Category: Ancestry

Ancestry

For African Americans, DNA tests reveal just a small part of a complicated ancestry

By Eli Chen

African Americans often have scant knowledge about where their ancestors are from, so many are using DNA test kits, like 23andMe and Ancestry, to trace their roots. The transatlantic slave trade erased a lot of information about family history and countries of origin for many people descended from African slaves.

It took nearly 30 minutes for Eric Depradine to extract a saliva sample from his dying grandmother. Depradine, 35, of Kansas City, wanted to have his grandmother’s DNA tested to confirm his suspicions that her ancestors came from Madagascar.

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Ancestry

NAACP Announces Memorial Trip to Ghana
  • Jamestown to Jamestown memorial trip to Ghana announced to commemorate 400 years of African diaspora
     

The Jamestown to Jamestown Memorial Trip to Ghana, an official event of Ghana’s Year of Return, was announced at the 50th NAACP Image Awards in Hollywood, California by Diallo Sumbry, Ghana’s first Black American Tourism Ambassador, in partnership with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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Ancestry

Meet Redoshi: The last enslaved African From Benin Republic To Survive Forced Migration to the U.S.

By Tanasia Kenney

A researcher at Newcastle University in Great Britain has pieced together the history of a remarkable woman believed to be the last survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade ships that arrived in the U.S.

Redoshi, later known as Sally Smith, was kidnapped from a village in modern-day Benin, West Africa, and brought to the United States, where she lived and died on the Alabama plantation where she was enslaved, according to research by Dr. Hannah Durkin.

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Ancestry

ANCESTRY.COM releases new data for African diaspora to unearth their lineage

By Samara Lynn

Genealogical website Ancestry.com, has released 94 new and updated communities so that African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans can learn more about their roots.

Communities are part of the AncestryDNA test, which lets people from the African diaspora explore their heritage and how their ancestors migrated.

One of the new communities focuses on Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina African Americans. As per Ancestry:

“Members with this community may have ancestors that were enslaved and working on rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. When cotton fields came to the area in the late 1700s, many enslaved African Americans were brought to work those fields. Following the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II, many South Carolinians followed rail lines up North to New York and Philadelphia. This group was one of many communities that were part of the Great Migration–which was the movement of millions of African Americans during the 1900s from the South to cities in the North and West.”

Another new AncestryDNA community centers on Louisiana Creoles and African Americans. Interestingly, Ancestry’s research finds that by 1940 more than 18% of African Americans in the Bay Area were from Louisiana.

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Ancestry

I’m a prince’: An American pastor shocked to find he has African royal ties

It was about 4am when his phone buzzed with a message from far away. He read it once, twice, three times before he woke his wife to tell her the news.

“I’m a prince,” he whispered as she blinked herself awake. “A prince.”

Jay Speights, an interfaith pastor from Maryland, US, could hardly believe the words as he formed them in his mouth. Him? A prince? He grew up in New Jersey. He lives in an apartment. He does not even own a car.

Speights, 66, had spent much of his life wondering about his forebears, probing public records until the trail went cold. Like many black Americans who are descendants of slaves, Speights could find little written evidence of his family’s history. In April, he turned to a DNA test from Ancestry in the hope that something, somewhere might turn up.

He was identified as the distant cousin of a man named Houanlokonon Deka – a descendant of a royal line in Benin, a small nation that once housed West Africa’s biggest slave port. At the urging of a friend, he ran his DNA data through another database that looks for matches between African Americans and Africans who have taken such tests.
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