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Tracing ancestral birthplace

by Barbados Today
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A DNA test for Barbadians or other Caribbean people who are descendants of enslaved persons could change their point of view and re-align their focus to developments in countries of the Motherland from where they discovered their ancestors originated.

The quest for exact ancestral origins by Barbadians is not to be restricted to DNA testing alone but coupled with researching easily available online data that provide information on slave names to be found in early 19th Century records in the ‘slave register’ and produced by Moravians and Methodists.

This position of realigned interests after discovering who a person truly is based on revelation of his or her ancestry, was contended by a mixed-race Barbadian, Marcia Inniss-Nurse, during a lecture presentation on genealogy hosted a by group so named at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society last night.

The lecture presented by University of the West Indies Dr Tara Inniss on Just Who Do We Think We Are?: The Frontline and Fault Lines of Genealogical DNA Testing in the Caribbean.

Following Dr Inniss’ scholarly presentation of implications of DNA testing including issues of intellectual property rights, and detailed findings of a survey of a limited number of Barbadians and their varied reactions to DNA testing and the behaviour of those who did it, Marcia Inniss-Nurse offered from among the audience that DNA testing coupled with research could prove life changing for Caribbean descendants of enslaved persons.

“For the purpose of descendants of enslaved persons it is extremely important to find an avenue that allows you to at least know where your blood lines lie in Africa,” she postulated, and used herself as an example, “because it is quite obvious looking at me that I have European blood lines, and it is quite evident that I have African bloodlines but on the landscape of Barbados we tend to know that we’re English, Irish, Welsh and we’ve heard that perhaps a lot of the persons came from Ghana, or Nigeria”.

She said however, “I found information about a country that I knew about in the news, but I didn’t know my bloodlines were connected to [there]”.

Without naming the country from which the enslaved side of her ancestry originated, Inniss-Nurse said, “it has stimulated [me] and should stimulate persons here of African descent because of the transatlantic slave trade to begin to perhaps listen to news or watch information about Togo, about Benin,  the areas that come up in their DNA and to move away from listening solely news about the United States and of course Great Britain”.

She established enslaved person’s descendants ancestry research bears similar relevance to the interest of Jews in Auschwitz, a concentration camp during the European conflict, World War II, where Nazi Germany slaughterer many of that ethnic group. She noted that Jews of today visit the infamous site “to try finding their ancestors and which camp they were in, which building they were in, where they got burnt”.

She said that in many cases the slave records record the lives of Caribbean enslaved ancestors’ detail from their first owner and perhaps to their death.

“Between 1817 and 1834 when those registers were done, if you find Thom, 40 years old, owned in 1817 by Mr Butcher, you can trace Thom all the way down to 1834.

“You can trace whether he sold him, gifted him or you can trace whether Thom died.”

She said the names of slaves in the register tend to go down through generations unchanged to this day.

This she contended helps when moving that slave register information to the time of baptisms here where, “the Methodists and Moravians in Barbados wrote the nationality the person, if you were African, that is born on the continent of Africa, as opposed to born in Barbados enslaved”.

“All of this ties in to having your DNA done because if you happen to be somebody who have an ancestor on one of the Moravian of Methodist records and its says Koromantee, and you do your DNA and it says the country [of ancestral origin] you can catch your ancestors.”

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