I did 23andMe genetic testing a few years ago at the same time as I got my son tested, and I reviewed the results with interest, but then left it alone. Mom and my brother recently got tested, and so I have been looking around on the website again.
The Ancestry composition was most interesting to me. Not surprisingly, I am 58% British and Irish, 21.8% French and German, 17.9% Broadly Northwestern European, 1.3% Scandinavian, .2% Broadly European, and .5% Sub Saharan African.
I can almost hear my ancestors flipping over in their graves. One half of one percent AFRICAN?!? Yep. Blue-eyed, auburn-haired me. [and it's noted that 67% of my relatives are likely to have some red hair...]
Of course, if my lily-white ancestors could return from the dead and observe my life they would likely be shocked that I have a number of black friends and 3 of them are married to white spouses, which was illegal until the Supreme Court decision in the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967.
My immediate next door neighbors are a family from Indonesia on one side, and a mixed race couple on the other side. All very lovely people, and wonderful neighbors.
I don't know what Ancestry or the other genetic testing companies do, but I was looking at the list of DNA Relatives on my 23andMe profile and I started to Google and look up folks and I found, much to my surprise, 3 fairly close [2nd to 3rd] cousins who are black. These folks are on both sides of the family, fyi,.
One of them is a lady in her 30's who is a nurse, who lives in Florida. I have messaged her several times and gotten no response.
So here's where things get tricky.
I would very much like to know how I am related to these folks. I have always been a very curious person. I also enjoy learning about genealogy.
There's no way to really research, though.
Of all of my great aunts and uncles, and my great grandparents and great great grandparents, nobody on either my maternal or paternal side was ever married to someone black. Nobody. So that leaves me with only one conclusion.
Somebody back there in my ancestral line [or actually several folks, most likely] had sexual liaisons with black or mixed-race folks, and produced children. Given the fact that birth control methods were unreliable in the mid and late 19th century, this raises a number of interesting questions. Were these liaisons love affairs?
I like to think my black relatives are the result of love affairs, not rape or some horrible slave/master forcible situation. I do know some of my ancestors owned slaves, though. I have to go back 4 generations to find slave-owning ancestors.
The one cousin I've reached out to has ignored me. Should I try reaching out to the others? They haven't reached out to me. The 23andMe website lets you send messages to your DNA relatives safely and [if you want] anonymously.
If I do reach out, how awkward is it to say "Hey, looks like one of my ancestors got a little somethin' on the side! What do you know about that?!"
What makes it truly more awkward is that some of the liaisons probably occurred well over a fifty or a hundred years ago.
I wish I had more answers to these questions.
I tutor a child who is black, helping him to improve his writing and English skills. We have some interesting discussions. He is very bright. He is working on a research paper about Thomas Jefferson. I felt like I had to tell him about the Sally Hemmings connection. I try to have him write about history topics -- getting a two for one deal, I like to think. I read a book years ago about Sally Hemmings and I believe the relationship she had with Jefferson was consensual and a love match. She was the half-sister to his dead wife, and her mother was also half white. Two of Sally and Tom's children were freed by him and went to Washington D.C. to "pass" because they looked totally white. So the Hemmings story raises a lot of thorny but interesting questions.
There's a moving page on the Monticello website about Sally and you can see it here. Her story is told through the words of her son Madison. He clearly didn't think too highly of his biological father, Thomas Jefferson. Did Jefferson essentially bribe her into leaving France with him and returning to slavery in Virginia, or did she go for other reasons? There is no way to know. I like to think she left freedom behind because of love, but I don't know that.
I was trying to explain to my student that history is a messy thing, not all neat and clean. Human beings do awful things sometimes. It's complicated. Great men are seldom morally perfect. That's life. The man who wrote "all men are created equal" probably didn't believe that the same way we do today. Jefferson likely meant "all white men who own property" are created equal. But Jefferson was a product of his time and place, so is it right to condemn him?
Is it right to go back and judge and condemn people who lived decades ago, or centuries ago, based on our modern sensibilities?
There is no way for me to know if my black relatives' ancestors were the product of love or rape. A harsh truth, but one I have no choice but to accept. Should I reach out to them and put them in a very awkward position, of trying to go back and trace their ancestor who had a relationship (I hope it was more than just an encounter) with one of my ancestors? There is likely no white person on any birth certificate, to prove paternity. That was illegal, remember. So was there a story written down somewhere? I don't know.
I can tell you this for a fact. I am looking at old photos and wondering now, wondering what happened, and trying not to condemn my forbears. Who knows what really happened? [BTW there is no evidence anyone in the photos below were responsible for my black relatives. I just don't have many photos of my dad's ancestors...]
What else should I do, if anything? Questions, questions...
