WASHINGTON (BLACK PR WIRE) — By now you may have seen the PBS program Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr. which premiered in late March. But you may not know that African Ancestry Inc. (AfricanAncestry.com), a small, minority business enterprise based in Washington, D.C., is a major force helping media powerhouses deliver ground-breaking genealogy programming.
Starting with African American Lives 1 and African American Lives 2 nearly a decade ago, AfricanAncestry.com has gone on to play a major role in other shows, such as NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?; CNN’s Black in America series, and Faces of America.
“The rise of reality shows has been great in many ways but it has also been not so great in many ways, especially in exposing the undesirable side of human behavior,” said Gina Paige, president of African Ancestry. “The work we’ve done with shows like Finding Your Roots is positively changing the way people see themselves and the way they interact with their families. This is the reality I want to see in my people and our communities,” Paige said.
Airing at 8 p.m. Sundays through May 20, Finding Your Roots is the latest series from Gates, a renowned cultural critic, using genealogy and genetics to explore the fascinating dynamics of race, family and identity in today’s America.
In collaboration with leading genealogists, world-renown research and historical societies, as well as ancestry experts, Finding Your Roots seeks in a 10-part series to satisfy the urge in some people to discover who they are and where they come from by focusing on 25 celebrity guests of all races.
AfricanAncestry.com picks up where the show’s paper trail ends by using DNA to geographically assess the African country of origin for each African-American guest featured, including Samuel L. Jackson, John Legend, Branford Marsalis, Condoleezza Rice, Cory Booker, Geoffrey Canada, Ruth Simmons, John Lewis and Wanda Sykes.
AfricanAncestry.com was formed in 2003 by one of the country’s few black scientists, Rick Kittles, and African-American entrepreneur Gina Paige, who pioneered DNA-based ancestry tracing for people of African descent across the world.
Employing its largest collection of indigenous African DNA, AfricanAncestry.com helps people of African descent discover where they come from in Africa through a proprietary DNA matching analysis lead by Kittles.
The company was the first to establish a marketplace among African Americans, which didn’t exist prior to its formation. Its African Ancestry’s African DNA database remains the largest and most comprehensive ever collected, making its lineage matching the most accurate and reliable in the marketplace.
For more information on AfricanAncestry.com and discovering your roots, visit AfricanAncestry.com
Photo: Gina Paige
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