One Georgetown University employee recently found out that he was tied to the school by more than a paycheck.

Jeremy Alexander, an executive assistant in Georgetown’s office of technology commercialization, recently found out that his paternal great-great-great grandmother, Anna Mahoney Jones, was one of the hundreds of slaves sold by two Jesuit priests at Georgetown to save the school from bankruptcy, reports the New York Times.

“Now I work here—to realize that this is my history, this is my story, blows me away,” said Alexander. “I have been really emotional as I learned about my ties to the university.”