Families separated during the Transatlantic Slave Trade are able to reunite as ancestral family groups using publicly available genetic genealogy tools.
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One of the goals of The African Kinship Reunion is to construct the genetic genealogy of our participants from Africa. In this post, I discuss the genetic genealogy dendrogram (tree diagram) results produced using SNPRelate. The purpose of using SNPRelate was to obtain genetic relatedness connections among participants in the form of a tree diagram. I welcome your feedback in
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Kabagworiwe Safiah and her parents Kabagworiwe Adam and Kabagworiwe Saleimabu are members of the Kassena ethnic group who have tested with Ancestry and subsequently had their DNA profiles uploaded to GEDmatch. This is a narrative of the practice of finding their relatives in GEDmatch. I did a one-to-many comparison for Safiah to find all the matches in the GEDmatch database
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TAKiR uses the Infinium H3Africa Array (Illumina) with 2.26 million markers! The array design was submitted by the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) consortium design team. Our samples are analyzed by the Functional Genomics Unit of Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center. One of TAKiR’s core projects involves encouraging northern Ghanaians to take an autosomal DNA test to help
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Drawing from my interactions with Africans and people of African descent who are interacting with each other as family members, a friend’s Facebook post brought something to mind. To explain it, I need to highlight a certain aspect of the idea of white supremacy first. White supremacy is the idea that people racialized as white and who have no African
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Up until this time, this blog focused on initial family reunions between people of African descent in the diaspora and Africans immigrants. Many people, including academics, never thought this would be possible because of the amount of time that has passed between the time of separation into the Transatlantic Slave Trade and now. But people of African descent are increasingly
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For 10 weeks in May to July 2016, my mother (Wylene Hameed) and I traveled to 5 of the 10 regions of Ghana. I explored the question of reuniting with descendants of family members who were taken away during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Conversations took place in Accra (Greater Accra Region), Elmina (Central Region), Ejisu (Ashanti Region), Kumasi (Ashanti Region),
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Great grandmother Nana Faba Idun (age 81) has lived in Elmina, a Ghanaian town of one of the infamous slave dungeons, all her life. Nana’s brother, Joseph “Kawantwi” Arthur, remembers the childhood stories of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Kawantwi spoke of having a great-grandfather who was taken away to work for the Europeans in another land. They thought they would
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Germainy Debbie Mokeleba of the Republic of Congo decided to take an AncestryDNA test in April to help identify possible kin in the diaspora. Debbie is a graduating undergraduate I met when I gave a presentation in her class in March, 2016. She was a student in the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s EPSY 203 “African/African-Americans: A Global Dialogue”
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“My maternal grandmother told me…that way back in time, we had family members who went to the stream to fetch water and never returned. This stuck in my psyche for all those years.” – Ade As a young boy of 6 or 7, Ade and his older brother normally visited with their grandmother Alice after school until their parents returned
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You couldn’t tell it from looking at the faces in this picture, but this moment captures the family embrace of descendants of common Ashanti ancestors separated through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. One is an African American descendant of those who endured American Slavery. The other three are Ghanaian descendants of Ashantis who remained in Ghana during the Transatlantic Slave Era.
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Rhoda, a Ghanaian woman of the Fante ethnic group, recently conducted an autosomal DNA test through AncestryDNA. After receiving her results, she discovered that among those who previously tested with AncestryDNA, she is related to at least 20 people of African descent with a 100% to 95% chance of finding their common ancestors within 5 to 6 generations. Some of
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