https://medium.com/@andrekearns/tracing-african-ancestry-using-dna-52065e19632e

This past season’s final episode of Dr. Henry Lewis Gate’s Finding Your Roots, featured Tonight Show band leader and drummer for The Roots Amir Questlove Thompson. Gates revealed that Thompson descends from Charles and Maggie Lewis who were born in modern-day Benin and arrived in Mobile, Alabama in 1859 aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in America. Both were shipmates with Cudjo Lewis, whose biography, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was authored by Zora Neale Hurston in 1927 and published this year.

Dr. Gates remarked during the show that of all the African American ancestries he’s traced, Thompson was the only person he’s traced back to named ancestors from a named place in Africa. Here’s why re-tracing our African roots is so hard for most of us.