“It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair.”  -  Sly and the Family Stone

Watch Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNQpYz1ztx8

This month begins a season-long focus on family with Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and then the yearly Family Reunion. Let’s take a look at how our family traditions extend from our African roots.

Did You Know? In most African cultures, the family represents kinship, an extended group of relatives, economic strength and political power. The family is considered a clan that promotes values such as unity, love, support and respect. Some of the more familiar traditions include a fervent respect for elders, rites of passage, systems of inheritance based on lineage and marriage as a contractual agreement between families, not just the bride and groom.

When we were taken from the shores of West and Central Africa and brought to the Caribbean and the Americas, we lost everything. We lost our names, our languages, our religions and our families were torn apart. As enslaved people we experienced a continued assault on the Black family by slaveholders who separated and sold families and controlled our ability to marry and even procreate. Resilient, we reached back to our roots and created extended families. Those new families included aunties, uncles, cousins and those we just called aunties, uncles and cousins.

Did You Know? The African American family reunion was born after Emancipation. Once slavery ended, people sought out their displaced family members, putting out announcements for family members to gather and reconnect. These “reunions” were emotion-filled events, critical to the rebuilding of the Black family.

We feel the impact of this history on our families today. When we try to trace our family’s roots, there are no records of us as people until the 1870 Census. Often, elders don’t want to share the painful experiences of the past that serve as our only historical records. Family reunions allow us a space to strengthen identity, pass on family history, share traditions, salute personal and family accomplishments and to share family resources.

Did You Know?  Many family reunion rituals tie directly back to our ancestral traditions. That family reunion t-shirt is a way to express a shared family identity that we had when we all lived in the same compound. Honoring the matriarch and patriarch of the family fosters intergenerational communication that we had when elders were part of the household. The family tree display connects the present to the past and records the family history. And, the family scholarship can be seen as a form of inheritance paid in advance. Learn about how to organize a family reunion here: http://www.temple.edu/fri/familyreunion/organize.html

How does your family celebrate? What rituals and traditions does your family reunion include? We’d love to hear your stories. Please share them with us at doyouknow@africanancestry.com or on facebook.com/africanancestry.

Two weeks ago extraordinary attention was placed on the family history of our first lady, Michelle Obama. Her mixed ancestry was found to be a surprise by many Whites in America. Similarly, the European and East African ancestry of President Obama was seen as an exotic mix. For African Americans, mixed ancestry is no surprise; it is part of our history and can be uncovered in most families through traditional genealogy research as well as DNA testing.

The story of Melvina Shields, the great-great-great-grandmother of Michelle Obama who was enslaved and impregnated by a white man is a consistent theme heard in many narratives of African American family history.  Noted sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, explained in “Black Bourgeoisie” that the nearly 600,000 mulattoes in the U.S. in 1860 were mainly the result of the sexual association of white men and enslaved African women. We also see this reflected in the DNA of African Americans. When we test the paternally inherited Y chromosome DNA we find that 3 out of every 10 (30%) African American men have European Y chromosomes while less than 5% of the maternally inherited mtDNA is of European ancestry. This is called sex-bias gene flow and is largely the result of the behavior of many slaveholders and/or their male relatives.

The increased focus by the media on uncovering white ancestry in African Americans is interesting to some but is also disturbing to others, especially when these stories portray mixed ancestry as the reason for African American achievement. It is important to understand all of your family history. However, for most African Americans, including Michelle Obama, we cannot trace our family history using traditional methods beyond the Melvina Shields and others enslaved in the mid 1800s. This is because of the lack of adequate records on the enslaved and why DNA testing offered by African Ancestry is so important and exciting to African Americans.

Deep inside almost every cell in our body lies information that is tightly packed and highly specific. Called, deoxyribonucleic acid (or DNA), this chemical mixture is tightly coiled in 23 pairs of chromosomes which produce a unique signature in each and every one of us. We get half of our DNA (or one of those chromosome pairs) from our mother and the other half from our father which is why we resemble our parents and other relatives. This masterpiece of art and biology predates human history and provides a record of ancestral relationships useful for exploring individual, familial, and population history.

I first became interested in DNA when I was in elementary school. I remember looking around the classroom and wondering why some students looked the way they did. After meeting some of their parents I realized that they resembled their parents for much of their physical features and that they inherited something that was responsible for their shared skin color, eye shape, hair color and lips. That something was DNA.

 Growing up I also had a yearning for wanting to know more about my ancestry. In particular, my African ancestry, where and with whom in Africa do I share genetic ancestry with? I was no different from the millions of other African Americans who wanted to know this. However, I was blessed with the opportunity to learn and gather scientific tools and information useful for answering this question.

Using DNA to trace ancestry has been seen by some to be controversial, especially as it relates to African Americans and our longstanding need to re-connect with particular African communities disrupted during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. However, other communities are also eager to learn more about their Jewish, European, Asian, African, and/or Native American ancestors.

The business community has taken notice of this increased attention on genetic ancestry testing. The number of companies have increased over 10-fold since Gina Paige and I started African Ancestry in February of 2003. Our company started because of the demand that African Americans had for trying to find useful tools for uncovering their ancestry. Traditional genealogy tracing has been the gold standard for uncovering ancestry, however its utility is limited for many African Americans like myself who hit a brick-wall in the antebellum south.

Criticism of our work is part of the background of an on-going philosophical debate about the utility of lineage-based markers for tracing ancestry. The debate is fueled and promoted at times by the media which enjoys and profits from the contention science enlists. The public is often left to wonder and confusion continues to abate.

What’s the value of mtDNA and Y chromosome markers given that they represent a small fraction of an individuals overall genetic makeup and ancestry? Why determine one lineage when there are thousands that contribute to your ancestry? What value does knowing one lineage serve when it represents a fraction of your overall ancestry? Why is this so important for African Americans?

The answer is clear. Knowing just a little is better than knowing absolutely nothing.

Here I will discuss these issues and more that relate to the African American experience, so please visit often. We are all part of this shared experience, in an exciting time, and we welcome your comments.