our history is in our genes

Tracing the lineage of American Descendants of Enslavement is a journey marked by both heartbreak and deep, often unexpected joy. For many of us, the paper trail begins not at birth, but in bondage—or in rare cases, in sudden glimpses of freedom. The absence of early documentation is not accidental; it’s the deliberate result of a system designed to erase, dehumanize, and render our ancestors property rather than people.

In my own family, the first time my paternal great-great-grandfather, Joseph (Livas) Anderson, appears in an official record is in the 1851 Census of Canada East and Canada West. He is sixty-four years old—already in the final chapters of his life. My maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Charles Boswell, emerges in the record even earlier, through a marriage bond dated 1818, placing his birth somewhere between 1780 and 1790. Both men were said to be born free, but there is no documentation of their births, no record of their parents’ names, no easy entry into their origin stories.

Joseph was born in Maryland, Charles in either Virginia or North Carolina—states where freedom for Black people in the 18th century was precarious at best. How did they or their parents attain freedom? Were they born to free mothers, manumitted, or self-emancipated? These are the central questions that haunt many Black genealogists. The silences in the archive are not mere gaps; they are the echo of centuries of stolen records, interrupted lineages, and lives lived under surveillance, not recognition.

Yet despite these silences, we persist.

With the help of DNA testing, new light is beginning to pierce old shadows. Coupled with traditional research—census records, land deeds, court documents, oral histories—DNA is breaking through long-standing “brick walls” that once seemed impenetrable. Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA testing, which trace the direct paternal and maternal lines, have made it possible to reconnect some of us to ethnic groups and regions in West and Central Africa—a powerful act of remembrance and return. Companies like African Ancestry Inc. have helped thousands of families identify ancestral roots in places like Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and among groups such as the Mende, Yoruba, and Tikar.

Still, the science has limits. While it can sometimes reveal regional or tribal connections, establishing direct familial links to specific African ancestors or kin remains rare. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the domestic trafficking of people within the U.S., severed family ties in brutal and lasting ways. But even fragments of connection—a common haplogroup, a cousin match, a shared oral tradition—can feel like revelations.

This work is painstaking. It demands patience, rigor, imagination, and heart. But it is also joyful. To uncover the name of a once-forgotten ancestor, to learn where they lived, whom they loved, how they resisted—that is a kind of resurrection. It is how we rebuild what was meant to be erased.

And we are not alone. Every ancestor we find walks with us.