Introducing The African Kinship Reunion: Finding Relatives, Reconstructing Family History

How genetic genealogy can help connect living relatives and recover parts of family histories disrupted by mass human trafficking from Africa across the Atlantic.

Mass human trafficking from Africa across the Atlantic, known as the transatlantic slave trade, separated families whose descendants have continued to live for generations on both sides of the Atlantic. Forced displacement, further family separations under slavery, and gaps in historical records have made those family connections harder to trace. For many African Americans descended from enslaved people, recovering family connections to Africa, let alone identifying living relatives there, long seemed impossible.

The search for those connections is at the center of The African Kinship Reunion, or TAKiR, a research project I lead at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. TAKiR brings together genetic genealogy, computational methods, historical and genealogical research, and social science to investigate family relationships connecting Africans and members of the historic African diaspora.

Many people associate DNA testing for African ancestry with percentages, maps, or estimates of ethnic and geographic origins. TAKiR focuses on a different question: Who are a person’s living genetic relatives, particularly among African and African diaspora populations? Evidence that two people inherited DNA from a shared ancestor gives us a relationship to investigate. Their family histories, together with evidence from additional relatives, may help us understand how their branches connect.

Finding relatives is the beginning of that work. We aim to reconstruct portions of extended family trees, bring previously inaccessible family histories into view, and understand what discovering these connections means to the people involved. Each connection concerns families on both sides of the Atlantic, with their own histories, questions, and choices about what a newly discovered relationship might become.

Why begin with living relatives?

The people taken during the mass human trafficking from Africa across the Atlantic belonged to families. They were taken from families, communities, societies, markets, and the wider networks of human civilization. Their forced removal separated them from those relationships. Slavery in the Americas created further separations as family members were sold away from one another.

Generations later, descendants continue to wrestle with those ruptures in their family histories.

Genealogists working on African American genealogies can uncover a great deal through census records, oral histories, newspapers, military records, and other sources. Tracing a family through slavery, however, often means working with records that omit names or describe people as property without documenting their names or relationships. The connection between a family in the Americas and its relatives in Africa can become extraordinarily difficult to trace.

Yet missing records do not mean that every trace of those relationships has disappeared.

Descendants of separated families continued to live and form new branches on both sides of the Atlantic. Some living descendants carry shared DNA inherited from common ancestors. Identifying those people can create another route into the past.

What a DNA match can tell us

Many people first encounter genetic ancestry through a percentage on a map. These results generally compare a person’s DNA with reference groups to estimate genetic similarities associated with particular populations representing specific regions.

Finding a genetic relative involves a different analysis.

An ancestry estimate might indicate that portions of someone’s DNA resemble those found in a reference group sampled in Ghana. That result alone does not identify a particular Ghanaian cousin or a named ancestor.

To investigate relatedness, researchers compare the DNA of individuals to each other and look for stretches they appear to have inherited from a common ancestor. These are called identity-by-descent segments, or IBD segments. The number and lengths of shared segments can help researchers estimate possible relationships.

A well-supported match can provide evidence that two people’s family lines intersect in an estimated time period. Establishing where those lines intersect requires further work.

Imagine an African American participant in Illinois and a Ghanaian participant whose DNA provides evidence of a distant relationship. The result does not automatically tell us the name of their shared ancestor, where that ancestor lived, the ancestor’s ethnicity, or exactly how many generations separate the ancestor from the two genetic relatives.

It gives us a connection to investigate.

We examine the shared DNA alongside the participants’ ages, known family relationships, and other evidence. We also consider alternative explanations and the possibility of errors in detecting shared segments. Several different family connections may fit the available information.

This distinction matters throughout TAKiR: a genetic match can open a genealogical investigation while leaving important questions unresolved.

How a match can help reconstruct a family

Consider the same hypothetical participants in Illinois and Ghana. With only their two DNA profiles, many possible family connections might explain the match.

Now imagine that additional relatives choose to participate: a sister and maternal cousin in Ghana, and an aunt and second cousin in Illinois. If we know how those six relatives fit into their respective family trees, their patterns of shared DNA may help narrow the connection to particular branches.

Each person contributes a different combination of inherited DNA. Studying several relatives together can reveal information that a comparison between two people alone cannot provide.

This is why TAKiR extends beyond producing lists of matches. We investigate how groups of relatives fit into larger family trees.

Computational methods help us compare possible trees. Documentary research, oral histories, and community knowledge help us investigate the people and histories those trees represent. Sometimes several explanations will remain plausible. In other cases, additional relatives or records may help distinguish among them.

The information can also become more useful over time. A relationship that is difficult to interpret today may become clearer when another branch of the family participates.

I think of the broader purpose as genealogical repair: recovering enough information to make a family’s account of its history more complete. I explored this possibility in my 2024 essay in American Anthropologist.

For example, a family’s documentary research might reach an enslaved ancestor in South Carolina and then stop. Genetic evidence could connect that ancestor’s descendants with a network of relatives in Ghana. Further research might narrow the connection to a family branch and uncover histories that were previously unknown to the American descendants.

