{"id":47189,"date":"2016-05-29T17:32:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-29T17:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47189"},"modified":"2016-05-29T17:32:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-29T17:32:39","slug":"the-story-in-my-dna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47189","title":{"rendered":"The Story in My DNA"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Story in My DNA<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Huffington Post<\/a>
\n2016-05-24<\/p>\n

Hope Ferguson<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Like many African Americans, I grew up not knowing where I came from. There was no \u201cold country\u201d for us. Obviously, I knew that most slaves were brought from Central<\/a> and West Africa<\/a>. I heard family stories about being part Native American – that the Seminole Indians had helped slaves escape from their masters by sheltering them within their tribe. That my grandfather\u2019s mother was half Cherokee<\/a>, part Scotch-Irish<\/a>, as well as African. Her long black hair and high cheekbones in the one photo I saw of her bore this out.<\/p>\n

For a while, these stories were enough. I believed that I would only really find out, if ever, in the afterlife.<\/p>\n

When I was 29, I moved from New York City<\/a> to Argyle, N.Y.<\/a>, a small upstate farming town that had been settled by Scots<\/a>. Since Fergusons were on the original patent, I was often asked, while interviewing people by phone as a local reporter, if I was one of the Argyle Fergusons, and I would laugh, and say no, and explain that I was African American, not Scottish.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, at a National Association for Black Journalists conference, the company African Ancestry was doing free DNA analyses for some of the attendees as a promotion. I sat transfixed as the African ancestry of various people was teased out; and listened with amazement at how the person displayed some similar traits as their ancestral land … for example, a gift with textiles.<\/p>\n

After that, I became more curious about my ancestry…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Story in My DNA The Huffington Post 2016-05-24 Hope Ferguson Like many African Americans, I grew up not knowing where I came from. There was no \u201cold country\u201d for us. Obviously, I knew that most slaves were brought from Central and West Africa. I heard family stories about being part Native American – that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,28,459,8,3015,20],"tags":[23916,23917,10108,2425],"class_list":["post-47189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-europe","category-history","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-usa","tag-hope-e-ferguson","tag-hope-ferguson","tag-huffington-post","tag-the-huffington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47190,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47189\/revisions\/47190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}