Family Roots

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I was telling dad about the PBS special African American Lives (Booker Rising discusses the series here and here) and the website African Ancestry in hopes of reviving my quest to leaf out the family tree. I was telling him all about the DNA testing that identifies genetic markers held in common with specific groups of people in Africa when he let lose with the information that he knew his mother's father's name. Well that just set me off. I got date and place of birth and death before I let him hang up. I also got my grandmother's mother's name out of him. Apparently Sis 1 looks a lot like her which means that Ethan looks like her because he looks a lot like Sis 1. Cool eh?

Researching our family history has been a bit difficult (just about impossible) for me because my family immigrated to the States some years ago. All of the relevant documents about our family are in another country. The only way to do any meaningful research into our family history is for someone to take a few weeks of vacation and go pester government officials in the old country. That's just not a possibility for me right now. Maybe I can talk dad or Sis 1 or Sis 2 into doing it for me.

I'm not particularly bothered by the current thinness of my family tree or by the fact that I'll likely hit a stone wall at some point due to the Atlantic slave trade (as I've noted before). I'm just nosy.

More discussion of the African American Lives series here, here, and here.

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