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. Family trees can spread very wide, but these tests trace back only one paternal line and one maternal line. This might appear to be a drawback, but the results are nonetheless very dependable and can create a reliable scientific outcome, unlike my mind’s understanding of it all. I will simply trust what the experts say about this.

The science says that the results point back to unique haplogroups for the subjects of these tests. What’s a “haplogroup”? Wikipedia says that it pertains to deep ancestral origins dating back thousands of years. What’s more, these haplogroups are associated with geographical population distributions: they can point to the regions from which one’s earliest foremother and forefather come.

So, with great expectation I look forward to seeing if two of my family lines point back to Africa–or what? Slowly but surely, I’m also looking forward to watching more of this show, African American Lives 2.

– Michael Emery

At KLRU, Michael Emery directs Texas Monthly Talks, is a camera operator for Austin City Limits and other productions, and produced Juneteenth Jamboree. He is a former bicycle commuter, currently a car commuter, and aspires to be a bicycle commuter again.

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.

For me, the neatest new thing is Geni.com, which is a social network for families. In the 13 months since I entered my particulars and the immediate family, over 860 other relatives, deceased and living, have been born into this data cloud. In this virtual family tree, I can point to links in Africa and Asia; Europe is still a distant continent, but for how long? Geni remains a free service, which I find truly amazing.

That figure of 860 individuals doesn’t include dozens of family members whom I haven’t yet entered. Also missing is my wife and her large family out of New Orleans. She is averse to sharing the privilege of her genealogy with 860 virtual strangers in affinity because of the fear of somebody stealing her identity. Getting her family to join in on the fun might be a future story for this blog.

I am in the process of watching AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES 2 right now, and will soon make comments on it.

– Michael Emery

At KLRU, Michael Emery directs Texas Monthly Talks, is a camera operator for Austin City Limits and other productions, and produced Juneteenth Jamboree. He is a former bicycle commuter, currently a car commuter, and aspires to be a bicycle commuter again.

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.

These things are still important, but genealogists have other tools to lean on today. Technology has provided us ever more contrivances to get our work (and play) done. One of the newest implements is DNA analysis. Following the theme of African American Lives, KLRU has handed me this new gizmo, a DNA kit from AfricanDNA.com. With the help of his pioneering company, Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. et al, I will give it a try in the weeks to come and blog about my own immersion in genetic genealogy.

While my knowledge of science isn’t one of my strong points, I can tell you that computer technology has been a great practical benefit to my own quest. In fact, it is the primary reason why I chose to invest in a personal computer (a Macintosh SE/30) back in the early-1990s. With this I was next able to purchase and install a dedicated genealogy application (Reunion) and begin the never-ending process of digitizing my family history. I’ve entered detailed person sheets about my family. I’ve scanned photographs and documents. I started looking around for other African Americans to share in the passion for genealogy when the Internet began to become popular. I have literally met several cousins online whom I had not known before! The family tree increased by scores and scores.

Trying to provide a public service, I (along with co-founder Saundra Brown) launched the very first Usenet newsgroup dedicated to African-ancestored genealogy discussions in 1995. News:soc.genealogy.african still lives, but it’s a shadow of its former self due to a period of malicious cross-posting that chased serious folks away; the service which initially hosted the newsgroup changed hands, and abruptly left the group unsupported for a number of years; the emergence at the right time of a very worthy successor, Afrigeneas.com; and the steady drumbeat of progress, superseding the former popularity of the Usenet.

Please bear with me in this blog as I attempt an embrace with the latest genetic technology in the effort to capture a view of my distant past.

– At KLRU, Michael Emery directs Texas Monthly Talks, is a camera operator for Austin City Limits and other productions, and produced Juneteenth Jamboree (which airs Monday, Feb. 9, at 9:30 p.m. on KLRU). He is a former bicycle commuter, currently a car commuter, and aspires to be a bicycle commuter again.