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African American Lives: Austin edition pt 3

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Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s series African American Lives journeys deep into the African-American experience to reveal the triumphs and tragedies within the family histories of participants. Watch clips from the series at pbs.org. In conjunction with this series, KLRU’s Michael Emery will be blogging about his own genealogical experiences. Here is part three of his journey.

Yesterday I put my DNA in the mail! I have no idea how long the results will take. The actual collection procedure is about as strenuous as flossing one’s teeth. There are no obvious bodily liquids involved with the sampling. The mail-in package is sanitary and secure. And the expectation is mounting, yes!

Research genetic genealogy and you’ll find that there are two popular tests, and the biology of it tests my understanding to the limit. One of these evaluates genetic markers from the father of the father of the father et cetera. This Y-chromosome isn’t passed on by females, which means that women can’t be tested for it. And the other test looks at chromosomes that describe a subject’s maternal lineage, the mother of the mother of the mother et cetera. more →

African American Lives: Austin edition pt 2

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Building on the widespread acclaim of African American Lives (2006) and Oprah’s Roots (2007), African American Lives 2 journeys deep into the African-American experience to reveal the triumphs and tragedies within the family histories of an all-new group of remarkable participants. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. returns as series host, guiding genealogical investigations. Part two airs Sunday, Feb. 22, at 4 p.m.

In conjunction with the rebroadcast of this series, KLRU’s Michael Emery will be blogging about his own genealogical experiences. Here is part one of his journey.

In addition to a great waste of time, the Internet has been a great advancement for genealogy. Consider the way the soc.genealogy newsgroups were adopted by a neat California couple in the 1990s and became Rootsweb.com, operating out of a nondescript Unix box on the floor of a spare room in their house. It got way too big, way too fast for them, so then Ancestry.com bought the rights and consolidated it with their commercial operations, while still maintaining lots of free services for historians and genealogists. It must be the world’s biggest genealogy operation anywhere.
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African American Lives: Austin edition

Posted on by

Building on the widespread acclaim of African American Lives (2006) and Oprah’s Roots (2007), African American Lives 2 journeys deep into the African-American experience to reveal the triumphs and tragedies within the family histories of an all-new group of remarkable participants. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. returns as series host, guiding genealogical investigations. Part one of African American Lives 2 airs Sunday, Feb. 8, at 4 p.m.; Part two airs Sunday, Feb. 22, at 4 p.m.

In conjunction with the rebroadcast of this series, KLRU’s Michael Emery will be blogging about his own genealogical experiences. Here is part one of his journey.

My dear mother kept several photograph albums that spanned decades of family relations. Always the patient parent, she would sit with me and my siblings in order to explain what the many pictures were about and who was being therein pictured. This was better than her reading us storybooks, because these were not made-up: these were real events and real people, frequently my own relatives. And so it went for me as a boy, my attraction to genealogy began as photos of my family and oral histories. more →