The story of Melvina Shields, the great-great-great-grandmother of Michelle Obama who was enslaved and impregnated by a white man is a consistent theme heard in many narratives of African American family history.  Noted sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, explained in “Black Bourgeoisie” that the nearly 600,000 mulattoes in the U.S. in 1860 were mainly the result of the sexual association of white men and enslaved African women. We also see this reflected in the DNA of African Americans. When we test the paternally inherited Y chromosome DNA we find that 3 out of every 10 (30%) African American men have European Y chromosomes while less than 5% of the maternally inherited mtDNA is of European ancestry. This is called sex-bias gene flow and is largely the result of the behavior of many slaveholders and/or their male relatives.

The increased focus by the media on uncovering white ancestry in African Americans is interesting to some but is also disturbing to others, especially when these stories portray mixed ancestry as the reason for African American achievement. It is important to understand all of your family history. However, for most African Americans, including Michelle Obama, we cannot trace our family history using traditional methods beyond the Melvina Shields and others enslaved in the mid 1800s. This is because of the lack of adequate records on the enslaved and why DNA testing offered by African Ancestry is so important and exciting to African Americans.

I first became interested in DNA when I was in elementary school. I remember looking around the classroom and wondering why some students looked the way they did. After meeting some of their parents I realized that they resembled their parents for much of their physical features and that they inherited something that was responsible for their shared skin color, eye shape, hair color and lips. That something was DNA.

 Growing up I also had a yearning for wanting to know more about my ancestry. In particular, my African ancestry, where and with whom in Africa do I share genetic ancestry with? I was no different from the millions of other African Americans who wanted to know this. However, I was blessed with the opportunity to learn and gather scientific tools and information useful for answering this question.

Using DNA to trace ancestry has been seen by some to be controversial, especially as it relates to African Americans and our longstanding need to re-connect with particular African communities disrupted during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. However, other communities are also eager to learn more about their Jewish, European, Asian, African, and/or Native American ancestors.

The business community has taken notice of this increased attention on genetic ancestry testing. The number of companies have increased over 10-fold since Gina Paige and I started African Ancestry in February of 2003. Our company started because of the demand that African Americans had for trying to find useful tools for uncovering their ancestry. Traditional genealogy tracing has been the gold standard for uncovering ancestry, however its utility is limited for many African Americans like myself who hit a brick-wall in the antebellum south.

Criticism of our work is part of the background of an on-going philosophical debate about the utility of lineage-based markers for tracing ancestry. The debate is fueled and promoted at times by the media which enjoys and profits from the contention science enlists. The public is often left to wonder and confusion continues to abate.

What’s the value of mtDNA and Y chromosome markers given that they represent a small fraction of an individuals overall genetic makeup and ancestry? Why determine one lineage when there are thousands that contribute to your ancestry? What value does knowing one lineage serve when it represents a fraction of your overall ancestry? Why is this so important for African Americans?

The answer is clear. Knowing just a little is better than knowing absolutely nothing.

Here I will discuss these issues and more that relate to the African American experience, so please visit often. We are all part of this shared experience, in an exciting time, and we welcome your comments.