Angela Davis shows us why "Finding Your Roots" complicates and strengthens the American story

[Buckeye_Democrat]

10. I started doing genealogy for health-related reasons.

Harvard took samples of my blood, and my nearest relatives (including my parents who were still alive back then) in the 90's to perform full genomic sequencing. At that time, it wasn't known what gene was defective to cause the extremely rare genetic condition that me and some of my siblings inherited. Harvard researchers indeed identified the gene eventually.

One of the scientists speculated that my parents were likely close relatives, since they both carried one copy of the defective gene. (The condition is recessive, so someone needs two bad copies to experience the health problems.)

So I started doing genealogy to determine how my parents were related! And it was never successful, since I eventually traced every branch of my family tree a minimum of 6 generations... but with no common ancestors found among my parents!

The earlier full sequencing of my DNA by Harvard later made it easier for me to order commercial DNA tests. And after GEDMatch later offered a way to upload those test results, and check for the relatedness of a person's parents (using statistics on the amount of common alleles in the individual's genes), those results came back the same as my earlier paper trails. My parents were not closely related at all.

Of course, we're ALL related at some point.

Even the plants and animals that I eat are extremely distant cousins. 😛