Nephew of Alex Haley discovers shared Scots ancestry that adds weight to slave roots theoryBy Helen McArdle
From the slave plantations of Alabama to the coal mines of Whitburn may be an improbable leap, but genetic fingerprinting has proved a direct link between Roots writer Alex Haley and his Scots-born great-great-great-grandfather.
Yesterday the nephew of Haley, the world-famous family history researcher and writer, met his West Lothian-born cousin for the first time after DNA testing proved their shared ancestry.
The cousins were introduced at the Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE event at the Olympia National Hall in London after the ancestry.co.uk DNA service revealed a link going back five generations.
Until recently, Chris Haley had only word-of-mouth history to prove Alex's great-great-great-grandfather had been born of an African slave mother and white Scottish father, both of whom worked on an Alabama plantation.
However, a DNA test taken two weeks ago has identified that Chris, from Washington DC, is descended from a Scottish paternal bloodline dating back to 17th-century Scotland. His sample matched that of June Baff-Black, who has lived in south Wales for the past three years but grew up in Whitburn.
This discovery adds weight to Chris's uncle's controversial research, in which he traced his ancestry back to William Baugh (a variation of Baff), an overseer of an Alabama slave plantation who was thought to have had a child with a slave.
The Haley family history was detailed in Alex's book Queen, partner to the 1976 novel Roots: The Saga Of An American Family which made the Haley name world-renowned. Alex, who died in 1992, was unable to fully prove his research by traditional genealogical methods as his ancestors were slaves, so very little documentation of them exists. Instead, he had to rely on oral histories.
Speaking yesterday, Chris Haley said: "It does help to vindicate much of what was criticised with my uncle's work. It demonstrates the veracity of his genealogical research and this helps confirm at least one aspect of the Queen saga, which I think bodes very well for the whole history. It's empowering and fulfilling - in the sense that it makes you feel more complete as a person, particularly in the African-American community where records are often limited."
For June Baff-Black, the discovery that her link to Haley brought her "full circle" to what first sparked her family's interest in its history. "It was a bit of a shock to find out that the man who had probably inspired my folks to start digging into my own father's roots was in fact a relative," she said. "My parents trailed in and out of St Andrew's House in the 1980s digging out what they could. I was just picking up the mantle."
Olivier van Calster, managing director of Ancestry.co.uk, said: "At its core any family history is a combination of established facts and reasonable assumptions. With science such as DNA becoming increasingly popular for use in furthering family history, it is exciting to see many of those reasonable assumptions, even 300 year-old ones, becoming established as facts. This is a high-profile example of what a simple cheek swab can achieve as DNA testing opens up channels traditional research cannot reach, allowing the man on the street to reach back into the past and discover ancestry that may have been lost for centuries."
DNA "fingerprinting" tests the paternal or maternal line by studying either the Y-chromosome, passed from father to son, or mitochondrial DNA, passed from mother to daughter. Ancestry.co.uk launched the genetic profiling service in 2007 and now has 40-50,000 samples, mostly from by family tree researchers in the UK and US. It aims to have around 100,000 members by the end of the year.
The technology enables researchers to map a person's genetic inheritance back thousands of years, and can identify the most recent common ancestor for up to 20 generations.
But spokesman Chris Blackwood does not believe the scientific advances spell the end for traditional research methods: "People still need to get online or go through archives to trace their initial family tree. DNA technology allows us to track down ancestors where paper records end, or where there's perhaps records which don't tell the full story. It's definitely a supplementary tool rather than something that will at any point replace the traditional methods."
