When ancestry tests reveal more than genetics

Special correspondent Lee Hawkins shares his experience finding new family with online genetics tests — and reconciling fraught history.

Many of us have heard of or taken those genetics tests that help you trace your ancestry and get medical information about yourself. Marketplace special correspondent Lee Hawkins was working on his forthcoming book — and now a podcast for our APM Studios called “What Happened in Alabama?” — when he took the test. He recapped the experience with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: So you do both 23andMe and Ancestry.com, those genetics tests.

Lee Hawkins: Yeah.

Brancaccio: Surprise No. 1?

Hawkins: Well, I always knew that I was Black, of course, but then I found out that I had 18% ancestry from Wales. Then I got another whopper. I found out that a guy who I have known for 30 years, who was a PR guy when I was a young reporter back in Wisconsin 30 years ago, is my cousin.

Brancaccio: But to be clear, a white guy.

Hawkins: Yeah, white guy, white guy from this same white family that traveled from Wales to Virginia.

Brancaccio: And it turned out, what? He shared a heritage with your, I don’t know, great-great-grandfather?

Hawkins: Yes, well, the enslaver, the people who enslaved my great-great-grandmother, Charity Pugh, actually are my relatives. That’s one of the dark legacies is sexual assault during slavery, and as a result, we are cousins. The truth is, we can’t really change the past, but we can affect the present and the future. And Jim and I decided to do that, and he introduced me to his cousin Lloyd, and my cousin Lloyd, who is a family historian. He’s an 88-year-old guy, and he had researched the whole family. And I went to his house and saw 200 pieces of Civil War artifacts. He talked all about our family members who were on the Confederate side of the Civil War. It just gave me a lot of information that I wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Brancaccio: All right, but sketch the scene. I mean, he is this trove of information. He’s collecting artifacts and documents. But you walk in. What does he have up in the living room?

Hawkins: A big oil painting of Gen. Robert E. Lee. It shocked me, but he looks at it as history and part of his heritage. He says he’s not a white supremacist. And the truth is, is they were concerned a little bit about being labeled white supremacists or racist, and they’re not, I know them. And the key is they opened up 400 years of information for me, and I opened up oral history that they wouldn’t have had about our family.

Brancaccio: You make a decision, which is, “I am going to forge a relationship with people who I disagree quite profoundly with.” It actually gives you access to people who are still alive, who are elderly, who, when you think about it, have experience that stretches back a long time.

Hawkins: Us coming together as a family helped me really tell my whole story, and it helped us both get over that fear: their fear of being considered to be racist because they descend from enslavers, and my fear of being labeled a sellout or an Uncle Tom for meeting them. And I think that that’s really one thing that I want white people in particular, who descend from enslavers, to understand is, look, you can’t be held responsible for the sins of your forefathers. You can control the present and the future, though, and I think to confront this history and study with the other side, the people on the other side, gives you, you know, really the ability to get all of this information that starts to feel almost like a book or a movie, because you get that full account of American history in the process.

Brancaccio: Lee’s podcast is called “What Happened in Alabama?” Episode 5 has a lot more on this. Lee’s forthcoming book is called “I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.”