Historians had spent decades searching for the site of the cabin in which Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman lived as a young adult. They knew from land records that the cabin stood near the Blackwater River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, so they began an excavation last fall. For months, they had no luck—until an archaeologist discovered a coin from 1808, the year Tubman’s parents were married, and ceramic shards dating from the 1820s to 1840s. That convinced them they had located the cabin of Benjamin Ross, Tubman’s father. Tubman lived there roughly between the ages of 17 and 22, from 1839 to 1844. Archaeologists will continue excavating in hopes of learning more about Tubman and her family. “This gives us insight into a time and place in Tubman’s life we know very little about,” says Kate Clifford Larson, a Tubman biographer. “The community really created this woman, and we can’t fully understand her until we understand the place she came out of.”