The exact ancestral link could remain unresolved. Even so, the family would have new relationships and evidence to investigate.

Repair can be partial and still matter.

How far back can DNA take us?

Across generations, inherited DNA is reshuffled, and segments from more distant ancestors tend to become smaller. Some ancestors leave no detectable autosomal DNA in a particular living descendant. Consequently, two people can be genealogical relatives without sharing a detectable match.

Other descendants do retain shared segments across many generations.

For what is now the mainland United States, 1526 marks the first documented arrival of enslaved Africans, who were brought to the Spanish settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape on the southeastern coast. In 1860, the Clotilda, the last known ship to bring African captives to the United States, arrived near Mobile, Alabama. These mainland dates are part of a wider history of trafficking within the Americas, connecting North America, the Caribbean, and South America.

For someone born in 1960, the years 1526–1860 are about 4–17 generations before their birth, using 25 years per generation. The number of generations varies among family lines because people have children at different ages. Measured in generations, this period of mass human trafficking is closer to the present than its dates alone may suggest.

A 2020 study by Micheletti and colleagues identified shared IBD segments between living people of African descent in the Americas and people in Atlantic Africa. U.S. participants shared these segments with people from an average of five to six of the seven African regions studied. The researchers also estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor, or TMRCA, with regional estimates centered at approximately 13–17 generations ago. Note that these estimates fall within the era of mass human trafficking from Africa across the Atlantic. The study thus provided evidence that shared ancestry dating to that period remains detectable in the DNA of living Africans and African diaspora descendants.

Using 25 years per generation, a 2024 modeling study by Agranat-Tamir and colleagues estimated that an African American born in 1960–1965 would have the greatest number of African genetic ancestors nine generations back, averaging about 65 in that generation. These are African ancestors who contributed DNA to the descendant; we will explore how the researchers counted them in a subsequent post.

Building on findings like these, in my 2023 commentary on finding living African relatives, I explained why this historical timeframe allows us to use autosomal genetic genealogy to identify living African relatives and investigate their connections to diaspora families. With sufficiently large databases or carefully selected participants, researchers can identify people who share DNA inherited from ancestors who lived during that period. Evidence from multiple relatives can then help us investigate how their branches of a family connect.

The possibility comes with limits. A match between an African participant and a diaspora participant does not, by itself, establish that their shared ancestor lived during that period of mass human trafficking (1526–1860 for the mainland United States). The connection could be much older—by hundreds or thousands of generations—or reflect much more recent migration. And it doesn’t establish that the ancestor was enslaved.

TAKiR therefore has to evaluate each proposed relationship using the evidence available. Some connections may become well supported. Others will remain uncertain.

Participation also cannot guarantee finding an African relative within a time period of interest. Relevant relatives may not be represented in the database, or the DNA they share may no longer be detectable.

A discovery that belongs to both families

When an African American participant discovers a Ghanaian relative, the discovery belongs to both persons. The Ghanaian participant has also discovered a relative in the United States.

Each has a family history worth understanding.

African families have experienced centuries of migration, marriage, political change, colonialism, and community life since the ancestors of diaspora families were forcibly taken from the continent. Their histories continued to develop, just as diaspora histories did.

This reciprocal understanding shapes TAKiR’s work with researchers, genealogists, participants, and communities in Ghana. We want to understand the families surrounding a genetic connection and the questions that matter to the people on both sides of it.

Those questions continue after a match is identified.

Shared DNA cannot determine how people should feel about one another. A newly discovered relative may become an important part of someone’s life. Another person may value the genealogical information without seeking an ongoing relationship.

People may exchange stories, develop friendships, visit one another, or discover differences in their expectations of family. They may encounter painful histories alongside welcome discoveries. Their experiences will reflect their personalities, cultures, circumstances, and choices.

TAKiR includes social science research because these experiences deserve careful attention. Through interviews, surveys, and other approaches, we investigate participants’ expectations and their interpretations of what they learn.

Family also encompasses caregiving, adoption, marriage, community, and chosen relationships. Genetic genealogy contributes evidence about biological ancestry within that much broader understanding of kinship.

What we are building

TAKiR is an ongoing research effort to bring genetic evidence, family knowledge, historical records, and participants’ experiences into the same investigation.

As more families participate, we hope to identify additional relationships and better understand connections that are currently difficult to resolve. Our aim is to reconstruct portions of extended family histories while explaining both the strength and the limits of the evidence.

Some ancestors may remain unnamed. Some family branches may never be connected with confidence. There will be questions that DNA cannot answer.

There are also living people whose relationships to one another have remained unknown for generations. Finding some of those connections could give families new ways to investigate their past and new choices about the relationships they build today.

That is the possibility behind The African Kinship Reunion:

Who, among the people living now, is part of your family story?

To learn about participation and eligibility, visit How TAKiR Works. You can also explore our research methods or contact the team.