by Nahlah Abdur-Rahman
June 18, 2024
African Ancestry’s co-founder Dr. Gina Paige speaks to BLACK ENTERPRISE about the company’s holistic work to help Black people find their roots.
Finding one’s roots can be a challenge, especially when one’s history was not deemed important until the 19th century. Thankfully, the work of African Ancestry can help those across the Black diaspora source their heritage and instill pride in knowing exactly where they come from.
Their home ancestry DNA kits uses their vast African genetic sequence database, comprised of over 30,000 samples, to trace one’s background. To African Ancestry, knowledge is power, and the power of knowing one’s history has now been unearthed for those of African descent.
Founded in 2003 by Dr. Rick Kittles and Dr. Gina Paige, African Ancestry has helped over 1 million people trace their maternal and paternal lineage while providing safety and security with one’s genetic history.
Ahead of Juneteenth’s nationwide celebration and call to action for freedom, BLACK ENTERPRISE spoke to Paige about this holistic restoration to Black people globally. Moreover, African Ancestry is offering new customers a special Juneteenth offer to discover more through their DNA.
Explain African Ancestry’s story. How did this company come to fruition? Where do you first see the need?
My co-founder [Kittles] is a geneticist, and he worked on the African Burial Ground project in lower Manhattan. He was part of the team of researchers from Howard University. His job was to determine the ancestry of the bones. When you talk about demand, when the community found out he could identify where in Africa these bones were from, they wanted to know, too. Then came these requests from the living to find out their present-day African country and ethnic group. He and I partnered, and I commercialized his research to make it available for everyone.
What are the wellness and healing benefits of having a fully realized identity through these means?
You can’t know who you are unless you know where you’re from. And we’re the only group of people in this country that don’t point to a country and a group of people for ancestry. I say this a lot: we’re the original victims of identity theft. When our ancestors were stolen, we lost our names, languages, and the freedom to honor our ancestors. When we think about identity theft today, when someone steals who you are, you really can’t function. You can’t live your life the way you want to live it. When you find out where you’re from, what we’ve seen is that people have an automatic sense of pride and place. And with this sense of belonging and peace, now you’re rooted and transformed in many ways.
So, how does this DNA kit work? What is the difference between genetic ancestry tracing and genealogy? How do they work together in this way?
GP: So genealogy is the research of a person’s family history using written and oral records. You pass down family stories, information kept in family bibles, marriage, and birth records, censuses, etc. Those are genealogical tools to help you recreate the lives of those who came before you. Genetic ancestry tracing is the research of this family history through biology, using DNA. Just like written records giving us information, there’s information inside of our DNA. Whether it’s your height, weight, personality, or shape of your nose, that’s all data. And that ancestry is in your DNA. They work together, specifically for Black people, to build a bridge between where your paper trail stops and where your ancestry was prior to the transatlantic slave trade.
Speaking more to this, can you give us a breakdown of how single-lineage African ancestry tracing works?
We each inherit 50% of our DNA from our mother and father. But you also inherited a little bit of DNA from your mother that didn’t mix with anything from your father called mitochondrial (mt)DNA. It is maternally-inherited, so passed from mother to child, and represents one lineage of your family tree. It all stems from the mothers of your history, and it does not change, even over thousands of years. So we can take your mtDNA, or your mothers’ or siblings’, and we look for matching mtDNA from elsewhere in the world. If you are looking for African Ancestry, you have the best chance of finding it when you have the most African DNA to compare it to. That’s what we do, and we have the largest database of African DNA in the industry.
As we approach Juneteenth, can you speak on the significance of this holiday with the work you do?
GP: You know, Juneteenth is the celebration of the enslaved people in Texas learning of their freedom. And we know that once people got their freedom, they then looked for family members. They reconnected their families to build new lives. African Ancestry functions in the same way. We’re celebrating your ability to reconnect with your ancestors in Africa. In honor of Juneteenth, we’re offering 10% off all of our test kits and our entire site. We want to make it easier for people to take advantage of this opportunity. We’re the only company that doesn’t sell or share our customers’ DNA either because we don’t want fear to be the reason you don’t find your roots. It only takes one test for a family line to find the answer, as everyone shares the same maternal lineage. It is a family project where everyone benefits from the results.
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