It can be shaky, but it can also be surprisingly accurate. I was
referring to whatever oral tribal traditions there might still be in
Africa. People who carry on their traditions orally are more likely
to be accurate than a family "Grandma said..." kind of thing.
Recently there was a report about DNA testing of the various peoples
of the British Isles. They determined that the majority, whether
Irish, Welsh, Scots, or English, trace their ancestry back to a
neolithic hunter-gatherer people who came there maybe as far as
16,000 years ago, were small, dark and probably spoke a language
similar to Basque. Later waves of Celts, Romans, Vikings, Angles,
Saxons, Normans, etc, added to the basic rootstock. What really
impressed me about this is that it's pretty much what old Irish tales
say about their ancestors. They came and found a small, dark, more
primitive race already living there, whom they looked down on. So it
seems that is one oral tradition that was pretty accurate, for 6,000
years. If anyone wants the link to the article, email me privately.
Then there's the Cherokee legend of their ancestral place which they
seem to have found in NC and is pretty much as described. So it might
be possible, if one can find the tribe a slave ancestor came from, to
find out more from the tribal stories.
Nancy
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I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
--Daniel Boone
On Mar 9, 2007, at 10:51 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> A think the oral history thing is bogus. My oral history was that
> I was
> descended from a signer of the Declartion of Indenpendence, which
> turned out to
> be a fiction.
>
> I think the dna analysis is the best criteria.
>
> JD South
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