| | As some of you may recall, in 2007 I participated in the Genographic Project and received rather surprising results from my Y chromosome test. It told me that my male line is from West Africa and that I share the line with most African-Americans too. This was not the answer I expected but it was confirmed by my Dad, who also had the chromosome test run. At the time we weren't completely sure what was going on, seeing how there is a tiny, tiny minority in of men in England who share the same chromosome grouping but the most probable explanation has, I'm fairly certain, turned out to be the correct one. I was reading a bit in a book Dad has about the Melungeons and their origins. It's hard to define who is a Melungeon but, in short, they/we are a tri-racial isolate group from (mostly) eastern TN, western VA and NW NC. Kind of a big circle these days but our ancestors are generally supposed to have lived in the Appalachians around Newman's Ridge for the better part of 200 years, which, according to Dad's geneology, is fairly accurate for us, well at least until the early 20th century when our branch of the Goins family migrated out of the mtns into Buffalo, SC. Anywho, getting back to my original point, this book brought up the fact that the first (or one of the first) Goins men in America was also one of the first African slaves brought to America. Now at the time slavery was just getting started and indentured servitude was much more common here, and that is what happened to this man (wish I could remember his first name). This man, progenitor of the Goins family, most likely was held as an indentured servant and therefore was freed after a set period of time, after which he started a family whose descendants include my family today. Now we all have many ancestors, especially as we go back in time, but our chromosomal DNA (for sex chromosomes at least) don't lie! So friends that is how you know the wonderful me...descendant of one of the first captive Africans brought to America, as well as of many, many different people from different lands. Neat huh? |
| | Posted 7/9/2009 6:15 AM - 20 Views - 8 eProps - 4 comments
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