Technology helps open new clues to blacks’ family histories

SELMA, Ala. – As B.J. Smothers was putting together her talk for the Black Belt African-American Genealogical and Historical Conference in Selma earlier this month, she got the magic e-mail: news of an exact Y-DNA match for her grandfather, who was born a slave in nearby Wilcox County in 1861.

It’s the clue she’s been awaiting for years, one that could identify his father, her great-grandfather.

Her long-lost cousin – who shares her father’s family name, Norris – also sent his own picture. “He’s a white guy who lives in Washington state,” Smothers said. “I’m looking at a cousin of mine.”

Smothers, who is light-skinned, knew her grandfather was mixed-race. She’d suspected that his father was one of four Norris brothers, sons of a plantation overseer. Still, looking over the family tree her cousin sent her, a family tree that goes back to an ancestor in Scotland, she was overwhelmed.

“I still don’t know how to process it,” she said.

With the growing availability of archival materials on the Internet, the greater communication made possible by e-mail and the availability of affordable genetic testing, many blacks are finding it possible to patch together family histories that had been torn apart by slavery and the upheavals that followed.

Perhaps the most surprising findings come from DNA tests, which in some cases have been able to point to African tribal origins for some subjects. In other cases, the DNA shines light on the fact that a person’s race is rarely a stark question of black and white.

Overall, the DNA of blacks in America is about 35 percent European in origin. Henry Gates, the director of African and African American studies at Harvard and host of the PBS special “African American Lives,” has revealed results of his own tests indicating that about half his DNA originates in Europe and that he is descended from an Irish warrior king.

And what was once taboo – exploring the family relationships between white and black ancestors – has become easier over time.

“It’s been a real shift in attitudes,” Smothers said. “Now, people are glad to have that diversity in the family.”