For generations, children would play kickball, hide-and-seek and jump rope on a stretch of concrete at Weccacoe Playground, unaware the remains of 5,000 Black...
Read moreHow To “Find Your Roots” Like Henry Louis Gates Jr.
How do you find the right direction in your life and understand who you truly are? On PBS’s Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates Jr. allows celebrities like Scarlett...
Read moreAn English City Grapples With The Slave-Trading Past Of Its Most Celebrated Figure
A statue of a merchant from the 17th century towers over the main square in Bristol, in southwest England. It’s a tribute to Edward Colston, described on a...
Read moreNigerian man connects with African American and Caribbean cousins through AncestryDNA
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 from work. On one...
Read moreHow the African-American Syphax Family Traces Its Lineage to Martha Washington
When Stephen Hammond was growing up, he scoffed when relatives told him he was related to the family of the nation’s first president, George Washington. It turns out...
Read moreTracing Your Roots: My Adopted Black Daughter Wants to Know Her Origins
I have worked very hard to trace back the ancestry of my adopted daughter Rasa Braswell, who is African American. (I am Caucasian.) However, I hit a snag once I got...
Read moreWhy DNA Ancestry Tests Are Struggling to Avoid White Bias
DNA ancestry tests, which help people find long-lost relatives and build family trees, have risen dramatically in popularity within the last several years. With...
Read moreThe Strange Evolution of Henry Louis Gates’s Estimate of Alex Haley and “Roots”
In 1998, Dr. Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, Jr., a University Professor and Director of Harvard’s Center for African and African American Research, explained in the...
Read moreDNA Testing Forced Me To Rethink My Entire Racial Identity
DNA testing sites make discovering your family history seem like one big genealogical adventure. But what about those ancestry stories that don’t have a happily ever...
Read moreSouth Carolina museum fills plot holes in African American genealogy
Strands of grey twist through her blonde dreadlocks, adorning her with a crown of distinguished wisdom. Her poised stride is seasoned by an abundance of life...
Read moreGenealogist grasps the family ties
Life has sent Monica Bailey on all sorts of journeys. Bailey, 48, recalled first hearing about family journeys when she was growing up. “I would spend summers in east...
Read moreMontpelier Slave Descendants Meet
There’s an unusual reunion planned this weekend at the home of James and Dolly Madison. About forty descendants of slaves will visit from around the...
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