black family” was once a contradiction in terms in the American colonies and United States. Before 1865, most people of African descent were enslaved, considered as chattel and prohibited from forming stable families and legally claiming kin. In an environment hostile to their human need to form deep and enduring relationships, enslaved people and their descendants longed for family, fought for family, prized family and remembered family who had been lost to sale or death. But many of these families have not possessed, as the photographer Chanell Stone put it, an heirloom “with a capital H,” meaning “a set of jewelry or fine china — European ideas of what heirlooms are.”

As a result, Black families have collectively redefined what an heirloom can be. Cookbooks, acreage, clothing, hair products, archival documents, newspaper clippings, photographs and photo albums, game pieces, jewelry, luggage, even the gestures of the body itself — all of these become carriers of tradition and vessels of inheritance.

For Black Americans and other communities under siege by societal forces, heirlooms have been especially precious as repositories of memory and sources of joy. As Doretha K. Williams, the director of the Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, has said, “While piecemeal in nature, collectively the stories of these heirlooms create the larger narrative of Black life lived.”

To mark the Juneteenth holiday, The New York Times invited 10 photographers to tell the stories of their families through heirlooms. Their work reveals this new definition of the word “heirloom.” It is significant that these items and traditions have been photographed, as people of African descent in the United States have preserved family photos as a dominant type of heirloom. Stowed away and moved from place to place in old suitcases and shoe boxes, they are exchanged between friends and kin, or dusted off and excavated from attics or beneath beds to be viewed anew.

In her essay “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” cultural critic bell hooks identifies the Black family snapshot as an everyday site of resistance. In hooks’ estimation, Black women and mothers act as “keepers of walls,” adorning the surfaces of the home with family stills, turning stairwells and hallways into galleries and photo albums into miniature exhibitions. In lieu of inclusion on the pristine walls of museums or in the temperature-controlled storage rooms of library archives, Black families have created meaningful constellations of memories through the careful arrangement of snapshots.

The “loom” in the term “heirloom” is not coincidental. This root word retains the old English expectation that a familial inheritance would include practical tools such as looms. We see in this project how the camera indeed becomes a tool for Black descendants: a modern technology for capturing the histories, traditions and pleasures of family.

The photographers took up the camera as a loom, weaving stories of kinship and care across the generations. In the American lands of the African diaspora, kinship has persisted and family bonds have endured — preserved by, and reflected in, heirlooms.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.