WE FINALLY KNOW WHY MILLIONS OF WHITE AMERICANS CARRY TRINIDADIAN DNA

Somewhere in the United States tonight, a person who has always checked the box that says white is opening a DNA result and seeing a few percent of African ancestry. Sometimes the trail behind it does not lead to a plantation in Georgia or Louisiana. It leads to an island in the Caribbean. Is that island Trinidad? This video goes through what the science has actually found. It covers the 2014 23andMe study led by Katarzyna Bryc (American Journal of Human Genetics, more than 160,000 customers), which found that about 3.5% of people who identify as European American carry 1% or more African ancestry, more often in the South; the 2020 Micheletti et al. study of more than 50,000 people against about 36,000 slave voyages, which shows how the Caribbean shaped African ancestry in the United States; the 2013 Moreno-Estrada et al. study of Caribbean genetic history; Barbados's documented role in launching Carolina in the 1660s; and Trinidad's own modern migration to the United States, with roughly 219,000 to 224,000 people of Trinidadian and Tobagonian ancestry today and strong waves between 1966 and 1980. As always: honesty first. I did not find any study showing that millions of white Americans carry DNA that can be traced specifically to Trinidad. The millions in the title come from my own rough extrapolation of the 3.5% figure, which is about African ancestry, not Trinidad. The Micheletti study does not single out Trinidad or report on European Americans, the Moreno-Estrada study did not sample Trinidad, and 23andMe's Afro-Caribbean update has a group for Tobago but none for Trinidad. The claim that Trinidad was a transit point for enslaved people bound for North America comes from a single source and I could not verify it. The best-documented route from the islands to the American South runs through Barbados. A percentage on a screen cannot tell you which island, ship or person. Records can. 🔎 Want to see what a real search turns up for your own surname? The link to our free surname lookup tool is pinned in the comments below. 🧬 For the full picture, our family research service goes directly into the surviving registers, baptismal and estate records, immigration records and the documented family lines tied to your specific surname. Link also pinned in the comments. Drop your surname below, and tell us whether your family has a Caribbean story. Sources: - Bryc, K. et al., "The genetic ancestry of African, Latino, and European Americans across the United States," American Journal of Human Genetics (2014); 23andMe press release - Micheletti, S. et al., "Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas," American Journal of Human Genetics (2020) - Moreno-Estrada, A. et al., "Reconstructing the Population Genetic History of the Caribbean," PLoS Genetics (2013) - 23andMe, "23andMe Adds More Detail for Afro-Caribbean Ancestry" (2023) - Migration Policy Institute, "Trinidad & Tobago" - Wikipedia, "Trinidadian and Tobagonian Americans," "History of Barbados," "Indo-Trinidadians and Tobagonians" - National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, General Registers of Indian Indentureship Subscribe — every week on this channel we trace another documented piece of Caribbean history back to the exact families still carrying it forward today. #Trinidad #DNA #Genealogy #FamilyHistory #Ancestry #AfricanAncestry #CaribbeanHistory #AmericanHistory #23andMe #AncestryDNA