The amount of energy, time, money, and care that many people devote to  
learning about their ancestry is a wonder to some of us not similarly  
obsessed (though doubtless we all have equally unremunerative but  
gratifying passions; I know I do).

Today, though, an article in The Washington Post offers a stark  
reminder of just how important it may be to know your ancestry.

It turns out that a particularly deadly form of breast cancer afflicts  
black women far more often than those in other ethnic groups, and at  
least part of the reason is very likely ancestral: this particular type  
of tumor is extremely common in certain areas of West Africa that were  
involved in the Atlantic slave trade.

More at  
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/ 
AR2007062201902.html

With news like this, knowledge of one's distant personal past becomes  
startlingly, even urgently, relevant.

As William Faulkner famously remarked, "The past is not dead.  It's not  
even past."  Not least because for better or worse, we carry it in our  
genes.

-- Jurretta Heckscher