Gorée is a small island located off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. A minor slave port, it has become famous for La Maison des Esclaves (The Slave House), built in 1786 by French-African Creoles and now a museum serving as a testament and memorial to the region’s slave trade. It displays slavery artifacts and contains the “Door of No Return,” an example of the portal through which millions of slaves left African shores bound for a life of servitude in the New World. Bernard traces the family’s ancestors to Senegal and this rock represents the passage of those ancestors to the Americas