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

-------
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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