Fantastic Find: Tracing African Roots - African American Results

From Wikipedia's page on Slavery in the United States.  Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and David Eltis, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Harvard University. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas". Stephen Behrendt (1999). "Transatlantic Slave Trade". Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 0-465-00071-1. 

For some reason this seems like a low number, but maybe that is just me?  I might be thinking of the much larger set of people who were sent to the Caribbean and Central and South America.  From Wikipedia.  "Assessing the Slave Trade: Estimates". "The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database". 

We are entering into a genealogical golden age.  Alex Haley would have loved it!  I continue to be amazed that after all those centuries of Black people in this country not being sure where their ancestors came from in Africa there are now tools, like DNA and digitalization of records, that is allowing hope of revealing some answers.  You can go to Youtube and see all the young people who discuss the results of their DNA tests.  It actually makes a big difference to know where in Africa you might originate instead of just "Africa" which is an awfully broad generalization.

I saw Fonte Felipe's ongoing thread on Ancestry.com's Support Center "Post your African breakdown (incl. Trace Regions!)" a while back and finally checked out his website, Tracing African Roots: African American Results. 

If you have African ancestry, particularly if you have both parents identifying as African American, this could be a very interesting and useful site, particularly if you are interested in discovering your ethnic makeup.





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