Reddit reviews The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

That's so cool! I'm glad you know so much already about your family. Some things I'd wonder about (and might answer through talking to relatives or reading books):

• The Creole experience -- there's lots of stuff about this, of course.
  
• The free black experience in St. Louis. Everything I know about this comes from a museum exhibit, but it seemed pretty interesting.
  
• Did your Creole relatives move from Louisiana to St. Louis? If so, when? What was going on (in both states) that might have prompted that?
  
• Was your maternal grandfather in the military before it desegregated, and if so what was that like? What was the end of Jim Crow like generally for your relatives? (I think either your parents or your grandparents would have gone through school desegregation?)
  
• Is either side of your family religious? If so, which denomination(s) do they belong to? What's it like being black in that denomination? If not, why not, and what's their black agnostic/atheist experience like?
  
• Your parents' experiences--you say they were raised around white people, but they both married black. Where did they meet, and how? Did/do they have any particular feelings about interracial dating/marriage? On your mom's side, what was her military brat experience like?
  
• Did you have any relatives who passed? (I do!) What were the circumstances? How does the family talk about them? Are there people who could have passed and chose not to?
  
  I don't know if you've read it, but I would suggest the book "Our Kind of People"--it's flawed in many ways, and my family was never an upper-class black family, but I found a lot of resonances to my own family in it, and from your description of your family, I think you may too. Another suggestion would be "The Warmth of Other Suns", and particularly the experiences of Robert Foster, a Creole doctor who moved from Louisiana to California in the 1950s. (I'm not sure if your family is readers, but see if you can get your parents to read it; I suspect they'd really enjoy it, and it would open some good conversations.) Finally, keep an eye out for "Black Elephants in the Room", which is being released in October and is about the particular experiences of black Republicans.

Links:

• Amazon
  
• Google Play