Dancing wasn’t just a part of the festivities for Elizabeth Katherine Thomas and Anthony Lee Gregg’s wedding day, as the couple paraded through the French Quarter of New Orleans on a balmy day in October. It was a declaration of joy reclaimed.
Nine years earlier, new details about Ms. Thomas’s family history had shaken her to the core.
Holding the train of her daughter’s gown, Sandra Green Thomas, the bride’s mother, could not stop herself from enthusiastically two-stepping along the route.
Ms. Green Thomas, the chief of staff to a New Orleans City councilman, Eugene Green, and a self-proclaimed history buff who grew up in New Orleans, had spent decades gathering newspaper clippings, stories and pictures to fill the gaps lost to generations of oral storytelling.
Everything she knew about her lineage began and ended in Maringouin, La. That is, until she read a New York Times article in April 2016 about the harrowing sale of over 200 enslaved people in 1838 by Jesuit priests at Georgetown University, which owned plantations in Maryland, to rescue the institution from its debts. Most of the enslaved people were shipped to work on plantations in the Deep South.
Ms. Green Thomas immediately recognized the lead photo as the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church Cemetery in Maringouin, where many of her family members are buried. A link provided in the article took her to the Georgetown slavery archive, where, among the list of the enslaved people sold, were names she recognized: her great-great-grandparents, Sam and Betsy Harris.
“None of us knew we had any connection to Maryland,” said Ms. Thomas, the 31-year-old bride, who also grew up in New Orleans. After discovering the physical and emotional pain inflicted on her ancestors by the Jesuits, she questioned her own connection to Catholicism. “If my family was never enslaved by the Catholic Church, would we still be Catholic?” she said. “Was Catholicism kind of forced upon me in a way, or is it a path I’ve really chosen for myself?”
In a previous interview with The Times, her mother, Ms. Green Thomas, said, “It is really horrific. My great-great-grandmother had a 5-month-old child when she was forced onto that ship.”
At the time, the younger Ms. Thomas was following a path shaped by her mother’s career working in different roles in the New Orleans city government.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Ms. Thomas completed print media internships in New York before returning to New Orleans to work on political campaigns.
Building a career in Washington was never on her radar.
“My mom had been pushing for me to go back to school, but I didn’t really feel the need to,” she said. That changed when Georgetown announced in 2016 that it would offer legacy admission status to descendants of the enslaved people whose labor the university had profited from. Two years later, Ms. Thomas was accepted to Georgetown’s graduate journalism program.
Ms. Thomas, now a producer for ABC News, including “World News Tonight with David Muir,” which earned a News & Documentary Emmy this year, felt an unexpectedly deep connection to the area during her time at Georgetown. “I didn’t feel like I was a stranger to D.C.,” she said.
Her first few years in Washington brought many good things: a full-time job after graduation at ABC News, where she shared the story of her ancestors in a column; an apartment she loved in the Mount Vernon neighborhood; and, last but not least, Mr. Gregg.
In January 2022, when Mr. Gregg, now 37, came across Ms. Thomas’s Hinge profile, he was intrigued by how the one-dimensionality of online dating had somehow failed to muffle her larger-than-life personality.
After chatting for some time, they asked each other why they were on Hinge.
“Trying to be intentional about my dating,” Mr. Gregg answered. “I hate to say the corny thing — ‘find my person’ — but yeah.”
Alarm bells rang through Ms. Thomas’s head. “I screen-shotted that, because, you know, a lot of guys on Hinge or in real life will love-bomb you to try and get something.”
The screenshot made its way to her Close Friends story on Instagram, where she asked her friends if they thought he was being genuine; they replied with resounding no’s.
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Still, their conversations remained consistent, and after what felt like an unbearably long time to Ms. Thomas, Mr. Gregg finally asked her out. He chose Morris American Bar in the Mount Vernon Square neighborhood as the location for their first date because it was only a six-minute walk from her apartment.
Ms. Thomas considered canceling. She was only a few months out of a yearlong relationship, and after spending the evening watching a Louisiana State University game on TV, she was not particularly in the mood. After a pep talk from some friends, she eventually made it to the bar — 20 minutes late, and wearing a Joe Burrow L.S.U. jersey.
