Customer Reviews

In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past

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I found this collection of genealogies and family histories of 19 African Americans to be both fascinating and moving. The family histories explore many different aspects of African American history and the black experience in the US, always tying individual stories to broader historical themes in a way that was generally successful, if sometimes repetitive and often lacking in detail. Therefore, despite the criticisms outlined below, I think this is a valuable book, and would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in African American history or genealogy.

That said, I was troubled by the factual errors and questionable interpretations that riddle the book. Gates is neither a historian nor a geneticist by training, so these lapses are perhaps unavoidable, but they detract from the book's overall impact. Perhaps most troubling is Gates's problematic use of DNA evidence. DNA evidence is particularly important in African American genealogy because it is almost always the only way descendants of slaves can find a direct, albeit generalized, connection to their African ancestry. But DNA test results are not as straightforward as Gates presents them. In the admixture test, for example, two siblings might have quite different results, despite having identical ancestors, because each sibling is the product of a different recombination of their parents' DNA. A brief section explaining exactly what DNA tests can and cannot tell us about our ancestry, and more careful wording when describing DNA test results, would have improved the book.

The book also contains several factual errors. Among the ones I found: the 1870 census doesn't list birthdays or family relationships (it lists ages, and family relationships were not recorded until the 1880 census) (p. 8); Harris County, Georgia, is on the Alabama border, not "near the South Carolina border" (p. 198); and the slave schedules in the federal census were made in 1850 and 1860, not 1840 and 1850 (p. 420). While each error in itself is minor, the errors combine to suggest a degree of carelessness in research or editing that weakens the book's overall message. This is unfortunate, because it's an important message.

Henry Gates' book, IN SEARCH OF OUR ROOTS, gives much more information than its accompanying PBS documentary, "African American Lives," and lays out the processes used to gather that information. This book is most relevant to those who have done or plan to do serious genealogy. It would also be of interest to those who are admirers of the people it covers. I have been obsessed with trying to trace my family into slavery and beyond for the past eleven years. I started this project in 1996 after reading Edward Ball's book, SLAVES IN THE FAMILY, because it struck a note which resonated with certain of my family's oral history.

I began my search before census data was digitized and searchable on the internet. Countless hours were spent going through microfilmed records and traveling to local archives. At that time DNA testing seemed only used to prove or negate paternity.

It's been said that black genealogy is very difficult but not impossible. Early mentors told me that if you cannot trace your people as humans, you must trace them as property. In this process you come to many dead ends where the line(s) just die out. Gates' book shows this and I found it to be a help in showing how his genealogists dealt with some of the barriers. Their use of conjecture was informative. For example, a simple thing such as searching for a slave owner in another state based on the last name of the former slave in the slave schedules had not occurred to me. If I did not have a record with the slave owner's name in the county where the ex-slave was living I assumed that there was no further information.

I am envious of the army of professional genealogists, historians and archivists that Henry Gates had at his disposal for this project. He also seemed to have had a huge budget for DNA tests. I entered his contest to pick a "regular" person to be included in the "African American Lives" project to have some of these resources placed at my disposal, but it was not to be. Previously I was able to do some limited DNA testing which was helpful in showing that I had none of Native American blood spoken of by my father's family and now could abandon time wasting searches through Indian records. The book was helpful in describing the DNA heritage of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, with whom I share the L3d haplogroup. I had been researching East African slavery to figure out how my ancestors ended up as slaves in South Carolina and Virginia from areas where slaves to the Americas were not taken. I did not have the $400 to test African ancestry of tribes and even if I did, I did not have the historians to interpret the results with tribal warfare and migration patterns.

On my own I have taken my and my husband's family back six generations. I have accumulated a sizable collection of genealogy books. Gates' book is very good in that it is informative and inspires one to go forward with a very difficult search. I can overlook the "factual errors and questionable interpretations" that were mentioned in other reviews because I was experienced enough to immediate recognize that they were errors. Either Gates did no genealogy himself or he did not write or have a knowledgeable person proof read those sections.

Gates, in his introduction, says that the "average" African American is likely to have X percentage of African bloodlines, Y percentage of European and Z of Native American. He then shows this with a number of famous African Americans, including building the case that an alleged American Indian ancestor in most black families' past lineage was likely actually a descendant of a black-white relationship.

The most fascinating story, in many ways, is that of Anatole Broyard and his daughter, Bliss. Anatole was born in Louisiana of mixed ethnic parentage but, at the age of 17, decided to start "passing" as white, eventually becoming a columnist with the New York Times. His daughter, Bliss, found out the truth from her white mother just before Anatole died.

Contra some people, Anatole was born and raise as "black," therefore he belongs in this book, precisely because of the issue of "passing."

The other interesting part is where Gates uses DNA analysis to connect the people of the book to specific African tribes and groups within their African heritage. That said, although he does make caveats at times, he may be claiming a bit too much for what DNA actually can, or cannot, tell us.

It's still a very good book overall, though.

The Broyard family (Anatole, Bliss, etc.) cannot honestly be called "African American" or "black." Gates has been pushing a forced black racial classification for mixed or part-black white people for a long time. It's better to spend your time reading: Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise And Triumph of the One-drop Rule or The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue.