Reading through the birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates and baptismal records of my ancestors gives a small glimpse of what it might have been like in terms of just surviving. People had a lot of children in those days… I mean a lot. However, the flip side to all these births is the high infant mortality rate. Many mothers in my family tree lost babies between the ages of 0 – 2. My grandmother’s previous two siblings both died at birth. It’s a blessing to be alive.

I was able to go back pretty far on a couple of the lines of my tree, relatively speaking for a black person. (I’m still thinking about the best way to share this information on this site). However, I still wanted to back further, so my wife and I decided to test our DNA. I decided on myheritage.com. They were having a sale so I picked them. The test came in a couple of weeks. We swabbed our cheeks and sent it back. In a few months our results were in.

MyHeritageDNA

I was able to download my Raw DNA data and upload it to FamilyTreeDNA. These are the results.

FamilyTreeDNA