The African Kinship Reunion

Rhoda, a Ghanaian woman of the Fante ethnic group, recently conducted an autosomal DNA test through AncestryDNA. After receiving her results, she discovered that among those who previously tested with AncestryDNA, she is related to at least 20 people of African descent with a 100% to 95% chance of finding …

You couldn't tell it from looking at the faces in this picture, but this moment captures the family embrace of descendants of common Ashanti ancestors separated through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. One is an African American descendant of those who endured American Slavery. The other three are Ghanaian descendants of …

“My maternal grandmother told me…that way back in time, we had family members who went to the stream to fetch water and never returned. This stuck in my psyche for all those years.” – Ade As a young boy of 6 or 7, Ade and his older brother normally visited …

Germainy Debbie Mokeleba of the Republic of Congo decided to take an AncestryDNA test in April to help identify possible kin in the diaspora. Debbie is a graduating undergraduate I met when I gave a presentation in her class in March, 2016. She was a student in the University of …

Great grandmother Nana Faba Idun (age 81) has lived in Elmina, a Ghanaian town of one of the infamous slave dungeons, all her life. Nana’s brother, Joseph “Kawantwi” Arthur, remembers the childhood stories of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Kawantwi spoke of having a great-grandfather who was taken away to work …

Up until this time, this blog focused on initial family reunions between people of African descent in the diaspora and Africans immigrants. Many people, including academics, never thought this would be possible because of the amount of time that has passed between the time of separation into the Transatlantic Slave …

For 10 weeks in May to July 2016, my mother (Wylene Hameed) and I traveled to 5 of the 10 regions of Ghana. I explored the question of reuniting with descendants of family members who were taken away during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Conversations took place in Accra (Greater Accra …

Drawing from my interactions with Africans and people of African descent who are interacting with each other as family members, a friend’s Facebook post brought something to mind. To explain it, I need to highlight a certain aspect of the idea of white supremacy first. White supremacy is the idea …

TAKiR uses the Infinium H3Africa Array (Illumina) with 2.26 million markers! The array design was submitted by the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) consortium design team. Our samples are analyzed by the Functional Genomics Unit of Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center. One of TAKiR's core projects involves encouraging …

Kabagworiwe Safiah and her parents Kabagworiwe Adam and Kabagworiwe Saleimabu are members of the Kassena ethnic group who have tested with Ancestry and subsequently had their DNA profiles uploaded to GEDmatch. This is a narrative of the practice of finding their relatives in GEDmatch. I did a one-to-many comparison for …

One of the goals of The African Kinship Reunion is to construct the genetic genealogy of our participants from Africa. In this post, I discuss the genetic genealogy dendrogram (tree diagram) results produced using SNPRelate. The purpose of using SNPRelate was to obtain genetic relatedness connections among participants in the …

Scientific Article Genetic Genealogical Methods Used to Identify Diaspora Relatives of Members of the Kassena Ethnic Group in Northern Ghana LaKisha David *1, Leia Jones 2 , Judith Escamilla3 *1 contact@takir.org, CEO, The African Kinship Reunion; PhD Candidate, Human Development and Family Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign2 ljones52@illinois.edu, Undergraduate, …