Courtesy of http://www.theroot.com/

Interesting read and some food for thought. You wonder how many Jaitehs
are Fula or Jahanke; how many Njies are Giande or Mam Yallah; how many
Darbos are Joula? Any genealogists among us?

Malanding


  Who's Your (Irish) Daddy?


    On St. Patrick's Day, Henry Louis Gates Jr. reflects on an unknown
    Irish ancestor.

    * By: Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Posted: March 17, 2010 at 5:08 AM


Getty Images

So how do we find this guy? Well, this is where the fun starts. Our
genealogist, Jane Ailes, has spent that last few years trying to find
the name of the man who owned Jane Gates. She has searched wills,
inventory and appraisals, account settlements for estates of slave
owners between 1820 and 1860 in Allegany County, Md., and nearby
Hampshire County, W.Va., and the Slave Schedule of the 1850 and 1860
federal censuses for those same counties (remember that her son, Edward,
was born in 1857). So far, no luck with the paper trail.

There were a lot of white people living in Allegany County in 1850, some
21,633. A ton of Irishmen moved into the Cumberland area in the 1830s
and 1840s to work on the railroad, and in the mining, glass and steel
industries, and in the 1850s to work on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.
(In 1850, in Allegany County, there were only 724 slaves, and 412 "free
colored.") Like finding a needle in a haystack, right?

Well, it turns out that the men sharing that Ui Neill haplotype tended
to have certain surnames. If we use those surnames, we narrow the number
of possibilities in Allegany and Hampshire counties to 178 men born
between 1800 and 1830 bearing 22 surnames.

What's so exciting about this? Well, it turns out that the men in the
Gates family line have a particular mutation, a slight variation, in our
Ui Neill haplotype. And we inherited that slight mutation, a spelling
variant in that DNA signature, through one of those 178 guys. If the
father of Jane's children, my Irish great-great grandfather, has any
other male descendants walking around on the planet, he will have
exactly the same y-DNA signature, with this particular variant, as my
father, brother and I do.

And so, we are advertising for any male descendant of one of these 178
men to contact us and take the DNA test. With a (wee) bit of luck, one
of the millions of unsolved genealogical mysteries facing African
Americans today can be solved.

Malcolm Little took the last name of "X" because he said it signified
our lost last names, names buried deep within the African continent. For
me, St. Patrick's Day, one of the most joyous holidays up here in
Boston, is the day I spend contemplating another "X" than the one
Malcolm identified: the name of my white great-great grandfather, the
man who fathered one black woman's five children, the man who connects
me (and millions of other black men) to a lost Irish heritage just as
surely as other ancestors on my family tree connect me to Africa. Did he
rape her? Did she love him? Could such a relationship ever be defined as
love? Did she see him following slavery? Did he give her the $1,400 to
purchase a home in a white neighborhood in 1870, just five years after
slavery ended? What was that all about? Until I can answer these
questions, I'll remain on the sidelines at the St. Patrick's Day parade.

/Henry Louis Gates Jr. is editor-in-chief of *The Root*. /

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