In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
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Book Summary Information
Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr.Brand: PBS
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-27
ISBN: 0307382400
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Crown
Book Reviews of In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
Book Review: A helpful and inspiring book
Summary: 5 Stars
Henry Gates' book, IN SEARCH OF OUR ROOTS, gives much more information than its accompanying PBS documentary, "African American Lives," and lays out the processes used to gather that information. This book is most relevant to those who have done or plan to do serious genealogy. It would also be of interest to those who are admirers of the people it covers. I have been obsessed with trying to trace my family into slavery and beyond for the past eleven years. I started this project in 1996 after reading Edward Ball's book, SLAVES IN THE FAMILY, because it struck a note which resonated with certain of my family's oral history.
I began my search before census data was digitized and searchable on the internet. Countless hours were spent going through microfilmed records and traveling to local archives. At that time DNA testing seemed only used to prove or negate paternity.
It's been said that black genealogy is very difficult but not impossible. Early mentors told me that if you cannot trace your people as humans, you must trace them as property. In this process you come to many dead ends where the line(s) just die out. Gates' book shows this and I found it to be a help in showing how his genealogists dealt with some of the barriers. Their use of conjecture was informative. For example, a simple thing such as searching for a slave owner in another state based on the last name of the former slave in the slave schedules had not occurred to me. If I did not have a record with the slave owner's name in the county where the ex-slave was living I assumed that there was no further information.
I am envious of the army of professional genealogists, historians and archivists that Henry Gates had at his disposal for this project. He also seemed to have had a huge budget for DNA tests. I entered his contest to pick a "regular" person to be included in the "African American Lives" project to have some of these resources placed at my disposal, but it was not to be. Previously I was able to do some limited DNA testing which was helpful in showing that I had none of Native American blood spoken of by my father's family and now could abandon time wasting searches through Indian records. The book was helpful in describing the DNA heritage of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, with whom I share the L3d haplogroup. I had been researching East African slavery to figure out how my ancestors ended up as slaves in South Carolina and Virginia from areas where slaves to the Americas were not taken. I did not have the $400 to test African ancestry of tribes and even if I did, I did not have the historians to interpret the results with tribal warfare and migration patterns.
On my own I have taken my and my husband's family back six generations. I have accumulated a sizable collection of genealogy books. Gates' book is very good in that it is informative and inspires one to go forward with a very difficult search. I can overlook the "factual errors and questionable interpretations" that were mentioned in other reviews because I was experienced enough to immediate recognize that they were errors. Either Gates did no genealogy himself or he did not write or have a knowledgeable person proof read those sections.
Summary of In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
Unlike most white Americans who, if they are so inclined, can search their ancestral records, identifying who among their forebears was the first to set foot on this country?s shores, most African Americans, in tracing their family?s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying black men and women even their names. Yet, from that legacy of slavery, there have sprung generations who?ve struggled, thrived, and lived extraordinary lives.For too long, African Americans? family trees have been barren of branches, but, very recently, advanced genetic testing techniques, combined with archival research, have begun to fill in the gaps. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes nineteen extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through U.S. history and back to Africa.
Those whose recovered pasts collectively form an African American ?people?s history? of the United States include celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Don Cheadle, Chris Tucker, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, and Quincy Jones; writers such as Maya Angelou and Bliss Broyard; leading thinkers such as Harvard divinity professor Peter Gomes, the Reverend T. D. Jakes, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot; and famous achievers such as astronaut Mae Jemison, media personality Tom Joyner, decathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Ebony and Jet publisher Linda Johnson Rice.
More than a work of history, In Search of Our Roots is a book of revelatory importance that, for the first time, brings to light the lives of ordinary men and women who, by courageous example, blazed a path for their famous descendants. For a reader, there is the stirring pleasure of witnessing long-forgotten struggles and triumphs?but there?s an enduring reward as well. In accompanying the nineteen contemporary achievers on their journey into the past and meeting their remarkable forebears, we come to know ourselves.
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