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I understand your point, but knowing your full ancestry is very valid. Notice that the "house of Windsor" (English royal family) knows everything about their lineage. Why do you suppose that is? Don't you find it interesting that those with the least, often know the least about their ancestors, while those with the most, know the most about theirs...
Good point. However, no DNA test available to us today is going to provide black Americans (the descendants of slaves) with anywhere close to the knowledge of lineage that the Windsor House has (or any common family with deep ties in the UK for that reason). At least not to their African Ancestors. Anybody who tries to suggest otherwise is generously misleading the public. Indeed, apart from the fact that such a test doesn't link to your actual line and provide knowledge of who your direct ancestors are, black Americans are likely to get a very muddled result, even among our African heritage, due to the amount of mixing that has taken place over the centuries; I'd imagine that the average black American would have a number of "ethnic" group ties within Africa due to the fact that numerous ethnicity were represented in the slave trade.
With the "relative finder," I'd imagine that the confidence level (given the huge gap among generations) is actually really, really low (to the point where there are many false positives). I'm sorry, but I'm not spending that amount of money for a very muddled and speculative picture of "who I am." I see how "useless" the relative finder is among the big three autosomal testing services in terms of identifying solid links for black relatives of black Americans (due to the history of slavery and inadequate record keeping/breakup of families), and don't see how this service would be any better.
True, but I'd guess that the vast majority of slaves came before that.
Right. The overwhelming majority came before that, though I don't claim that there wasn't a regular stream of illegal importation of slaves after 1808. For reasons I outlined in another post, I just don't see how this test is worth it (at this price) for me.
In another thread, a poster by the name of CaribDoll, highlighted an excellent point about the vast amount of African culture that African descendants lost, as a result of the slave trade in the Americas.
I've encountered many African Americans who constantly talk about wanting to connect with their roots, but few know the actual country and tribal group of their ancestors. Well, guess what! For the last 8 years or so, Professor Henry Louis Gates (Harvard University) established a DNA research firm which has been able to establish sound testing to uncover your ancestors' countries of origin and tribal affiliations.
I'm curious as to why more African Americans are not taking advantage of the DNA testing? The testing is under $500. Imagine what you could do with such knowledge, once you've uncovered your actual ancestral identity.
For starters, if you are a descendant of the Igbo in Nigeria, you could book a trip to Nigeria and start unraveling your ancestors identity and your true composition. You could also learn (or at least attempt to learn) the lgbo language and customs of your ancestors. This would free you from the generic "black or African label" because you would actually know where in Africa your ancestors hailed from.
What are your thoughts?
No, I'm American and have no real interest in paying to trace my roots back to Africa.
I've done 23andMe. I think its a good starting point. However, you have to do the legwork going through the paper trail as well. Most black Americans run into a wall around 1865 when it comes to the paper trail. Still DNA testing helps on a basic level. With the paper trial I was able to trace my father's family to 1870's Choctaw County, Alabama. I was able to trace my mother's family to 1870's southeast Louisiana. Marriage records have really been helpful in my search.
The black vs. American vs. African American thing is overblown. "American" is a nationality. Just like "Mexican" is a nationality. One can be Mexican and be of Mayan ancestry. One be can Mexican and be of Spanish ancestry. There are quite a few Mexicans of middle eastern ancestry. Similarly you can be American of any ancestry.
Terms like "black American" or "African American" speak more to ethnic group. They are legitimate terms as they describe something greater than simple nationality. They point to lineage. Lineage to a certain degree is more legitimate than nationality. National borders change or get dissolved altogether. I have no problem being identified as American. I have no problem being identified as African American either. It's not an either or proposition.
With the "relative finder," I'd imagine that the confidence level (given the huge gap among generations) is actually really, really low (to the point where there are many false positives). I'm sorry, but I'm not spending that amount of money for a very muddled and speculative picture of "who I am." I see how "useless" the relative finder is among the big three autosomal testing services in terms of identifying solid links for black relatives of black Americans (due to the history of slavery and inadequate record keeping/breakup of families), and don't see how this service would be any better.
All the "relative finder" systems do is tell you who in the company's data base you share DNA with and how much. Matches of very tiny bits may occur by chance, but larger snippets and more of them are unlikely to be "false positives". If you match, you are related. Demonstrating how is the hard part.
Another thing to consider is that if more African Americans join the database, the more matches there will be and the greater the opportunity to discover something significant. As more of those who currently live in Africa participate, the greater the possibility of picking up a match there will be.
