My Nigerian father's DNA, African American double cousins and continental African DNA cousins. The Niger Delta to The Mississippi Delta double cousin connections.

  Welcome. This is my first blog post. I will start by giving some information about my family background and ancestral heritage.

                          BACKGROUND

(1.)My paternal grandfather was named Jeremiah Amughmun. He was an Abuan man from Omelema, Rivers state, Nigeria.

(2.) My maternal grandmother was named Reddessa Campbell. She was an African American women born in Coffeeville, Yalobusha, Mississippi.

(3.) My paternal grandmother was named Jessica. She went by the adopted surname Okereke. She was an Igbo woman born in Mbano Osigwe, Imo state, Nigeria.

(4.) My maternal grandfather was named Henry Robinson. He was an African American man born in Sumner, Tallahatchie, Mississippi.

(5.) My father was born in Omelema, Rivers, Nigeria.

(6.) My mother was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

 My parents were born with the Atlantic ocean between them but fate would have it that they would meet, marry and have children. Family stories told to me by my maternal Grandmother Reddessa peeked my interest in my family history early but it wasn't until after my maternal grandparents passed away that I started to actively research. Like many others I signed up for an account with Ancestry.com and started what would become a labor of love or a borderline obsession if you'd ask my wife😂. 

                            DNA COUSINS 

 When I initially started my genealogy journey I was encouraged to take a DNA test by fellow genealogy enthusiasts. I tested through AncestryDNA. To help me sort through my DNA matches I also tested my maternal aunt, my maternal great aunt, my mother's paternal first cousin and the last person that I had tested was my father. In total I now manage 5 DNA kits. With other cousins who'd already tested being in AncestryDNA's database I was soon able to pinpoint exactly which family line hundreds of my DNA matches belonged to depending on our clustered group of shared matches.

 My father's test results were the last to come back. While waiting for his results I became intrigued by many of my DNA matches who were Afro-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-South Americans but didn't match anyone on my maternal side, however these DNA matches were surely not from Nigeria. Well how were we related? Most of these matches even had surnames like Robinson, Williams, Taylor and Lewis. Surnames that have been used on my maternal side since emancipation but these genetic cousins shared no DNA matches with me from my mother's side of the family.

 When my father's test results came in I realized that many of my "Diaspora" DNA matches were related to the Nigerian side of my family. Knowing the history of the transatlantic slave trade and it's connection with Igboland and the Niger Delta I wasn't surprised that I had genetic cousins from the Diaspora that were related to me on my Nigerian side. What was surprising was how many there were and how closely they were related to my father. I was expecting 5-8th cousins but many of them were legitimate 4th cousins matching between 20-40 centimorgans.

I have so many diasporic African DNA matches from my father's side that he was assigned several diasporic African genetic communities on AncestryDNA. Genetic communities like the African descendants in North Jamaica or the genetic community of African descendants in Virginia and Guyana. All of these communities have Ancestral homelands in the Bight of Biafra. Looking at my father's results I could literally see a path of genetic cousins leading from Southern Nigeria to South America, across the Caribbean islands then finally into the Chesapeake Bay area and the Carolinas in North America.

 What was truly an eye opener was the amount of DOUBLE COUSINS that matched my African American family branches on one line of their family and also match my Nigerian family branches on a totally different line of their family. I have so many double cousins that match both my paternal and maternal sides of my family that's it's kind of spooky given that there's an ocean between the two. 

 I have maternal African American ancestors that were enslaved in the Brunswick, N.C/ Horry, S.C area but were brought to Mississippi in the 1840's during the American domestic slave trade.

Today my African American family has genetic DNA cousins from Brunswick, N.C and Horry, S.C that are related to us via that tragic family separation caused when my ancestors were uprooted from North Carolina and brought to Mississippi during the domestic slave trade like the ancestors before them were uprooted from Africa and separated from family during the transatlantic slave trade.

Having DNA cousins who are still living in the same area where my ancestors were ripped from and who carry the same surnames that those same ancestors chose after emancipation makes me feel that our family history research is not in vain. We are actually reclaiming precious things like family ties that were broken and ripped away from us long ago.  