Mr. Gregg, who was watching the game on his phone, recalled Ms. Thomas asking, “You picked a bar with no TV?” as she sat down. Hoping to catch bits and pieces of the game, she later asked that they relocate to a bar with one.
She also came ready to investigate. She asked Mr. Gregg a series of what he called “reporter-style” questions, while sharing minimal details about herself. He admits he learned so little about her that he didn’t feel an immediate romantic spark that night.
Ms. Thomas, however, sat across from him, soaking in his answers with laser focus. Awkward first-date banter was nonexistent, and she hoped to go to a third location that night. But Mr. Gregg, a software engineer at Asurion who lived about 40 minutes away in Silver Spring, Md., needed to get home.
“It’s Sunday, I have work,” he said, before offering to walk her home. Disappointed, Ms. Thomas rejected the offer.
Mr. Gregg grew up in Elkridge, Md., and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.
The tables turned the second time they got together when Mr. Gregg was the one running late.
“‘I think I got stood up,’” Ms. Thomas texted her friends. Mr. Gregg arrived 40 minutes late to Zeba Bar, a hot spot in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. “In my head, I was like, dang, this is crazy revenge.”
Mr. Gregg arrived feeling sheepish, and Ms. Thomas, eager to enjoy the night, had received enough “sympathy drinks” from bar patrons to forgive him. Shortly after, they made their way upstairs to enjoy a mixture of Latin, reggaeton and Afrobeats music.
Sharing the dance floor that night was a turning point for their relationship, and Mr. Gregg was quietly swooning; he still remembers the “chunky-heeled Converse” Ms. Thomas was wearing, and her signature dance moves.
They shared their first kiss outside the bar that night.
After a few months of consistent daylong dates, visits to different “watering holes” and numerous nights out, they found themselves back at Zeba Bar one night.
As Ms. Thomas two-stepped, Mr. Gregg sat at the corner of the bar on his phone, confessing his love for her to a friend, who urged him over text not to tell her yet. When Ms. Thomas asked him why he wasn’t dancing, Mr. Gregg showed her the exchange.
“Took you long enough,” Ms. Thomas replied. “I love you, too.”
In April 2022, they officially became a couple.
“We were just so lock-step in sync,” Ms. Thomas said about realizing she was ready to take their relationship to the next level. “And I liked how I felt when I was with him. And I liked how he made me feel.”
In November 2022, not quite a year into dating, Ms. Thomas moved into Mr. Gregg’s house in Silver Spring. “It just made so much sense,” Mr. Gregg said.
Ms. Thomas, who had been vocal about her goal to make it out of her 20s with no children and no marriage, was itching to marry Mr. Gregg on the night of her 30th birthday party in New Orleans.
In March 2024, Mr. Gregg, in a beige suit, proposed at the National Gallery of Art museum in Washington.
On Oct. 18, Deacon James LeBlanc officiated their wedding ceremony, in front of 175 guests, at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, where Ms. Thomas’s father’s funeral was held in 2007.
Ms. Green Thomas, the bride’s mother, said she was “all cried out” by the day of the wedding. “It wasn’t tears for me, it was happiness,” she said. “We’ve been through so much as a family, and I think as a people, I don’t have any tears left.”
On This Day
When Oct. 18, 2025
Where St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans
A traditional second line: The wedding guests, waving custom-printed handkerchiefs and led by the couple and the Kinfolk Brass Band, participated in a traditional second line from the ceremony to the reception at Old Ursuline Convent Museum. The parade-like procession was complete with sweat-inducing dancing, as the wedding party jolted their white and black umbrellas up and down, and onlookers flooded the streets to catch a glimpse of the commotion.
A surprise dance: About an hour into the reception, Ms. Thomas pulled her mother, Sandra, into a dance circle of guests as Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” played. “Yes she is!” a guest yelled, as Sandra twirled.
The cake pull: The three-tiered almond wedding cake, complete with a miniature version of the couple’s terrier mix, Sadie, was fitted with silver charms attached to satin ribbons. The bride, her bridesmaids and some guests each pulled a charm, a Southern wedding tradition meant to predict the future. Robyn Summers, a wedding guest who was experiencing cake pulls for the first time, pulled the stability charm and later jokingly asked, “This come with a man?”
The post A Painful Family Discovery, and the Love Story That Followed appeared first on New York Times.
