Dr. Gina Paige, co-founder of African Ancestry, is giving African Americans the pathway to connect further with their identity and heritage.
Paige will be at the Heinz History Center on Saturday, April 26 at 11 a.m. for the “Discovering Your African Roots,” an African American Genealogy Workshop.
Her appearance is the celebrate National DNA Day, which is on Friday, April 25.
African Ancestry’s tests are single-lineage tests. They analyze the genetic branch of one person’s ancestry at a time. They have a test that can look back 2,000 years on either the maternal or paternal side. Other companies typically use autosomal testing, which analyzes the entire family tree.
There are parts of a person’s DNA that are constant. That DNA is compared to African ancestry from all over the world, and when an ethnic group match is found, “they are determined to share ancestry, because that DNA never changed,” she said. “We are looking at one part of who you are, but we are looking at the part that never changed.”
They have 33,000 African DNA samples comprised of 35 countries across West and Central Africa and 400 ethnic groups. They work with historians, anthropologists, and linguists. African Ancestry prioritizes protecting DNA.
Recently, 23andMe, which filed for bankruptcy, has come under investigation for how it handles personal data. In 2023, 7 million customer profiles were accessed.
“They (African Ancestry) don’t sell or share DNA. Once they get the results, the lab destroys it,” according to Paige. “We do this because we don’t want people to be so afraid that they don’t get this valuable information. We’re taking fear out of the equation and creating the pathway to reconnect.”
Protecting DNA holds heightened importance for Black people, especially given the historical context of how DNA has been handled.
Paige referenced past research studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the case of Henrietta Lacks, who did not have agency over her HeLa cells, as well as issues within the criminal justice system.
“There is a lot of power in our DNA, and historically, people have not handled it with respect,” she said. Paige’s path to founding African Ancestry came from an entrepreneurial approach.
She was introduced to her co-founder, who had a database of African lineages. As a genetic researcher, he wasn’t able to commercialize the process for determining specific ancestry. They were introduced by a colleague, and Paige saw it as an opportunity to create something that had never existed before.
“As Black people, we are the only group of people, African Americans, who can’t point to a country of origin. We work with and live with people, most of whom can say, ‘My people came from this place or that,’” she said. “We are stuck in this place of knowing that we have a history that happened before the shores of America and the Caribbean but not knowing where.”
“Knowing your identity is a birthright,” she said. She considers African Americans, because of that lost identity, the first victims of identity theft.
During the event, in partnership with in partnership with the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of Pittsburgh, there will be a few real-time genealogy reveals for Samuel Black, director of the African American Program at the Heinz History Center, Mayor Kenya Johns of Beaver Falls and Mayor Val Pennington of Bellevue.
Test kits will also be available at a discounted rate.
“It’s important for families to understand their roots, to learn more about their identity and document their history for future generations,” said Black.
“For African Americans seeking to learn more about their family’s connections to Africa, it can be especially meaningful. In some cases, finding these connections can help heal trauma and lead to an increased sense of belonging,” Black said. There’s an opportunity to connect with genealogy prior to 1619, the beginning of the slave trade in America.
It can give folks a better sense of the values, beliefs, and practices that inform who they are without them even knowing it.
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“It is important for us as Black people to reconnect to where our ancestors were prior to the slave trade. … to plug into our power,” Paige said.
Before the founding of African Ancestry in 2003, traditional genealogical tools could not provide Black people with their full ancestry, because enslaved people were not recorded as full human beings until the 1870 census, according to Paige. Though the value of understanding ancestry can go beyond just the emotional realm.
It may also improve health outcomes. Paige has been working with Touch, The Black Breast Cancer Alliance.
“They talk about the genes that have been identified as most likely to develop breast cancer, but some of these genes aren’t studied in Black women. We’re not even being tested for the gene, and then we don’t know our risk,” Paige said.
“Precision medicine is here and allows health care providers to prescribe the medication that will work best based on DNA. If Black people’s DNA is not part of the research, then Black people will not benefit.”
Though Paige did not know her full ancestry, she had relatives in her family who were genealogists, so she had some knowledge in the United States, but not in Africa.
“Having that knowledge of her family’s history gave me, and continues to give me, an essence of confidence,” she said.
For Paige, she knows she comes from a long line of entrepreneurs who created the goods they sold.
“For as long as I can remember, I wanted to do my own thing, and then overlay that with my paternal ancestry, where most of the entrepreneurs trace back to the Hausa people of Nigeria, and the Hausa women are the businesspeople of the community,” Paige said.
“It gives me another degree of explanation,” Paige said. Paige has received similar emotional feedback from others who’ve found their roots.
Many feel pride and an immediate sense of awe.
“You don’t really understand what is missing until you find it,” Paige said.
People often have more curiosity, like how they may have gotten from the shores of Cameroon to Pittsburgh, for example. Paige also said that it can be tied to psychological, mental, and physical well-being.
The first time she took a large group to Africa, they all came together at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. They had all taken the African Ancestry test and traced their ancestry to different groups in Cameroon.
When they landed, they got off the plane calling themselves Cameroonian Americans. After being in the country for about three days, they were Camericans, according to Paige.
“I watched their identity change … and that is how they moved through the country, and even upon return, that is how they are moving through life,” Paige said.
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