Finding out what it means to be Boricua through a genetic & genealogical journey through my family history
As I am currently living France, last month while I was on vacation I decided to create a specific and intentional route for my travels. Why? Because I knew that on the 21st of December I wanted to be in the town of Saint-Malo. Currently in my family tree, I have no genealogical connection to …
December 21st – A Day Dedicated to My Ancestress Read More »
DNA has been both one of the coolest and yet most difficult tools to use for Puerto Rican genealogy and research. For starters, many Puerto Ricans on the island share mutual ancestors, meaning that DNA has been repeated throughout our branches (sometimes multiple times) and thus create cousin matches seem closer in relation than what they …
In honor of Black History Month and my 4th great-grandmother’s birthday in February, I wanted to dedicate this post to the ongoing research of Julienne Malvina Lautin, my enslaved Martinican ancestor who moved to Puerto Rico. There are many times in genealogy when you think you know well enough the life of an ancestor. Given …
Back in 2019, I read an interesting book that combined genealogy and non-fiction story telling. The book is called: The Man Who Stole Himself:The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan. The book was written by Icelandic professor of anthropology, Gísli Pálsson, and documents the journey of a former Caribbean slave from St. Croix to Denmark and finally to …
The Caribbean, Western Africa, and Iceland: An Unlikely Trio Read More »
Last July, 23andMe blogged about a recently (at the time) published article that looked at genetics and the legacy the transatlantic slave trade left on the New World (specifically countries like the United States, countries in the Caribbean and in Latin America which were main receivers of enslaved people). Their post (23andMe blog linked) offers …
23andMe Takes a Look at the Transatlantic Slave Trade Read More »
This week something awesome happened- Ancestry.com updated their DNA part of the website and added more ethnicity groups! More importantly, they now break down Africa into various sections which is amazing since this is the first time (to my knowledge) that a company has broken down the Autosomal DNA by African countries. Part of the …
A Puerto Rican look at: AncestryDNA 2.0 (African Portion) Read More »
Things have been pretty slow on my end here! I’ve been searching through church records in different towns in Puerto Rico trying to locate more ancestors and documentation. Just two days ago I found two sets of maternal 5th great grandparents which is awesome to add to the tree. But more interestingly, the 23andme feature …
In honor of International Women’s day and because I was itching to write about a certain haplogroup, I decided that this was the opportune time for me to write! So far with 23andme, I have been able to test 7 people in my family including myself and have been able to discover 4 different maternal …
Ever since I discovered the document for Julienne Malvina Lautin and her mother Eglantine Lautin (as well as Pauline Lautin) in Rivière Salée, Martinique I can’t stop thinking about this family! I was super lucky to find Julienne’s and Pauline’s birth records in Trois Bourgs despite them being slaves and I also discovered that Eglantine …
So being home all day bored leads you to a lot of genealogy. So a couple of days ago, I decided to write down all the slaves the Antonetti family owned according to the 1872 Central Registry of Slaves which can be found on ancestry.com. And boy did they have a good number of slaves; …