Derrell Teat

This was THAT assignment. The one that the editor calls you excitedly about and then you quickly realize that while it's a really compelling story, it's really nonvisual. The one where it's your first time working for a client and you want to do well, even though you're resigned to shooting a portrait. The one where if something could go wrong, it would and probably did. Ideas fell through. Lights crapped out on me. Etc, etc... But this is what I ended up with, and they called me for another job about a week later, so I guess they were happy.

Meet Derrell "Dee" Teat. She has been researching genealogy for about 15 years, running as many as 12 listservs, and has become obsessed with tracking down descendants of her distant relative John B. Hodgens. She even went so far as to corner a guy in his garage in Georgia, demanding a DNA sample, and when he declined, she followed him to a McDonald's the next morning and tried to take his coffee cup out of the trash can after he threw it away.