New technology may help thousands of U.S. blacks trace their African roots

When David Grant opened a gift from his daughter and son during Christmas 2005, he had no idea what he was getting into. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” said Grant’s adult daughter, Malaika.

That gift turned out to be a National Geographic Genographic Project DNA testing kit. Translation? Grant, a longtime Minneapolis-based screenwriter and playwright, could now test his DNA and use the results to determine approximately where his paternal ancestors came from in Africa.

“As African Americans, most of us are stuck in only knowing that we come from Africa,” Grant said. “But from where exactly, and from what people or group of people?”

A longtime history buff and genealogy enthusiast, Grant has had a general idea that his ancestors on his mother’s side came from a region that today stretches across Senegal and Sierra Leone. But he didn’t have a clue about his father’s side.

“Many of us do not know our history,” he continued. “But now we can take our history off these shores and locate the area where we came from. It would satisfy so many people if they could just know the region or area or what ethnic group or group of cultures. Even to have that would feel so powerful.”

Grant had the good fortune to go much further than that. A little more than a month after receiving his test results, Grant found himself emailing a man from Ghana, Lawrence Agbemabiese, and speculating that they might be relatives based on the similarity of DNA strand data they had both posted on a genealogy website.

Jackpot! The two men soon realized that they were indeed relatives, sharing ancestors of a royal African line stretching back for centuries in southeastern Ghana. Three months later, the distant cousins met in Paris, where Agbemabiese resides with his family and works for the United Nations.

“It was amazing,” Grant said. “We met at the train station in Paris. We were both on our cell phones looking for each other in the crowds, saying ‘I’m only 50 yards away!’ And then there he was. It was emotional for both of us.”

On November 1, Grant departed for a three-week journey in Ghana, his first trip ever to Africa. Not only will he meet countless relatives and make a pilgrimage to his ancestral village, he will also be journaling his experience and researching his family history for a book he plans on writing. (Grant will also regularly post updates and reflections about his trip as it happens on his blogsite: www.transatlanticlostandfound.blogspot.com.)

Ultimately, the journey will culminate in a transatlantic family reunion, including Grant’s entire immediate family, in Ghana’s capital, Accra, for the 50th anniversary of Ghanaian independence August 2007. Days before his departure, Grant took some time to speak with the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder from his home in South Minneapolis.

It was anything but an ordinary evening (or was it?): His wife, Celeste, had just left on her own trip-of-a-lifetime to India; his children and relatives were coming and going; Grant had a mountain-high to-do list to tackle before he could gear up for his journey; and, in between storytelling and reflections on the future of Pan-Africanism, he had to continually ward off Julie, the family’s golden lab/basset hound, from jumping into this reporter’s lap.

“This is new territory for me,” he said. “I have never written a book before, but I am up to my eyeballs in one now.”

The 50-something Grant has the look of a veteran writer with large rimless spectacles and a thick gray-streaked beard. Over his career, he has written plays for the likes of the Mixed Blood Theatre and the Minnesota Historical Society and screenplays for Russell Simmons’ Def Pictures and the Showtime Network. He also sits on the board of several arts and community groups, including serving as board chairman of a youth gym and center, The Circle of Discipline. Besides the book, his other current projects include a screenplay adaptation of Jevetta Steele’s play Two Queens, One Castle.

A journey begun in childhood
While the book idea came to Grant only earlier this year, the story started long ago. He grew up in Northwest Washington, D.C., the son of a mother who was a professor at Howard University and a father who worked in the Labor Party. He said that his grandparents on both sides told him stories that stretched back to slavery times, and, on his mother’s side, even to Africa. Perhaps these stories, from his great-great-great grandfathers fighting in the Civil War to other relatives intermarrying and assimilating into Cherokee culture, help explain why he became a storyteller himself.

“I have always had an interest in my ancestry and history,” he said. “I was an unusual kid, very bookish and very serious. I was like a little scholar.”

When Grant was only 13, he spent a summer working in a library and researching his family history in his spare time. As an heirloom, the family had an eight-piece Spanish doubloon, an old gold coin form of currency minted in 1786, the year Grant’s great-great-great-great grandmother arrived in the New World.

While his ancestor was sold to a plantation owner from South Carolina later that year, she held onto the gold doubloon. That was enough inspiration that summer for the 13-year-old Grant to go through the Port of Charleston shipping records for every single day in 1786 until he found the ship that his ancestor came in on.

“That gives you an idea of how serious I was,” Grant said with a smile. Since then, he has amassed many boxes and books full of history and family facts, including those of the slave owners. In fact, when Grant awaited his DNA test results, he expected them to confirm what he had always assumed based on other research — that he had European as well as African ancestry due to female slaves birthing the children of their owners. But he hardly could have expected to meet an African blood relative and discover that his paternal line had royalty in it that stretched back to the 1300s.

Lawrence Agbemabiese’s grandfather was a king of the Ewe (pronounced Ev-ay) people whose traditional lands straddle southeastern Ghana and southern Togo. Like Grant, he also has long had a deep interest in his ancestry and the African Diaspora in the Americas and around the world.

“In my case,” Grant said, “I came across that one West African in a million who had the money, knowledge, interest in history, and the time to pursue this.” Now he hopes he can also ultimately learn the name and story of the first African man on his father’s side to have his freedom stolen from him on an America-bound slave ship.

Grant strongly urges anyone interested in where their ancestors came from to begin their own journeys using the newly available scientific tools. He also said that, if his book and project is successful, he hopes to set up a fund for DNA testing in both America and Africa.

“I see more and more people having the opportunity to make personal connections, which I have been blessed to do,” he said. “We are at the tip of the iceberg of what could become a real movement over the next decade. There may be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands who will have the means to connect with their ancestral lands from Guinea and Sierra Leone all the way to Angola and even in the Congo.”

Grant even dreams of a time when the economic and educational bonds between Africans and African Americans will flourish and grow to empower many communities and societies, and as a consequence U.S. foreign policy in Africa will improve significantly.

For Grant personally, such a journey is embodied in an expression from the language of his ancestors. In Ewe, “Tror Na Foe” (pronounced troh- na- fway) translates as “to return and find again” or “to come back and retrieve something that one has lost.”

The DNA test: how it works
Both men and women can find out more about their roots with a simple swipe of a cotton swab on the inside of the mouth, which is then placed in a vial and sent to a National Geographic laboratory. That is usually enough for researchers to isolate a clear sample and strand of your DNA to first identify the specific branch of humanity to which you partially belong, known as a haplogroup.

The National Geographic kits cost about $100 — learn more about them at www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic. The kits include the cotton swabs and sterile sample vials, a self-addressed envelope, detailed instructions, information on genetics and human migration, and a DVD documentary about the project. Results generally take eight weeks or longer.

After sending in that swab in a vial to National Geographic, here’s one thing to keep in mind: Sorry ladies, but you can only test DNA samples on your X-chromosome (maternal genetic line), which means you will only get results that pertain to the ancestry of your mother and her mother and her mother and so on.

Men’s results pertain to their Y-chromosome (paternal genetic line), a man’s father and his father, etc. But men can also learn more about their maternal ancestry through a different DNA testing process that is not included in this specific kit.

David Grant notes on his blogsite (transatlanticlostandfound.blogspot.com) that, for African Americans, getting more specific DNA matches than just a haplogroup, such as West African, is difficult. But he lists several resources and suggestions.