Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
who isn't curious about family history
where we came from who our people are we
know nothing we have to rely on some of
our older family members to really tell
us what they remember I heard that they
say he was a tall fast skinned man with
green eyes and red hair my family is on
a quest we're hoping that DNA testing
can unlock secrets of the past because
like so many families like ours family
tree is incomplete before we started
this ancestry research I didn't know
anything about Lee hert Lee hert and
Eliza Waller our oldest known patriarch
and matriarch sit at the very top of our
family tree they're kind of like our
families Adam and
[Applause]
Eve Lee and Liza had 14 children and
spawned a long line of
descendants but other than that we don't
really know that much about about them
who are Lee and
Liza and where did they come
from I'm Byron hurt I'm a documentary
filmmaker and I'm a member of the hurt
Walla family I've always been super
curious about our family's Origins
Beyond Lee and
Liza many European Americans are able to
discover their family Roots using public
records and genetic ancestry test kits
but for African-American family amilies
like mine the path to learning family
history is much more challenging since
emancipation black families torn apart
during slavery have had to work hard to
reunite and discover the truth about
their past my family has no idea who Lee
and Liza's ancestors are because
unfortunately we can't go back any
further than
1863 the year Lee hurt was
born why is it so difficult for us as a
family to learn the information that we
need to learn about Lee her's parents
his grandparents elza her's grandparents
great grandparents and so on and so
forth well our lives did not count in
the way that other people's lives
counted you know I mean if if we ever
needed a black lives matter movement it
would have been from our very Inception
on these Shores Our Lives didn't count
plus we don't have the scientific record
of Africa that would allow us to make
the the bridges that we know exist
because we are an African people in
North
America the big DNA databases are mostly
made up of samples from people of
European descent with a lot fewer DNA
samples from black people whether they
are now living in Africa or the
Americas the African database is not
robust there's not a lot of information
within the database because the way that
that genetic sequencing and ancestry
reconstruction works is that you take an
unknown sample say your sample and then
we try to match it to samples that we
have already identified if we can't
match the unknown sample to samples that
we have already identified then we have
a problem DNA can tell you some of your
family history but it's not all
encompassing