I’m “mixed race”, or “dual heritage”; call it what you will. I was adopted as a baby by two lovely White English people. I wasn’t aware of my Jamaican ancestry. I was simply aware that I obviously had one white parent and one black parent.
Before I get into the meat of this article, I just want to say that if you’re in a similar situation. Researching this topic is not easy or fast *for most people.
You need to be patient when searching. Some people don’t want to engage; some have secrets to hide or people to protect. There WILL be times when you feel like the universe is conspiring to keep your identity a secret, but please, don’t give up. Trust the process. Many others will help you and even go out of their way to assist you. Nothing is hidden from time.
I met my birth mother in 2001. I’ve mentioned her Irish heritage before.
My father was a Black man, but that was all I knew; my adoptive parents knew nothing except his occupation, and the adoption agency knew nothing. Before meeting my mother, I’d put the whole thing away, and after meeting her…I put the whole thing away again. I had work issues; my own parents were ageing, and I had my own life to attend to.
My partner had been watching some family vlogs on YouTube and had seen people with a similar family situation to me…she suggested I do a DNA test. She ordered me a test from 23andMe. This was in 2021. I’d always been curious about my heritage and honestly hadn’t deeply considered that I might find family from it; in fact, I thought it highly unlikely. I took the test and moved on with my life.
7 weeks later, the test results came back, and I got quite a shock. Before I expand, I want to point out that I now know all DNA companies measure your ethnicity results by the size of THEIR database of testers.. So whatever results you get back, it’s only an estimate. The ethnicity results I got from 23&Me were quite different from the ones I’d later get from Ancestry and MyHeritage.
Again, this isn’t because DNA is innacuratem its due to the amount of DNA tested people each company can compare your results to. These results change over time as the databases grow.
23&me Regions
European DNA
So here is my current 23&me set of results for European ancestry.
African DNA
My (*Jamaican) African ancestry (remember most black Jamaicans came to Jamaica via the transatlantic slave trade between the late 1500s and 1803) looked like this:
Ancestry DNA Results
The Ancestry.com results were a bit different. But actually still really interesting, even more variety.
Piecing together a Jamaican Family Tree
Piecing together a Jamaican family tree has not been easy. Trust me to have Jamaican and Irish roots, two notoriously difficult groups to trace due to migrations, fires, poor record-keeping, and the elephant in the room: The Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.
The DNA tests yielded some close matches: several cousins, nephews, and nieces. From there, I was able to meet some half-siblings and their families, so I feel incredibly blessed to be able to at least make a healthy start on the family tree using their anecdotal evidence and what I know about building trees.
St Mary Via Portland with a seasoning of Westmoreland
Starting with my father’s name and info given to me by various family members, I have been able to build a tree that starts in St Mary Parish but mostly comes from Portland Parish.
Even better, depending on your point of view, I discovered that my people were Winward Maroons from the settlement of Moore Town. Founded by the great leader, Queen Nanny, who is a Jamaican heroine.
Like all families, there are connections to other local families, such as Harris and Reid, Hunter, Haye and many more. To this day im still finding and cataloguing new DNA matches and incorporating their family tree data into mine to build up a loose picture of how we are all related. The ideal dream is to be able to find a real connection back to an actual named African Ancestor.
I feel I’m a few steps away from that, though.
African DNA Matches
Despite not yet being able to trace any specific African Ancestor back to Africa, I have been able to find numerous enslaved ancestors and several people in other branches of the tree who were enslaved ancestors, as opposed to Jamaican/Americas born enslaved people.
Furthermore, I have found several African matches who are around the third cousin mark. Meaning that we realistically share a 2nd or 3rd-great-grandparent. This suggests to me that any African ancestor would have been brought to the Caribbean right at the end of the Slave trade. Of course this is just speculation, as there are doubtless many other ancestors to find.
Ghanaian DNA Matches
Here are a couple of Ghanaian matches I managed to make contact with and these are the places they are from. The people are Akan, formerly known as Ashanti.
Nigerian Matches
The locations of the DNA matches homes are further inland than I had expected, but having read all ot about the Slave trade, I discovered that captives were often marched for days from the interior, often being loaded into canoes to be brought to the coast.
I will explore this topic further in later posts. I feel there is plenty of information available on the Internet without me rehashing it here.
Further Reading
Traders in Men – Nicholas Radburn
The Slave Trade – James Walvin
