Ancestry DNA sent back these results...

38% - Benin/Togo

32% - Cameroon, Congo, & Southern Bantu Peoples [2]

13% - England, Wales & Northwestern Europe

6% - Ivory Coast/Ghana

4% - Ireland & Scotland

3% - Mali (only non-coastal point of African origin, [2])

2% - Nigeria

1% - Norway

1% - Germanic Europe

-North Carolina African Americans

-Northeastern North Carolina & Southeastern Virginia African Americans

-North Carolina Northern Coastal Plain African Americans

This person's family history jives with the coastal North Carolina migrations noted above, with North Carolina being the hub of all runaways of all races, where African Americans looked more African and European Americans earned their most scathing caste monikers, such as "white trash" from the Virginia and South Carolina slave masters they fled.

The author talked to someone with an interest in genetics long enough to determine it was beyond his ken and that such single-person tests only tell half the tale of that person's biological family tree and of course are silent on adoption and death without issue [3], which were huge factors in Plantation America.

The proportions of African genes in this lady's DNA increase as the point of origin coincides with the point of shipment on the West African coast, meaning that most of the people sold into her family line were sold by their local rulers, not as foreign POWs or caravan commodities, like the poor folks marched down from Mali and Nigeria out of the Sahara. [2]

The European genes also fit the proportions of slaves shipped into Virginia, with English and Welsh predominating [indeed, there were Welsh-speaking Indians located in Carolina in the late 1600s] with Scottish and Irish the minority. The Scots may have been POWs captured and sold after the defeat of Montrose in 1650 or Scottish women sold as slave wives by the order of Cromwell thereafter. [1]

The German and Norway traces most likely reflect the fact that one branch of her family Migrated to New York in the 19th century, from whence one returned as a Navy man to Virginia where he was stationed and married a girl from a Carolina family.

The English Welsh and Northwestern Europe traces may well reflect the fact that 1600s Virginia saw the sale of predominantly English and Welsh children as slaves and also Dutch men as POWs and their wives sold as slaves, when New Jersey fell to British forces in 1654. The Dutch fought 3 wars and many pirate skirmishes against the English in the 1600s, all of which produced POWs sold as slaves in Virginia as early as 1609 and as late as 1677.

1.

2. While the Congo has a coastal outlet, much of the slave traffic there was in POWs from the interior, who were the most likely African slaves to runaway and form "maroon" communities in the swamps, coastal marshes and forested mountains. A higher proportion of Congo blood would indicate a higher proportion of out-group slave sales. Just like the English relished selling off Cornish, Welsh, Scottish and Irish folk who lived on the margins of their nation, African kings, made rich in their coastal haunts by contact with Europeans, were wont to traffic in less closely related folk from their interior regions.

3. A high proportion of English and Welsh slaves were male children who almost all died without reproducing, as the few female children were sold as "ho wives," for work, pleasure and breeding. This further slants the gene base as a Scottish POW was more likely to survive and gain his freedom than a malnourished English boy from London. Indeed, a Scottish POW was voted in as an officer during Bacon's Rebellion in 1776, rising from slave to captain with the light of a match.

I would like to thank Emily for donating her DNA test to serve as a point of discussion.

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