₦airaland Forum

bigfrancis21: I tried visiting the link you dropped severally but I got the 404 error code message. Check the link for correction and drop it again for me.

Here is the link in its entirety
Http://research.history.org/Historical_Research/Research_Themes/ThemeEnslave/SlaveTrade.cfm. This is a great article. If for whatever reason this link doesn't work, there is probably a typo somewhere. Please Google the article - "New Findings about the Virginia Slave Trade" By Lorena Walsh. You will see that there were also a couple of shipments from the Bight of Biafra to Virginia.

As far a any future plans for visiting Africa -Nigeria, I would love to visit, but after reading some of the stuff posted on Nairaland, I am having second thoughts. On the other hand, here in the US, everyday there's something crazy going on. ....And it's not just Black Folks, we just get all the news press; What the others are doing barely gets a mention or they don't post their picture all over the news.

I can see from some of the posts that some people has issues with Igbos. Well, the ones that I know and work with are great. That's all I have to say.

Gotta go...

BigFrancis raised the question concerning slaves imported from the Bight of Benin to the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia. He raised a really good point. So how did my mother's Yoruba ancestor end up there? One answer is maybe she was purchased else where and brought to Virginia, or maybe she was one a few that came in on a small shipment between 1761 and 1774 - only 180 slaves, according to WEB DuBois Slave Trade Project. I'm having issues with my PC (it's about to crash and burn at any minute), so I can't post the article or charts for you to see, but it is interesting. The link is http://research.history.org/Historical-Research/Research... The article is called "New Findings about the Virginia Slave Trade" by Lorena S. Walsh.

My family was from the Rappahannock area, and this is the only documented port that received slaves from the Bight of Benin in Virginia. Wow, I just noticed that! The earliest known, but undocumented ancestor was born maybe around 1800. One of the imports could have been her mother! Unfortunately I didn't get interested in genealogy until after all the old folks who could have maybe filled in some of the blanks had pass on. I have collected every document I could find online, but it looks like I am going to have to make a trip to Virginia to continue my research.

Hi,

Just wanted to comment that this thread is really interesting and informative. I am going to follow up with the docs some of you posted. As an AA, I can attest, at least in my family, that some Yorubas did end up in the state of Virginia, and that they were assigned to domestic work at the plantation manors. My father's ancestry is the Ovimbundu of Angola. His ancestors were confined as farm laborers in the state of North Carolina.

Although mt DNA is said to be a match to Nigerian Yoruba, many of my Grandmother's and my Great-grandmother's siblings resembled Igbos. Since there was probably a lot of mixing with other African ethic groups, who knows. The males on that side of the family are gone, so we may never know.

My parting comment is, the main reason why many AA don't know their ancestry, isn't because we wanted to forget, it was snatched away from defenseless children. Many slave children were orphaned when either they or their parents were sold separately. One advantage of breaking up families this way, was to permanently erase all traces of ethnic identity. Those who were resourceful learned to survive by redefining themselves apart from what the slave handlers tried to impose upon them. Although a slightly different dynamic, the same principle applies today.

Not all of us are lost, many of us are doing well for ourselves, through much perseverance and faith.

American

After learning my mitochondrial DNA is a 100% genetic match to Nigerian Yoruba, I was researching to find out more about the culture. Many of the links lead back to NL. So that is how I was introduced to the site. I especially love the culture section. It has been very insightful.

Much Kudos to Onila for postings of African Images Sights & Sounds and the African Weddings, Likial for "The Art and Architecture of Yorubaland", and the Op who compiled "PreColonial and Early Colonial Africa". Absolutely PRICELESS !