This paper traces the historical memory of an early Muslim named Abu Bakra, who began his life in obscurity and ended up centuries later lionized as a model of Sunni piety. Despite his liminal origins as a slave of unknown paternity, early Arabic-Islamic authors sought to categorize Abu Bakra in more familiar terms; specifically, they tried to determine whether he was a mawla of the Prophet Muhammad or, on the other hand, a member of the Arabian tribe of Thaqif. By interrogating why authors categorized Abu Bakra in these ways, we can better understand how they shaped his memory to convey particular ideological lessons about Islamic history. For those historians who view Abu Bakra as a mawla, such as Ibn Sa'd and Baladhuri, this designation is more than a neutral description of Abu Bakra's legal station. It also serves to bolster his connection to the Prophet Muhammad and thus undergirds his authority as a historical informant and behavioral model. Moreover, his mawla identity contrasts him sharply with his half-brother, Ziyad ibn Abihi, who infamously "adopted" a Qurashi lineage for political gain. Against the foil of Ziyad, Abu Bakra's proud self-identification as a mawla becomes a badge of moral rectitude and signals his preference for piety over power. On the other hand, hadith specialists such as Ibn Abi Shayba and al-Bukhari viewed Abu Bakra as an Arabian tribesman from Thaqif. They likely used a particular hadith, "The child belongs to the master of the bed," to determine Abu Bakra's legal identity. By doing so, these scholars located a standardized, hadith-based criterion for determining identity, but they also erased the symbolic meaning of Abu Bakra's mawla identity in many historical sources—his agency, authority, and integrity. Ultimately, this analysis reveals that seemingly neutral categories such as mawla and Thaqafi are not always straightforward, but shed light on the shaping of historical memory and provide insight into the development of different historical genres with their own unique symbols, methodologies, and value systems.