DNA testing can help Black Americans reclaim their identity and history

Americans with European heritage have long been able to pinpoint their ancestry through DNA testing, but it's only in recent years that those with African heritage have been able to trace their genetic roots with any kind of precision.

Instead of being told their ancestors were from "western Africa," people with African roots are now able to trace their family line back to specific countries and even tribes of origin, testing providers say. Genetics is also adding to local records' searches to track migrations since a family's Middle Passage arrival in the Americas.

That's why Tisa Joyner-Nance decided to trace her mother's lineage a few years ago through AfricanAncestry.com, and why she spent 10 days earlier this month visiting Cameroon with the company's founder and a small cohort of other customers.

"I really wanted to know specifically who the people were that I was from, not just the region, not just the country," said Joyner-Nance, 52, of Rahway, New Jersey.

She learned that all of her mother's mothers as far back as the test could show came from the Tikar people of Cameroon. "That landed so much differently and was so profound to me."

The trip was "life changing," said Joyner-Nance, who works for the City University of New York. "I'm literally looking at people who look like they could have been my cousins."

Still, when considering both parents, the ancestry of most Americans, particularly African Americans, isn't totally from one people or another.

"The whole notion we have of someone being 100% of something is decently rare," said Nicka Sewell-Smith, senior story producer with Ancestry.com, which analyzes complete DNA rather than just the maternal line. "We need to stop with our buckets. There’s way more going on."

Expanding databases

In the African American consciousness, Ghana is the African nation where most enslaved people originated and feel most welcomed.

But by collecting the largest database of African lineages, Gina Paige, president and co-founder of AfricanAncestry.com, said she's been able to show other countries were actually far bigger origin points.

"The slave dungeons are well known and well visited. People expect that Ghana would be higher up on the list, but it's not," she said. Sierra Leone, Ginea Bissau, Nigeria and Cameroon are the ancestral homes of far more African Americans, said Paige, reached by phone earlier this month while in Cameroon.

When her customers learn new things about themselves, such as countries of origin they didn't know, "what we find is awe and pride and overwhelm," Paige said. "It's a sense of being overwhelmed by getting information that you never thought you'd know."

Although identity information is important for everyone, it carries extra weight for African Americans because of their history, she said.

"As African Americans, we're the original victims of identity theft," Paige said. African Americans' ancestors were torn from their homes, their families, their languages, their freedom. "If you don't know these things, you can't know who you are. When you get that back, it's incredible. Literally incredible."

How DNA can tell the past

Every cell in the body contains each person's distinctive DNA, as well as mitochondria, which provides the cell its energy. DNA is a mixture of genetic material ‒ some inherited from one parent, some from the other – so it can reveal the full make up of someone's genetic inheritance.

Everyone inherits mitochondria exclusively from our mothers, so it can be used to show maternal ancestry; the DNA's Y chromosome is only present in men and only comes from fathers, so it can be used to trace a man's paternal line. (Women can't trace only their father's lineage.)

By comparing an individual's DNA, mitochondria or Y chromosome to tens of thousands of others in a database, computers can identify similarities and differences. The closer your DNA is to DNA from a group of people who currently live in Ethiopia, for instance, the more likely it is you share common heritage.

The bigger a company's database and the closer it matches your own ancestry, the more precise it can be.

The genetic testing site 23andMe includes a Family Tree feature that automatically generates a tree based on DNA relatives in its database. It also allows customers to add other relatives to the tree.

Sometimes matching with cousins will help fill out missing tree branches, said Sewell-Smith, of Ancestry.com, because they might have information you don't have about your ancestry, or vice versa. At Ancestry.com, they also link genetic databases to other records to simplify research.

For instance, Sewell-Smith said, finding a distant cousin in Jamaica ‒ which is not uncommon among African Americans because of the slave trade ‒ could be helpful for tracing roots, because Caribbean countries kept national slave lists, while American records were spottier.

If you took a genetic test many years ago and again now, the result might be different, because of expanded databases and improvements in algorithms.

DNA still has its limitations. Genetic information can say roughly where someone lived, but it can't identify their name or provide details about their daily life. "We can't say 'you are related to these people at this address,'" Paige said.

Great migration

In recent years, 23andMe and Ancestry.com also have gotten better at helping people trace their family's path since leaving Africa.

While before, family lore might have just told you your great great grandparents lived in Tennessee, now, these companies can use your DNA to pinpoint the region or county where they most likely lived.

This might help if your ancestor had a common name and there were, say, five people with the same name in Tennessee around that time. Knowing the county or community helps with the "process of elimination," Sewell-Smith said. "We did not have that five years ago."

Coping with surprises

Sometimes people are taken aback by what they find in their genetic history.

Paige recently unveiled a radio announcer's ancestry to him live on-air. Although he identifies as Black, his mitochondrial DNA, inherited from his mother, comes from Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia and North Africa, Paige said. "For him, this opened more questions."

Sometimes, she said, her customers are disappointed by the lack of a clear African ancestor. "But they get it. That's just a function of who we are as African Americans."

About 5% of people who identify as European American receive matches to at least one of the company's African Diaspora Genetic Groups, 23andMe senior scientist Steven Micheletti said in an email to USA TODAY, even if they had no idea they had such ancestry.

"This underscores how the legacy of slavery in the United States is reflected in the DNA of millions of Americans, regardless of whether they identify as African American," he wrote. "These connections are often unknown, as they were frequently erased from family histories with the intention of hiding the involvement of exploitation and sexual violence often endured by enslaved women."

Understanding who you are

Paige said she leads trips like the recent one to Cameroon to help people better understand themselves.

"It's more of a 'need to know' rather than a 'nice to know,'" she said. Looking back can help people "then move forward through life."

Some of her clients change their names while on their trips. They might buy land or support philanthropic organizations. Some bring their children. African American children, she said, can feel left out when schools have an "ancestry day" and they don't know theirs.

Joyner-Nance said the trip to Cameroon was even more moving than she expected.

Her mother died prematurely three years ago on Halloween, so when the opportunity came up, visiting the homeland of her mother's ancestors just felt like the right thing to do, Joyner-Nance said.

"I know if she could have, she would have gone with me, or at least been part of my journey," Joyner-Nance said. "That's why it made it more important for me to go in her honor, her legacy."

She's still processing what the trip meant and what she'll ultimately take away from it. But rather than a "homecoming," Joyner-Nance said the journey felt like a "coming to peace" ‒ "a piece of my story, my history that was missing."

Now, she said, "I'm complete. I've been made whole."

Karen Weintraub can be reached at kweintraub@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: DNA testing helps Black Americans reclaim identity and history