About Guy Weston
Guy Weston is a public historian, genealogist, writer, and preservationist whose work explores the lives and communities of free Black Americans in the decades before the Civil War. He is the founder and Managing Director of the Timbuctoo Historical Society and a Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. His research combines genealogy, public records, historic newspapers, archaeology, material culture, and family-held documents to recover stories that have often been absent from conventional accounts of American history.
Weston’s principal focus is Timbuctoo, New Jersey, a free Black community established in Burlington County in 1826. His connection to the community is both scholarly and deeply personal: his fourth great-grandfather purchased land there in 1829, and the property has remained in the family for seven generations. A collection of nineteenth-century deeds, mortgages, wills, and other documents preserved by his family helped launch what became a decades-long investigation into the people who built Timbuctoo and the larger world of free Black communities in the antebellum North.
That research culminated in New Jersey’s Timbuctoo: Free Black Community Before the Civil War, scheduled for publication by The History Press on January 5, 2027. Weston is also the author or co-author of more than a dozen articles on Timbuctoo, African American history, genealogy, and historic preservation. His work has appeared in New Jersey Studies, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society Journal, National Genealogical Society Magazine, and other publications.
Weston approaches public history as more than the recovery of names and dates. His work seeks to reconstruct how people lived—the property they acquired, institutions they created, families they sustained, challenges they confronted, and communities they built. He has helped translate that research into interpretive signage, educational curricula, exhibitions, lectures, historic-designation initiatives, cemetery preservation, and archaeological research. Through the Timbuctoo Historical Society, he has worked to make primary historical sources accessible to scholars, teachers, students, descendants, and the general public.
In 2025, Preservation New Jersey presented Weston with its Dr. Doris C. Carpenter Excellence Award in recognition of his contributions to preserving and promoting the history of New Jersey’s diverse communities. He was also inducted into the Willingboro High School Hall of Fame as a distinguished graduate.
History represents a second major professional chapter for Weston. For more than three decades, beginning in 1986, his career centered on HIV/AIDS—as a writer, researcher, public administrator, trainer, and program executive. He held senior positions in public health agencies in Vermont, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, including serving as Director of Data and Research for the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration. His research there helped draw public attention to the extraordinary burden of AIDS in Washington and to disparities affecting African Americans and women.
His writing career also began with the emerging AIDS epidemic. During the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote extensively about HIV/AIDS, health, and LGBTQ issues, particularly for LGBTQ publications, while also contributing to publications including the Philadelphia Tribune. His public-health research and work were subsequently reported in major newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post. Today, those early articles form an archive of a period when communities, journalists, activists, health professionals, and public institutions were struggling to understand and respond to a new epidemic.
Long before either of those careers, Weston acquired an unusually broad view of the world. The son of a career military serviceman, he grew up living in 15 homes in three countries and attending nine schools by age 15. Continually encountering new places, cultures, languages, and communities taught him early that the same story can look very different depending upon where one stands. He credits that experience with shaping his approach to research, writing, teaching, and public history.
Weston holds a master’s degree in Bilingual/Bicultural Studies and speaks Spanish with native proficency as a imersion to the language early in life. He points out that training in cultural studies was foundational to his success in researching and teacing about cultural heritage in the historic preservation arena. Across careers that have ranged from HIV/AIDS administration and journalism to genealogy and historic preservation, his work has remained grounded in a consistent purpose: finding stories that have been overlooked, examining the evidence carefully, and making those stories available to a wider public.