My Black Cousins

Ancestry estimated my ethnicity and told me I had more than
a thousand 4th cousins or closer relatives who had also
sent DNA samples for analysis by them. 

About two years ago, in preparation for a trip to the UK, I sent a sample of spit to Ancestry to confirm or deny my paper genealogical findings. Unsurprisingly, I had few documented leads on the exact origin of my British ancestors because most came to Virginia so early. Of the people who represented the dead ends of my dozens of lines of descent, 25 percent of them first appeared in 17th century Virginia, 50 percent were traced to 18th-century beginnings in Virginia or North Carolina, and the rest could be traced no farther back than the first half of the 19th century. All of my direct lines stayed in Tidewater, Virginia, mostly in Gloucester’s Kingston Parish, which became Mathews County in 1791. Some settled first in Mathews or New Kent, Virginia, then migrated to old Bute County (later Granville, Warren, Franklin Counties), North Carolina. Some siblings and cousins moved on from there, but for the most part, my ancestors have hung close to the Eastern Seaboard.

For more on early
English settlement,
I suggest reading
Adapting to the New
World: English
Society in the
17th-Century
Chesapeake.

Their demographic mix probably mimics the outline of colonial Virginia settlement, with about three-fourths arriving as indentured servants, simply hoping to find a better life, and the other fourth representing the lesser gentry, those with some education and means, but no land in the Mother Country. After digesting research from scholarly publication like Adapting to the New World, I felt pretty safe in the assumption that many of my paternal ancestors came from Wales and the English Border counties via the Severn River valley on ships leaving Bristol. 

Bamburgh Castle is like Mecca to genealogically-
inclined members of the Foster Family
A sign near the Castle entrance sets us
straight on the Foster/Forster
relation to the estate.

On my mother’s side, there is a long-standing legend that my maternal grandmother's  Foster family was descended from Northumberland, England, and that one particularly notorious ancestor was a 16th-century constable, Border Riever, and caretaker of Bamburgh Castle. Others who have an English origin story are said to have been born in Kirkby Lonsdale, Kirk Deighton, other Yorkshire locations, and Kent. Many of these ancestors probably left from London or port cities on England’s southern coast. 

For the most part, Ancestry’s DNA test suggested there was some truth to these folklores. Nevertheless, I am nearly 100 percent British.

Recently, I received an email from Ancestry telling me that their analysis of my DNA had been refined since the ever-increasing pool of people tested had provided more data. The updated ethnicity estimate, based on more than 44,000 reference samples, told me my ancestors were from Scotland (36%), England and Northwestern Europe (34%), Wales (16%), Germanic Europe (10%), and Ireland (4%). 

All this leads to the point of this posting: the discovery of new-to-me cousins. The Ancestry DNA test provides more than your ethnicity results. They also provide a list of DNA relatives who have also taken this test, sorted by their degree of relation to you, revealed in lengths of identically-patterned DNA. Some of these people you may know and some you don’t. Some have kindly added their photograph, but most have not. Some have identified themselves with their name, but most provide only an email address. Some have linked their extensive and well-documented Ancestry family trees, but they are truly few and far between.

  

Ancestry gives you a list of your DNA
matches as well as a number of ways to explore the
data. You can even contact your cousins who have
given their permission to be contacted.

My son has taken this test and Ancestry correctly identified our relationship as parent/child. Neither my sister, nephews, nor any of my first cousins have been tested, so the next relatives identified by Ancestry are my 2nd cousins. Apparently, eight of them have been tested and from details they provide I can identify all but two of them.

I discovered that the list of cousins grows from here, and I was curious to find others I knew. Besides, the Ancestry email caught me on a particularly slow COVID-defined day. Leisurely scrolling along, I found twenty of my 3rd cousins had been tested. Although there were several familiar family names, I didn’t know a single one.

