I'm a Nigerian Prince

I got a notification from Ancestry shortly before Christmas that my DNA report had been updated. Apparently they do this from time to time, as they gather more and more information about global DNA and better refine their data.

You may remember that I first did this DNA analysis nine years ago, and it hasn't changed significantly since then. I am still overwhelmingly English -- and now they can even break down what parts of England I'm from. I have additional Scottish, Welsh and German ancestry, and traces from Ireland, Sweden, and West Africa.

It's that West Africa bit that fascinates me most. I have no idea what the story is there. I do have plenty of family from the South in the years before the Civil War, so it's not impossible that at least one of my ancestors had some African blood. Things like that certainly happened back then, as we all know from Thomas Jefferson's history with Sally Hemings.

What's interesting is how the source of my African DNA changes from one report to another. Initially, Ancestry said only that it was West African, and reported it as a "low confidence" result, so I considered it a fluke or a throwback to some distant primordial past.

But with each report it's become more specific -- the second report pinpointed Mali and a few other adjacent countries as the source. The third eliminated Africa entirely and folded in Norway and Iceland. (It seems to have dispensed with low-percentage results.) The fourth report brought me back to Africa with DNA more specifically linked to Ivory Coast and Ghana, but got rid of that Norwegian connection.

The newest version shifts my African roots to Nigeria. And as you can see above, it's very specific, right down to certain ethnic groups.

I have no idea how accurate this is, but as I said, it's not impossible. The accuracy seems more likely the more specific we get, and this is pretty darn specific. I'm not aware of any stories in my family about ancestors with African connections, but of course that's not the kind of thing anyone talked about back then. In American society, certainly before the Civil War but even afterwards, there were social benefits to "passing" for white.

I can see how it might happen. Let's use Sally Hemings again as an example. She was one-quarter African, but still enslaved, and she was having children by Jefferson, so they would be 1/8 African (assuming the Jeffersons had no African ancestors of their own). With each successive generation there's a greater likelihood that those descendants would marry further into white European-American culture. That kind of intermarriage could seemingly lead, in modern times, to results like mine. (I'm not saying I'm a descendant of Hemings and Jefferson, just that I could be a descendant of that kind of coupling, which was surely not rare.)

It's pretty fascinating. I wish my brother would take a similar test. I'd be interested to see if his revealed anything more, though obviously the DNA he inherited would be somewhat different from the DNA I inherited. He could be less African than me -- or more.

The "journeys" on my mother's side remain very accurate. My maternal grandmother was from southeastern North Carolina, which is shown as a "hot spot" on the map above, and my maternal grandfather's people were New Englanders and New Yorkers.

And on the paternal side, Ancestry zeroes right in on the ancestral home of my father's people in northern Arkansas.

Pretty fascinating stuff!