Title: Do you know where you're from?
Tags: HERITAGE
Blog Entry: I recently had the pleasure of viewing a program on PBS, hosted, narrated by and featuring Henry Louis Gates Jr . : Historian, Author, Harvard University Profesor (with ties to countless other educational outlets). I actually caught about 3/4 of it but I was totally mesmerized by the experience. The program was African American Lives with parts 1&2 available on video; Mr. Gates and his family are featured along with other African American celebrities. I was considering purchasing copies for my video catalogue but decided against it, at least until I checked out my own heritage a little more. I only knew one great grandmother (mother's side) and one great grandfather (mother's grandfather); none of my father's parentage, bottom line this is as far back as I could go. Mr. Gates went back to one of the earliest slave owners in Virginia who was never married but maintained a secretive family by way of an African woman which many of those slave owners did even when they already had a white wife and family. The search continued to Ireland (to the Irish king Niall of the nine hostages and the Yoruba people of Nigeria based mainly on slave manifests, DNA and geneological evidence. As the science of DNA testing evolves, scientists are able to breakdown the percentage of different racial genes we may have in us and pinpoint the section of the world they originate from. Celebrities on the show were surprised to find that they didn't have any Native American genes (every other African American I've met seems to believe they have Indian in them); instead the lighter eyes, skin tone and hair texture were all as a result of European genes. My question now: Could I or anyone of us of caribbean heritage be able to go back that far? I think he went back to the 1700s, that's incredible. P.S. anyone with knowledge of how to start a search in Jamaica, please leave me a note or response
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