All the "relative finder" systems do is tell you who in the company's data base you share DNA with and how much. Matches of very tiny bits may occur by chance, but larger snippets and more of them are unlikely to be "false positives". If you match, you are related. Demonstrating how is the hard part.
Another thing to consider is that if more African Americans join the database, the more matches there will be and the greater the opportunity to discover something significant. As more of those who currently live in Africa participate, the greater the possibility of picking up a match there will be.
I've had things explained to me rather differently via the Ancestry.com forums; Ancestry.com, which I'd imagine is more advanced and reliable than this service generally speaking, only just revamped this process to cut down on the high number of false positives (as a result, my mother went from having over 60 pages of matches, most very low confidence, to 23 pages of matches). For so-called matches of very distant relations, the likelihood of people being actually related (even though they are "matched") goes down by a lot. That's one reason why Ancestry.com will give you a particular confidence interval, which decreases with the most distant the estimated relationship; Ancestry.com will basically tell you straight up that its "very low" confidence matches may very well not be related to you. My point is that, when trying to determine relations with people in Africa today, who are, for the most part, very, very distantly related (between 8-12 generations for many) to black Americans, you're going to get some, at best, very, very low confidence matches (and that's assuming that they've tested sufficient numbers of people in Africa). That's not exactly something that I'm willing to pay that amount of money for.
Last edited by prospectheightsresident; 12-04-2014 at 03:19 PM..
. My point is that, when trying to determine relations with people in Africa today, who are, for the most part, very, very distantly related (between 8-12 generations for many) to black Americans, you're going to get some, at best, very, very low confidence matches (and that's assuming that they've tested sufficient numbers of people in Africa). That's not exactly something that I'm willing to pay that amount of money for.
DNA tests will show the various regions in Africa where one might have ancestry. It cannot trace to specific groups within those regions. So one can only approximate, so no one is going to be 100% Yoruba.
And you are correct. The sample sizes in different regions in Africa are small. And the groupings not necessarily accurate. Ancestry.com has a grouping which captures from south east Nigeria through Cameroon, all the way to Congo. These are very different peoples who probably had no contact, and so doesn't really provide an indication as to point of origin.
So for instances my largest grouping is Togo/Benin. What does that mean? The region now part of Togo/Benin wasn't completely separate from Nigeria or from what is now Ghana. So what does that mean?
People need to use it as a possible indication of ancestry and not as a sure sign about where "one comes from".
i would like to get one of these tests one day. sounds interesting. but America is my country and the country of my ancestors. my family has been here for centuries, even the African descended ones. people died to make this my country. i don't need to feel a connection to an African country to feel connected to a country. i am a black American of African descent, not an African. i'm more American than many white people whose ancestors didn't come here until the 1900s.
This pretty much defines how most white Americans look at their ancestry. I still haven't done a dna test, but know there is a lot of Scots (I've been told I look it too) and Ulster Scots and some English. I'm curious what other there is, and if there's much is left of the Viking. I'm not Scots or English, but American who is fascinated from where it all came from.
Don't think that too many Black/African Americans are interested in defining themselves in terms of Africa. Those who use the term African American are usually attempting to describe an ethnic group. This to get away from the notion that they are a people defined solely in terms of their skin color. That AAs are every bit as ethnic as are Irish Americans, Italian Americans, etc. All defined by the culture and traditions and experiences as an AMERICAN group.
I am saying this as a black immigrant. I don't get the sense that most black Americans are any more interested in peoples and cultures from outside the USA than are Americans in general.
The few who take the tests do so for academic reasons, the same reason that white Americans also take the test. Given that black Americans (and other Trans Atlantic blacks) know nothing about their pre slave past its kind of "cool" to have a notion as to which region(s) in West and West/Central (or maybe even East Africa) that one might have ancestry from.
Note that I say regions and not ethnicities, because there is not one ancestry test that can allow some one of African descent to determine what their ancestral ethnicities were. The sample sizes are too small.
No, I'm American and have no real interest in paying to trace my roots back to Africa.
Good for you! Do you think that America looks at you and doesn't peg you into some ethnic group within the USA? Or at least tries to? The USA is definitely NOT a nation where assumptions about what one's race might be isn't a frequent occurrence.
Why the popularity in all of these tests? Clearly from the sampling these tests cater to the desire of many Americans of European and African ancestry to trace their roots.
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