Regaining a Lost Heritage
Can a simple procedure unlock African-Americans’ genetic history? Or is DNA tracing just an expensive waste of time?
By Toni Coleman
This year’s Black History Month program at my friend’s Washington, D.C. church won’t just feature kids reading about famous firsts and courageous equality fighters. Added to the mix is a lecture to the congregation on using DNA testing to determine their African lineage.
Increasingly, Blacks are turning to science and not assumptions to put “Africa” back in “African-American.” The eagerness to reconnect is understandable. People robbed of their history innately want to know where they come from. Veteran genealogists say the PBS special, “African American Lives,” in which Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed the family histories and African lineages of such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey and comedian Chris Tucker, certainly created a spike in interest in genealogy and DNA testing.
I was all too excited when my editor asked me to do a first-person story on this growing phenomenon. Genealogical research has become more accessible because of Web sites like Ancestry.com, which has made detailed pre-1930s U.S. Census Bureau records and vital documents available online. Another worthwhile site is FamilySearch.org, which plans to put the Freedmen’s Bureau bank records online. Still, we can only go back so far with traditional research, and so much was lost in the Middle Passage.
Out of this desire to know exactly where we come from, African Ancestry Inc. was born, says company president Gina Paige, a former product specialist for a number of Fortune 500 companies. For $299, the company analyses a person’s DNA and compares it with the DNA samples of present-day Africans to identify an ancestral link. Co-founder and scientific director Dr. Rick Kittles, an associate professor of medicine and a geneticist at the University of Chicago, had used DNA analysis to determine his own lineage, but when word spread about his research, he was inundated with requests from Blacks wanting to know what stories their own DNA held.
