Code Black Associates started as a crew name at Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas in 2012. But the "Associates" in the name was never only about the athletes I lined up with on that roster. It's also a family word. The full name I carry is Daniel Dajai Stewart-Handy, and the second half of that hyphen opens onto a lineage I've spent real time trying to document — carefully, with sources, and without inventing anything I can't back up.
Two names, one hyphen
Stewart-Handy is not a stylistic choice. It's two family lines meeting in one person, and genealogy work on a hyphenated name means you're really tracing two trees that have to be kept honest against each other. The Stewart side and the Handy side each have their own records, their own migrations, their own gaps — and the temptation in this kind of research is to let a strong finding on one branch paper over a weak spot on the other.
I don't do that. Every person I place on the tree gets a confidence level attached, and that confidence is tied to what an actual record says, not to how much I want the connection to be real. A census line that names a household is strong evidence. A shared surname in the same county is a lead, not a conclusion. Keeping those two things separate is the entire discipline of the work.
Records, not stories
Family history usually arrives as oral tradition — a grandmother's account, a name repeated at reunions, a "we're related to so-and-so" that nobody ever checked. Those stories are where research starts, but they are not where it's allowed to end. The job is to take an oral claim and go find the paper that either supports it or doesn't.
That means the primary sources: census enumerations, which put named people in named households in a specific place and year; vital records where they survive; and the harder-to-reach archival material that documents lines the standard genealogy sites don't index well. For African American lineage in particular, a lot of the crucial records sit in state and institutional archives rather than in the tidy commercial databases, and getting to them means going through archive systems built decades ago and never modernized. That's slow, unglamorous work, and it's the only work that actually settles a question.
When a record confirms a link, I write it down with the citation. When a record contradicts the family story, I write that down too, because a genealogy that only records the flattering findings isn't research — it's a scrapbook.
Honest confidence is the whole point
The reason I'm careful about this is that the stakes are higher than a hobby tree. Code Black Associates carries the CBA name into athletics, into music publishing under Code Black CBA, and into everything else the brand touches. If I'm going to attach a lineage to that name in public, the lineage has to be defensible.
So I hold myself to a simple rule: cite it or flag it. A connection I can source gets stated plainly, with the record behind it. A connection I only suspect gets labeled as a suspicion, in the open, so nobody downstream mistakes my hope for my evidence. That honesty is not a weakness in the research — it's what makes the strong parts trustworthy. When most of the tree is documented with real records and the uncertain parts are clearly marked as uncertain, a reader knows exactly how much weight each branch can hold.
That's the same standard I apply to everything under the Code Black banner. On the athletics side, the Bishop Gorman roster names are verifiable — the D1 and NFL outcomes attached to that circle are a matter of public record, not embellishment. The genealogy has to meet that same bar. A name only goes on the tree with confidence when a record earns it that confidence.
Why lineage belongs under the CBA banner
Someone could ask why a brand that started as a high-school crew and grew into athletics and publishing is doing genealogy at all. The answer is that they were always the same project.
Code Black Associates was built on the idea that the people around me — the roster, the crew, the family — are one equal group, not a hierarchy with a star on top. Tracing the Stewart-Handy line is the oldest version of that same instinct: figuring out who the associates were before there was a name for it, generations back. The athletics pipeline documents where the circle went. The genealogy documents where it came from. Same brand, same insistence on getting the record right, pointed backward in time instead of forward.
The Bishop Gorman era gave Code Black its start and its roster. The family line gives it its roots. I research both the same way — with sources on the table, confidence tied to evidence, and every uncertain claim flagged as uncertain — because the name deserves a history I can actually stand behind, not a story I'd have to walk back if someone checked.
FAQ
What is the Stewart-Handy line?
It's the hyphenated family lineage carried by Daniel Dajai Stewart-Handy, founder of Code Black Associates. The hyphen joins two family branches — Stewart and Handy — and researching it means tracing both trees with cited records rather than relying on oral tradition alone.
How is the genealogy research kept honest?
Every person placed on the tree gets a confidence level tied to actual evidence. A census record naming a household is strong; a shared surname in the same county is a lead, not a conclusion. Connections that can be sourced are stated with citations; connections that are only suspected are openly flagged as suspicions, so nobody mistakes hope for evidence.
What is the connection between Code Black Associates and genealogy?
Code Black Associates began as a Bishop Gorman crew in 2012 built on the idea of the surrounding people as one equal group. Tracing the Stewart-Handy family line is the same instinct pointed backward — documenting the "associates" generations before the name existed. Athletics records where the circle went; genealogy records where it came from.
Why are African American lineage records harder to trace?
Many of the crucial records for African American family lines sit in state and institutional archives rather than in the commercial genealogy databases, and those archive systems are often old and poorly indexed. Reaching them takes slow, direct archival work, but primary sources like census enumerations are what actually settle a lineage question rather than just suggesting one.