Trace Your Roots: How Far Back Can You Go?

What you will experience

Most African families can trace their history back two, maybe three generations. Then it goes dark. Nobody wrote it down. The colonial records are incomplete or wrong. The oral traditions were disrupted. And so you know your grandmother's name but not her grandmother's. You know the village but not the story of how your family ended up there. This experience doesn't promise you'll find every answer. But it teaches you how to start looking. I'll walk you through the tools and methods available for tracing African ancestry. Online databases, DNA testing services and what they actually can and can't tell you, colonial records that sometimes have more than you'd expect, church and mosque archives, oral history techniques that draw out details from family members who know more than they think they do. We'll also discuss the emotional complexity of this search. What it means to look for roots when the reason they were severed was violence. What it feels like to find a name you didn't know existed. How to sit with incomplete answers because for many African families the trail goes cold and you have to decide whether that gap is a wound or a doorway. Each person will leave with a personalised research plan. Where to start based on what they already know. Which databases to search. Which family members to interview first and what questions to ask. How to organise what they find so it becomes a living family archive. This is for anyone who wants to know where they come from beyond the country level. For people who've taken DNA tests and want to go deeper. For parents who want to give their children a sense of lineage. For anyone who's ever looked at a family tree template and realised they couldn't fill in more than a few names. The past is there. Not all of it. But more than you think. Let's go find what's left.

Access and participation

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