Historical research in RioGrande do Sul is mixed with investigations that, over the decades, have sought, rather than knowing the foundations of our society in its political, economic and cultural aspects, to enhance family trunks and specific ethnic-racial groups. Thus, a sometimes positive but often harmful interweaving between genealogy and history is perceived, since the family histories that come from it are not largely from subordinate groups. The development of a strong Eurocentric varnish identity in southern Brazil has reached editorial circles and even forms of documentary arrangement in many gaucho places of memory, fostering and facilitating research projecting genealogies of white or at least socially white families. The purpose of this article is to propose the investment in the research of trajectories of black individuals and families, leading such characters in a regional and national historical process marked by multiraciality. We will stop at a special black family nucleus, formed by the coast african José Manoel Antônio and the cassanje Maria Rita da Conceição. This aphrodiasporic couple had two children, the shoemaker José Manoel Antônio Filho and the bricklayer Florêncio Manoel Antônio. We do not know what Maria Rita was concerned with, but both Josés, father and son, and Florencio worked as artists, that is, skilled manual workers. The two children of this African couple acted in the direction of Rio Grande do Sul's first black (non-religious) association, the "Floresta Aurora Charitable Society", created in Porto Alegre, in 1872. Focusing on one character or family group is never an exercise restricted to a few individuals, since the relationships spread in kinship and familiarity networks, friendships, associativism, devotion. Living the structural precariousness of freedom in a still-slave society, this black family in captivity forged social strategies that allowed it to demarcate its distance from slavery.