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To Mark the 55th Anniversary of 'Bloody Sunday,' the Film Selma Is Being Used to Teach a New Generation About Protecting the Right to Vote
When it comes to spurring Oklahoma to grapple with a century-old race massacre that schoolbooks had left behind, much of the credit is due to an unlikely historical resource: HBO. For 99 years, Oklahoma had failed to reckon with the 1921 Tulsa massacre in which white residents torched and carpet bombed the city’s black community,…
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Tracing Your Roots: Why Did My DNA-Test Results Change?
A few reasons that the percentages in your ethnic-ancestry breakdown may change over time. Dear Professor Gates: I did DNA testing through the site African DNA. Initially it showed I had 82 percent West African ancestry, 10 percent European and the rest “Middle Eastern.” However, I recently received updated results from Family Tree DNA (which…
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Tracing Your Roots: How Safe Is It to Date a Cousin?
A woman seeks to know the risks of dating—and the risk of having offspring with—a relative. Dear Professor Gates: I want to date a fourth cousin of mine. Is that wrong? I’m curious to know how related we actually are. We do not plan to have any children together, but if we did, would there…
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My Family Is West Indian. How Did I Get Melanesian DNA?
I have been watching your show and cannot remember anyone having Melanesian in their DNA ethnicity results. I did the Ancestry.com DNA test and it showed 1 percent Pacific Islander-Trace Region: Melanesia. I just wondered how often this comes up in people from the West Indies. My mother is Trinidadian and my father is Jamaican. I will send you…
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Do I Really Have African and Native American Ancestry?
According to the 23andMe DNA-testing service, I have 0.1 percent West African DNA from my mother. I also have approximately 5-6 percent Native American from my mother, who is now deceased. I have a studio portrait of my great-grandmother Luisa Gomez taken on the Plaza in Santa Fe, N.M., about 1881-1883, and she looks (about…
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A DNA Test Says I’m Part Black. How Do I Embrace That?
I came across your article from 2014 while Google searching, trying to make sense of my own home DNA test. I grew up as a white American, so at first, when I saw that the report said I have 11 percent African ancestry, I thought, “Well, everyone came from Africa originally.” But then I found…
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How Do I Decode Slave Records?
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Feb. 13, 2013. For many African Americans the paper trail back to your ancestral origins hits a wall once you reach the slavery era. During the hunt for information about my great-great-grandmother, Jane Gates, who was born into slavery in 1819, we were able to find her…
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Testing DNA When Time Is Running Out
I frequently receive requests for advice about DNA testing, and occasionally the questions involve the following scenario: A parent is dying or incapacitated. The window is closing on the opportunity to have his or her DNA tested in order to gain answers to long-standing questions about genetic origins. This week I turned to genetic genealogist…
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Why Does My Lebanese Dad Have African DNA, When I Don’t?
Dear Professor Gates: I have done an autosomal DNA test for most of my relatives and ancestors, including my father. He is of Lebanese origin (born in 1959 in a village near Kartaba, also spelled Qartaba), but I discovered that his ancestry contains 4 percent Central-East African. Both my brothers inherited 2 percent African DNA. However,…
