Cheryl McKissack Daniel’s parents never bought her dolls. Instead, she got T-squares, trains and lettering sets to play with. “I grew up in a family legacy that was all about architecture, engineering and construction,” said Mrs Daniel, 64, a part-time Bermuda resident.

Her ancestor, Moses McKissack III, was one of the first Black Americans to qualify as a registered architect. He founded McKissack & McKissack in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1905.

It is one of the longest running minority and woman-owned professional design and construction firms in America.

Mrs Daniel is president and chief executive of the firm headquartered in Manhattan, New York. Her father, William DeBerry McKissack, and mother, Leatrice Buchanan McKissack, ran it before she did.

In 2025, Mrs Daniel released a book about her family legacy — The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers.

She will be signing books at Long Story Short in St George next month.

Mrs Daniel started tracing her family tree as a preteen.

“I got a hold of a family tree when I was around 11 or 12 and it was fascinating to me,” she said. “However, it was handwritten and a lot of the information was not legible.”

She decided to completely redo her family tree and to do it properly using a lettering set. “I put it on a large sheet of paper on a drafting table,” she said.

The information she had ended with her father’s generation, so she began extending it by talking with different members of the family and drawing on her own knowledge of cousins and their children.

Genealogy holds unique challenges for people whose ancestors were enslaved.

“You can trace your history,” she said. “It is there, but you have to work at it. The information is not going to just fall into your lap. It has gotten easier, especially with genealogy websites such as ancestry.com.”

Mrs Daniels said it was hard to trace her ancestors back before emancipation, but she eventually found information about Moses McKissack I in enslaver records in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

She also used documents at the Tennessee archives and materials at Fisk University in Nashville, plus oral stories.

She learnt that her ancestor had been an enslaved West African from the Ashanti tribe.

He learnt the brickmaking trade in North Carolina.

When his enslaver, contractor William McKissack moved to Maury County, Tennessee, in 1834, he went with him.

Upon gaining his freedom, Moses McKissack I continued to work as a master builder and maker of bricks.

“They were in the process of converting from log cabins to more sturdier structures with brick,” Mrs Daniel explained.

After the Civil War, his son, Moses McKissack II, started a construction and contracting business in Tennessee. It was a dangerous time and place to be a successful Black entrepreneur.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in a small town in Tennessee a few years before he started the business.

“We have come up with some scenarios for why he was able to operate,” Mrs Daniel said. “The main one being a circle of conditional protectors. He worked for people who needed his services, so they protected him as long as they needed him.”

She is now writing a second book about the second Moses.

Even in Mrs Daniel’s time, life could be frightening in Tennessee. She remembers being at a birthday party as a young child and seeing a cross burning on the lawn.

“The party was not even a block from the Fisk University campus,” she said. “While we were inside of the house someone lit a cross on the lawn. I guess some white folks that didn’t like Black folks did it.”

Everyone at the party raced outside to look at it.

“It was very scary,” she remembered. “How did they come into our neighbourhood, put up a cross and set it on fire without us even realising?”

They went back inside, but it put a damper on everything.

“The parents at the party had to discuss what to do about it. At the same time, they were trying to comfort us.”

The experience shattered her sense of security. Writing her family story took 20 years.

The first draft of The Black Family Who Built America was dry and unappealing.

Her publicist helped connect the family with writer Nick Chiles. He read the manuscript and felt he could make it more engaging.

“He conducted more interviews with me and my mother and people close to the family,” Mrs Daniel said. “We were able to come up with what we have now, a book that tells this 230‑year history in a more exciting way.”

The book was released in 2025 and is on the Black Bestsellers Book List.

Mrs Daniel and her husband, Samuel Jeremiah Daniel, have been spending time in Bermuda and maintaining a residence here since about 2009.

During her upcoming visit, Bermudians will have the chance to encounter both the history and the woman behind it at her book signing at Long Story Short in St George’s.

She first met shop owner Kristin White years ago through Ms White’s son.

“I met her long time ago through her son,” Mrs Daniel recalled.

She has yet to take one of Ms White’s popular history tours, but hopes to do so on this visit.

• Cheryl McKissack Daniel will be speaking with readers and signing books on May 1, at 6.30pm, at The Arcades at Water Street West in St George. The talk will be facilitated by journalist Jasmine Patterson