Snowdon is a dummy

Searching for African American Roots Today

What Alex Haley accomplished was impressive. His search involved difficult and sometimes tedious detective work, required a considerable amount of travel, a sizeable budget, and African words and stories passed on as an oral history from generation to generation over a period of two hundred years. It is perhaps not surprising that the publication of his book did not lead to a host of other, similar stories of African Americans finding their roots in the same fashion.

Fortunately, genealogical search resources and methods have improved since 1976. Census records are now key word searchable (30), making it a lot easier to trace freed slaves and their families in the years following the Civil War. Additionally, ancestry.com (29) recently added key word searchable digital slave registers from Barbados for the year 1834, when slavery was officially abolished in the British Empire. The records include the name of the owner; residence parish; and the name, gender, age, and nationality of the slave. There are 99,349 slave records, and 5,206 slave owners in the database. The records were required to be submitted by each colony after the implementation of the Abolition of Slave Trade Act in 1807, which made the trade of slaves from Africa to the British colonies illegal. When additional records of other British colonies are digitized and added to the online database (estimated completion January, 2008), it is expected that there will be a total of more than 3 million slave records in the database.

A comprehensive Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database, called the Voyages Database, is now available at an open access web site (32), containing information on nearly 35,000 transatlantic slave trading voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866. It is the largest uniform, consolidated database of its kind in the world. The database is estimated to include about 80% of the slaving voyages that ever sailed. An example of findings from the database - Professor Ira Berlin of the University of Maryland noted that "It confirms the overall volume of the slave trade, but tells us many new things of who went where and when. So that, for example, we now know that slaves from the Nigerian interior largely populated the Chesapeake region. Low-country South Carolina, on the other hand, was peopled by Africans from Angola and then from Sengambia." (33)

Additional online resources related to African American genealogical searches can be found on Cyndi's List (31) and Christine's Genealogy Website (47).

Another major advance since 1976 is the availability of DNA analysis. The use of genetic tools to trace African American roots was popularized recently on PBS television, and by the PBS Home Video DVD African American Lives, hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University (28). In the DVD movie, Gates traces the ancestry of eight prominent African Americans: neurosurgeon Ben Carson, actress Whoopi Goldberg, Bishop T.D. Jakes, astronaut Mae Jemison, musician/producer Quincy Jones, sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, comedian/actor Chris Tucker and TV pioneer/philanthropist Oprah Winfrey.

Several kinds of DNA analyses are available. It is possible to trace the male and female lines of ancestry, for example, to determine the earliest male and female ancestors in the family tree. To visualize this, note below the family tree of Margaret Beth Nolan of Tasmania, Australia which Beth has published on the internet (34). Tracing Beth's male ancestral line, we find Clifford J. Nolan, her father, then William H. Nolan, her paternal grandfather, and Patrick Nolan, her paternal great grandfather. Each of these men passed on to all of their sons the Y chromosome (27), and if Beth has a full brother, he too will have the same Y chromosome originally passed on by Patrick Nolan.

You are a bigger liar than JTT pretending to be so justice and holy orientated

so unless I misread something (I've been guilty of sloppy reading), my responses should usually answer any question posed to me.

I try to answer truthfully and to the best of my knowledge. If people show me that I'm wrong, I usually apologize.

@cicerone imposter,
The point is, historian have an idea of where slaves came from in aggregate numbers, thanks to boats and harbors' registries, but not where individual slaves came from. They were considered and treated like cattle, and whatever info is available is not at the individual level.

Which is why you know where precisely your ancestors came from, but most African Americans do not know that. They just know their origin as "somewhere in Africa".