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I would settle for even knowing which country my ancestors are from.
This is beyond awful and as someone who loves exploring ancestry, it bothers me terribly. I am sorry.
Looking at maps from the early 1800's, there weren't many countries on the continent of Africa to begin with, so you're left with the task of sorting through regions and following routes to try and figure where your ancestors might have captured prior to being loaded onto ships.
With the increases in DNA/Genealogy testing, I have to ask: have any insights been made into the region of origin for Americans of African descent?
Quote:
the flesh whipped off their backs or worse for not accepting their slave name. How that strengthened Black identity as you put it I don't know, and I really don't care to hear your explanation.
This leads me to responding to your second statement. When you're outnumbered, separated at birth, and treated as African slaves were for 400+ years it's kind of difficult (Impossible) to accurately hold on to your African roots especially when the Whites who outnumbered and hated you were hell-bent on insuring that didn't happen, no matter how much you value it as you put it.
Reading this portion, I feel that you are doing all African ancestors a great disservice. They were strong people in an horrible position. While they might have been forced to accept slave names after being subjected to beatings, I do not believe that this would cause them to forget their African names or their African heritage. As we've been told, their history had been passed from generation to generation in the oral tradition. No matter how cruel a slave master was, he could not take that from them.
I'm sorry to hear that. I would settle for even knowing which country my ancestors are from.
That's simple. Just send in a saliva sample for gene typing. They will tell you which part of Africa your African ancestors came from, which part of Europe your white ancestors came from, etc. It doesn't even cost that much.
Done deal.
Mod cut.
Last edited by PJSaturn; 07-11-2014 at 09:25 AM..
Reason: Off topic.
As mentioned, there have been other people/groups/races that have been persecuted/wronged/lost their identity throughout history. There are also many groups throughout the world that have been enslaved as well. Blacks are not unique in this manner.
Reading this portion, I feel that you are doing all African ancestors a great disservice. They were strong people in an horrible position. While they might have been forced to accept slave names after being subjected to beatings, I do not believe that this would cause them to forget their African names or their African heritage. As we've been told, their history had been passed from generation to generation in the oral tradition. No matter how cruel a slave master was, he could not take that from them.
While your statement might be true for 1st generation slaves, maybe even 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation slaves, after hundreds of years of separating children at birth, mixing slaves from different regions of Africa, cutting out African slaves tongues or whipping them (in certain cases to death) for speaking their native language or mentioning their true surnames...After more than 400 years of that, it becomes very difficult to "orally" pass down your history and accurately record your ancestry as Whites have been able to do.
That's simple. Just send in a saliva sample for gene typing. They will tell you which part of Africa your African ancestors came from, which part of Europe your white ancestors came from, etc. It doesn't even cost that much.
Before anyone goes off on a tangent I'm not asking who's had it worse or who's suffered the most persecution, I'm simply asking about ancestry and heritage. Are there any other races in history that have had their identities completely stripped from them like Black people? Meaning not knowing where their people are originally from and not knowing their true ethnicity/real last names?
Africa and Europe had roughly equal populations of 85 million in the year 1500
By 1900 Africa had a population of 133 million while Europe had a population of 408 million and most of the 156 million people in the Western Hemisphere had a lot of European blood.
So predictably European population thrived as they became the dominant power in the world.
But the population of the indigenous people of the New World may have been as high as Europe (and Africa) in 1500. In contrast, the native population is believed to have declined by 96% by 1900, and the rest were part of a new mestizo group who was mixed with European blood.
Do using non-emotional comparison, the peoples of the Americas were almost completely exterminated, while at least the African people survived.
I am reluctant to compare two great historical tragedies, since I don't want to make light of one or the other. But survival is still better than extermination.
Last edited by PacoMartin; 07-08-2014 at 01:11 PM..
OP I think your intentions were okay, you are just a victim of a topic that a lot of people feel is beaten to death. I think most of the people responding are the type who feel disconnected from the civil rights struggle of blacks in this country as well as decades of slavery as just something that happened a long time ago that has nothing to do with them. The general feeling I get in this country is that young people just want to put all that behind them and that no matter what your color is - they believe that any American has the chance to be all they can be and finding out who or where you came from is just a google search away and is just as good and fulfilling as asking your oldest living relative.
In short, most people here seem to perceive this to be another feel pity for the black man thread instead of just an open topic to discuss which is why I think you are being jumped on.
OP I think your intentions were okay, you are just a victim of a topic that a lot of people feel is beaten to death. I think most of the people responding are the type who feel disconnected from the civil rights struggle of blacks in this country as well as decades of slavery as just something that happened a long time ago that has nothing to do with them. The general feeling I get in this country is that young people just want to put all that behind them and that no matter what your color is - they believe that any American has the chance to be all they can be and finding out who or where you came from is just a google search away and is just as good and fulfilling as asking your oldest living relative.
In short, most people here seem to perceive this to be another feel pity for the black man thread instead of just an open topic to discuss which is why I think you are being jumped on.
I don't think it's about age. As a twenty something year old, I still have a desire to know my ancestry. I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "young". I have my own philosophies on how Black people could and perhaps should completely emancipate themselves from slavery, but I'll keep them to myself since this isn't the politics forum.
Mod cut. Your transcript is taken out of context and therefore inaccurate.
Last edited by PJSaturn; 07-11-2014 at 09:33 AM..
Reason: Inappropriate language; off-topic.
I think it's fairly common for people who belong to minority and marginalized ethnic groups to have lost touch with their family histories and culture. However, when this happens to, for example, a Jew in Europe, they may not even be aware of their background, whereas for an African-American in America, they are much more likely to know they are AA just based on phenotype. Usually oppressors tend to oppress groups occupying the same or neighboring areas, rather than importing people from the other side of the world to oppress, and neighbors tend to look more alike, so a few generations there's not that clear visual evidence that one's heritage isn't the same as the majority population.
To give the OP the answer he's looking for I'd say a lot of people in Central and South America have had much of their cultural/ancestral identities stripped from them. There are also a lot of Indians, Indonesians, Chinese, etc who were brought to places like Southern Africa, the Caribbean, South America, etc as "contract workers" who would have a hard time tracing their specific origins.
I recently took one of those DNA tests and found out I was 89% European with the other 11% being a mix of Africa/Middle East/Caucasus (which, knowing I had Mediterranean roots, was not at all surprising).
Before I started doing genealogy research what we "knew" about about either side of my family going back past my great grandparents was what amounts to mythology. I was able to trace a few of my ancestors back to the early 1700s but, like I said, the oral history in my family only goes back to about 1880-1900 and a lot of it was inaccurate (grandparents and great grandparents trying to gloss over a troubled past).
I was able to trace a few of them back because a) those people came from places that had/have a good system of record-keeping and b) those records are publicly available. The rest of my ancestors are just completely off the radar before they turn up in the US.
That kind of research is more difficult for African-Americans pre-1865, no doubt about that, but I think it's wrong to assume that most people of European descent know those things. They might say, "Oh yeah, I'm Polish" b/c their last name is Wondolowski but they really have no idea about their families beyond 3 generations.
And really, if your family has been here for 3 generations you're American and that's all anyone really needs to know.
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