Black Ancestries Traces Client Back to African-born Ancestor
I remember the moment clearly.
I was watching an episode of Finding Your Roots, hosted by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., featuring the story of The Roots drummer and Tonight Show band leader, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. In that episode, Dr. Gates revealed something remarkable: Questlove descends from Charles and Maggie Lewis — Africans born in what is now Benin — who arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in 1859 aboard the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach the United States. They were shipmates of Cudjo Lewis, whose biography Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was recorded by Zora Neale Hurston in 1927 and published nearly a century later.
Dr. Gates commented that Questlove was the only African American whose ancestry he had successfully traced back to named individuals from a named place in Africa.
That moment stuck with me.
The Challenge of Tracing African Roots
The reason African American lineage is so difficult to trace lies in the complex history of slavery in the U.S., which involved three interrelated slave trades. The first is the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1619–1808) in which an estimated 400,000 Africans were brought directly to North America before the importation of enslaved people was legally banned. The second is the Inter-Caribbean Trade where Africans and their descendants were regularly transported from the Caribbean and South America into the U.S. The third is the Domestic Slave Trade (1780s–1865): Over one million enslaved individuals were forcibly relocated from the Upper South to the Deep South in the decades before emancipation.
Because enslaved Africans and their descendants were forcibly migrated over multiple generations spanning hundreds of years — from the Caribbean and South America to the U.S., and later from state to state within the U.S. — as property rather than as people, their movements were rarely documented by name. This lack of detailed records makes it incredibly rare for African Americans to trace their lineage back to a specific African-born ancestor. Which is why I’m thrilled to share that Black Ancestries has done exactly that — for our very first client.
Reaching Across Oceans: Our Client’s Story
One of our first clients — a proud Spelman College graduate and fellow Atlanta University Center alum (I’m a Morehouse graduate) — came to us with a clear goal: to uncover the heritage of her maternal grandparents from Louisiana.
Though she has always had access to her paternal Nigerian (Igbo) heritage, she knew far less about her African ancestry through her African American mother’s line.
Through detailed research, we expanded her family tree by three generations beyond her grandparents, uncovering five new ancestral locations [Mississippi, Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama, and one other I reveal below] and three previously unknown family surnames [Sleeper, Leonard, and Williams.].
The most extraordinary discovery?
Her third great-grandmother, the mother of Cyrus Caulfield (b. ~1815 in Mississippi), the client’s ancestor previously unknown to her, was born in Africa, according to the 1880 U.S. Census in Amite County, Mississippi.
This remarkable fact places her among the final generations of Africans trafficked into the United States before the 1808 ban on the transatlantic slave trade. Most Africans brought to Charleston, South Carolina — the primary port of entry — came from Angola (40%), Senegambia, including present-day Senegal and The Gambia (19.5%), The Windward Coast, covering parts of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire (16.3%) and The Gold Coast, now Ghana (13.3%).
Why It Matters
This rare finding represents more than a historical footnote — it’s a spiritual and cultural reclamation. To reconnect our client to her African foremother is exactly why I founded Black Ancestries: to help families rediscover and honor the heritage and our connection to Africa that history tried to erase.
What We Offer
Black Ancestries offers a range of services, including dedicated genealogical research conducted by a skilled research team, dynamic speaking engagements, and educational workshops conducted in culturally significant locations. Our mission is to become a global leader in African diaspora genealogy — helping clients uncover their family history, celebrate their heritage, and preserve their legacy.
Start your journey today. Visit www.blackancestries.com to learn more or email us at connect@blackancestries.com to get started.
