I’ve been dabbling in exploring my genealogy. After I took the 23andMe DNA test and did a video on my ancestry results with them, quite a few recommended that I take the African Ancestry test which traces your actual ethnic group if you have African ancestry. Many Black Americans have complex views on their link to slavery, whether they acknowledge their link to Africa through the slave trade or not. I am very comfortable calling myself African-American and very much do feel that my I have a cultural connection to West Africa. But since that is forever up for debate in the comments section of my video with Evelyn from the Internets on Africans & African-Americans, I felt this test would be a great part of the conversation. Plus it’s always great to support Black owned businesses, especially those owned by #SmartBrownGirls.
The African Ancestry kit has two components, you can do the myDNAmix test to get your ancestry composite the list in addition to the actual African Ancestry test that only gives you the results from your African ancestry and links you to a specific ethnic group. All it takes is a swab of saliva from your mouth, mail it back to the lab in the packaging they send you and wait about six weeks. Women can only trace their maternal lineage. Men can trace both their maternal and paternal lineage, thought that is two separate tests.
First up myDNAmix results came back with an interesting result. Not to far off from my 23andMe results, I came in at 73% Sub-Saharan African and 18% European. But most interesting was the 9% East Asian that showed up in my results! On 23andMe, East Asian and Native American are lumped together. So it’s crazy that myDNAmix found a very strong Native American link when 23andMe only found 0.9%. Guess my Grandma was lying when she had a mini-fit about “not being regular Black,” whatever that means.
Peep the video below to find out what my results concluded for my maternal lineage.
