African and American relatives to reunite

MSNBC - Atlanta genealogical researcher William Holland is going to do something that according to him, has never been done before...

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From MSNBC.COM

Based on his genetic profile, William Holland considers himself a descendant of noble families going back more than a millennium. Between then and now, however, his ancestors were dispersed around the African continent — and some of them were brought to America as slaves. That’s the branch of the family to which Holland and his family belong.

Now, Holland is bringing the centuries-old saga of his family full circle by inviting his long-lost relatives to come from Africa to America. If Holland’s plan works out, African royalty will meet face-to-face with the descendants of slaves and slave owners in Virginia.

This month, during a visit to his genetic relatives in Ghana, Holland pieced together a story of a grand migration. A comparison of his Y-chromosome markers with those of the families in Ghana and Cameroon suggested that their most recent common ancestor lived perhaps 50 generations ago, or roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years ago. His Ghanaian hosts, members of the Akpaglo family, told him that their ancestors migrated southward from Sudan and settled in the Oyo Empire. Holland assumes that his Cameroonian ancestors were part of that migration as well.

“From there, they split up,” He said. One ancestral line eventually took root in Ghana, another in Cameroon. Holland has now been to both nations to track down his pedigree. Armed with the genetic results, he was initiated into two African families.

But he’s not finished yet. Holland still wants to share the experience he had with his fellow Americans, and at the same time give African visitors a taste of America. Holland says some of his friends and relatives back home in Atlanta are irked by the idea that they were somehow sold into slavery by their African ancestors. His African friends and relatives say that’s not the way it was. So Holland is trying to organize a daylong reunion and seminar on May 22 in Virginia, where his ancestors worked as slaves, to give Africans and Americans a chance to talk through their history together.

Holland says his newfound African kin can hardly wait. “They’re past excited right now,” he told me. All in all, not a bad way to end Black History Month.

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