Nevertheless, I scrolled on to 4th cousins. At last I saw a name I recognized. My cousin Grover Lewis had been tested. I was still counting cousins, although I was about to give up the extra effort of counting as the list seemed endless, when . . . 99, 100, 101, 102. Huh? Hmm. 103, 104, 105. What? I scrolled back to 102 and looked at her photo and then clicked through to her ethnicity estimate. I scrolled on to 105 and looked at his. Both were a bit Scottish and English. Other European locales showed up, but the majority of their DNA patterns, 60 to 80 percent of them, were related to Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, Western Bantu, Benin, Togo, and Mali ethnicities.

Scroll, scroll, scroll. Faster now, I was just looking at the photos. After about a half hour, I scrolled past more than 1,000 of my DNA-defined 4th cousins and among them I found 25 African-Americans who had identified themselves as such by adding their photo. There may have been more, but as I said, not everyone submits a photo and clicking through on over 1,000 people to drill down to their ethnicity percentages required more time that I was willing to spend. 

By now it was clear to me that I had found a truth that most of us White people know, on an intuitive level, but have never confronted as fact: great-great grandfather, or his brother, or someone else not too far removed from me, raped the people he enslaved.

At first, I was in some form of denial. I though the “White man in the woodpile” had to be my North Carolina great-great. After all, he was the largest slaveholder of the slaveholding bunch of great-great grandfathers and uncles. Could I somehow determine this?

In fits and starts over the last couple of weeks, I have gathered my 25 new-found cousins onto a spreadsheet and started comparing them. I grouped them by the number of centimorgans (cM), the length of a piece of matched DNA, that I shared with each. I graphed their ethnicity percentages from European and African geographical origins.

I discovered that not all 4th cousins are the same. Ancestry lets you click on a cousin to group them with others who share the same ancestor. These shared DNA groups are designated by a length of DNA exhibiting the same pattern. 

For example, my closest Black cousins, Mercedes and Jonathan, share the same 35-cM-long pattern of DNA with me, so we all descend from the same ancestor. So do six other people culled by Ancestry from the list of more than 1,000 4th cousins and sorted into this DNA pattern group. 

Pamela, Edwin, and I share a DNA pattern 23 cM in length with 19 other 4th cousins and one 3rd cousin. 

Alexis, Charlene and I share a different 23 cM long pattern with six other people. 

Jon, me, and 27 other people, including my son, share yet another identical 23 cM DNA pattern. 

Jamaal, Jean, four other cousins, and I share the same 20-cM long pattern. 

Many of my new-found Black cousins share a length of DNA with me, yet they share no patterns or ancestors with any other Black cousin in my group of 25. 

All of this suggests more than one of my White ancestors was an abusive master. There wasn’t just one “White man in the woodpile.”

So far, I have tried to triangulate to figure out who the shared ancestor is in the grouping of nine people that includes Mercedes, Jonathan, and I. By examining the genealogies linked by some White cousins in the group, I tried to see if I share a common ancestor with them. Examination of a Mathews County, Virginia, cousin's family tree shows we are related through the children of Henry Digges (1767-1823), but it’s complicated: my third great uncle married Henry's granddaughter. 

In another triangulation, I found a White cousin in the group with Pamela, Edwin, and I who has a number of Mathew’s ancestors with the Forrest surname. My paternal grandmother was a Forrest, and there are Forrests in other paternal and maternal branches of my family tree. But I can’t make a connection. Also, I learned while preparing for my UK trip that Forrests, Forsters, and Fosters, a surname spelled variously once people started writing and recording names, can be related. I've got Fosters on my maternal side. 

I've surfed through other groupings for relations. The same surnames pop out, but no direct line yet. My assumption that one North Carolinian was to “blame” seems to be misdirected. My Mathews, Virginia, ancestors are implicated by my work thus far. 

Importantly, what this shows me, and I am saddened and ashamed to realize, is that the sexual abuse of female enslaved people was all too common. This realization, that most American Blacks have White ancestors, has already resulted in my viewing every Black person I see in a different light. If he’s not my cousin, then he is very likely the cousin of my White next-door neighbor, business colleague, or friend from church.