 My Horry/Brunswick DNA connections were clear and confirmed. I knew exactly how we were related and I knew the year and the manner in which the family branches were separated. The DNA confirmations were just the icing on the cake.
But wait......My father's test returned and it showed that he also had a genetic connection with the same families in the Brunswick/Horry area. Things were becoming a lot more clear and complicated at the same time. Distant cousins who matched me, my maternal great aunt and many other Gause descendants on my maternal side also matched my paternal side. An example is one cousin who's surname is Gause and who's paternal Gause line from Brunswick, N.C  matches my Maternal Gause line from Grenada, MS. This same cousin is also a genetic match to my Paternal Nigerian side via his mother's family. This situation repeats itself with many of my other DNA cousins from the same region matching both my maternal (African American) and paternal (Nigerian) sides of my family.

To think that hundreds of years after the transatlantic slave trade started and being an ocean apart the bloodlines that connect African descendants all over the world are still strong. We are literally family. My family history research into my paternal Niger Delta ancestry surely intertwines with my family history research into my maternal Mississippi Delta research. We share more than just ethnic and ancestral origins. We are family torn apart. We are cousins.

 Many of my Diasporic DNA matches who are related to my Nigerian side are excited to learn not only what region or ethnicity in Nigeria that their ancestors may have belonged to but they are happy to learn what family they belonged to. Many are able to pin point which side of their family it is that connects to my Nigerian family.

 Seeing the way in which my father's diasporic DNA matches were able to pinpoint southern Nigerian Ancestry on a particular branch of their family using my father's matching DNA segments made me even more eager to do the samething with my maternal African American family's continental African DNA matches. Combing through my relative's matches page by page I have been able to leverage my maternal relative's DNA connections to help determine which areas, ethnicities and families in Africa that my maternal family branches descend from. I have been able to determine which enslaved ancestors were Ashanti of Ghana, Songo of the Congo, Fulani from Mali and Guinea, Igbo from Nigeria, Senefou from The Ivory Coast, Bamoun from Cameroon and more. Being able to tie particular Ashanti and Kongo DNA relatives to specific family branches is fulfilling. My maternal side has 5 continental Fulani African DNA matches all with the surname Diallo and all with ancestry from the same region in Guinea. The genetic link to this particular Fulani family from Guinea can be tied to one specific branch of my maternal family tree. Amazing.

       

            ETHNICITY ESTIMATES

  Another thing that I wanted to do with my father's DNA results were to see how accurate the various ethnicity estimates were for different DNA companies. Would AncestryDNA be able to definitively classify his DNA as Nigerian? What about the other DNA companies? 

Given the fact that 2 out of 4 of my grandparents were born in and have deep ancestral roots in Nigeria and yet AncestryDNA only classifies 6 percent of my DNA as Nigerian, I was not too hopeful that my father's DNA would be classified as Nigerian by AncestryDNA. In fact prior to my father's DNA results coming back I'd already noticed that most of my DNA matches who were from southern Nigeria had very little DNA classified as apart of the "Nigerian" DNA region on AncestryDNA. Most of my southern Nigerian cousins were Igbo or from Niger Delta Ethnicities and were usually classified on AncestryDNA as being evenly split between the Benin/Togo and Cameroon/Congo regions. Usually the split is about 45% Benin/Togo, 45% Cameroon/Congo and under 10% percent Nigerian for people from southern Nigeria who've taken an AncestryDNA test. Sure enough my father's DNA results on AncestryDNA reflected this trend.

 In fact if you look at the map for AncestryDNA's Benin/Togo DNA region it encompasses the region where my paternal family is from in Southern Nigeria. AncestryDNA's Nigerian region overlaps my paternal Homeland only on the borders.

 Further research into this issue lead me to AncestryDNA's scientific white paper on their ethnicity estimates. Reading this paper I've learned that AncestryDNA is well aware that it's accuracy in classifying Nigerian DNA is subpar.

 Below is an excerpt from the AncestryDNA's 2018 ethnicity estimate white paper. Even tough Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa AncestryDNA only has 111 Nigerian DNA profiles in their reference panel.

"Figure 2.3: 20-fold cross-validation analysis of the V3 reference panel. Here we plot the results of an experiment in which 5% of samples are removed from the reference panel, and their ethnicity is estimated using the remaining (95%) panel samples. Each boxplot represents the distribution of estimated ethnicity for all samples from a given region (75%, 50%, and 25% percentiles of estimated ethnicity). For the majority of samples in each region, we predict on average 78.9% of the genetic ethnicity to be from the correct region. And for the most part, the other 21.1% comes from nearby regions. However, there are exceptions. In particular, our average prediction accuracy for samples for Nigeria, Spain, and Basque are not quite as high. There are many factors affecting the accuracy of these numbers, most importantly the number of reference samples in the panel for each region and the genetic distinctness of each region." https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/AncestryDNA-White-Papers

 I am happy to see that the accuracy in predicting other regions like their Mali DNA region (which is apart of my maternal African American Guinea ancestry) is pretty high but considering that many of AncestryDNA's customers are African American and African Americans traditionally have high Nigerian ancestry, it seems that AncestryDNA would be eager to provide more accurate results when giving African Americans their ethnicity estimates.

 I also uploaded both me and my father's raw DNA data from AncestryDNA to Gedmatch, MyHeritage and Ethnogene.

Unlike AncestryDNA the Gedmatch ethnicity calculators were able to clearly pick up on me and my father's Nigerian Ancestry. However because my father is technically half Igbo and half Abuan and Abuans are a very small ethnic group in Nigeria that most likely are not reflected in any DNA database, Gedmatch calculators assigned my father the Nigerian ethnicities that are closely related to his ethnicity. Often the Gedmatch results given for him are a mixture of Yoruba, Igbo and some Cameroonian ethnicities. The Cameroonian classifications are not a surprise given that Cameroon neighbors Nigeria to the east.

My father's Gedmatch admixture results

My father's Gedmatch admixture results

 Myheritage seems to do a better job than AncestryDNA at definitively classifying Nigerian Ancestry. Myheritage classified my father as 90% Nigerian and classified me as 75% Nigerian.

 The most impressive Autosomal ethnicity results came from a little known company called Ethnogene. Not only does ethnogene give you regional ethnicity estimates based on your Autosomal DNA, Ethnogene also provides a list of ethnicities that your DNA most closely matches to in their reference panel.  

Ethnogene assigned 89% percent of my father's DNA towards Nigerian ethnicities. Again I repeat that my father's paternal ethnicity is Abuan. It is taught in Nigerian schools that Abuans are a subgroup of the Ijaw/Ijo ethnicity but there seems to be some dispute about that. What I can say with certainty is that Abuans are a group of people that are indigenous to Rivers State in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Given the fact that the Niger Delta DNA profiles in Ethnogene's database are so similar to the Yoruba DNA profiles in the same database my father was assigned majority Yoruba ethnicity on Ethnogene. The ethnogene results were still impressive and I expect them to become even more accurate as more Niger Delta DNA profiles are added to their reference panel. Ethnogene also correctly assigned a good portion of my father's DNA to the Nigerian Igbo ethnicity. I didn't report any information to Ethnogene about my father's nationality or ethnicity until after I received his results.

 The experience of being able to use my father's genetic results to clearly see the familial connections between Africans born in Africa and Africans born in the diaspora has made it even more clear for me why genetic genealogy is a tool that we need to use to rewrite and tell our own histories and family stories. Family stories that transcend continents and oceans. Family stories that reconnect what was once taken away. #Sankofa.

In November of 2019 Ancestrydna updated the ethnicity estimate results for me and my father. The number of Nigerian DNA samples in Ancestrydna's reference panel grew from 111 to 522 allowing AncestryDNA to more accurately predict Nigerian ancestry.

https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/AncestryDNA-Reference-Panel?o_iid=103595&o_sch=Web+Property&o_lid=103595