Discovering their roots

Ancestral ties give couple a sense of completeness

James B.Meadow, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 20, 2007 at midnight

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A number of Denver blacks had their cheeks swabbed and their DNA collected last year to trace their lineages back to Africa. Then they waited for their pasts to emerge.

Here is another in a series of sketches that recounts the personal discoveries made by eight Denver residents, a celebration of Black History Month.

Wil Alston looked at his wife and said, half in wonder, half in awe, "I'm from somewhere."

No, not the cotton and tobacco fields of North Carolina, where his parents had been sharecroppers and he had done much of his growing up before moving to Washington, D.C. And not his adopted Denver.

What Wil Alston meant that day a little more than a year ago was he was descended from the Yoruba, a gregarious, storytelling people from Nigeria. He knew this, knew his maternal line stretched back that way because he was looking at his packet of information from African Ancestry.

Although Alston, a deputy communications director for Gov. Bill Ritter, is not, by his own estimation "a teary kind of guy," the moment he stared his ancestry in the face was "throat-clenching."

"This whole notion of saying our beginning didn't start once we hit the whole Jamestown thing - that there's a beginning that started way before that - is something that's always in your mind. And now this document in front of me says, 'You go back a lot further.' "

After a pause, he adds, "It was like, wow, that Middle Passage stuff that broke so many connection lines is now reconnected."

Quickly, Alston was in touch with his 11 brothers and sisters, filling them in on what he had learned. Plans for a family pilgrimage to Nigeria were tossed about.

For an older sister who had visited Nigeria, the information endorsed a strange feeling she had had when she met the Yoruba. She had felt this odd connection to these strangers, but didn't know why.

Now she did.

Meanwhile, witnessing her husband's sense of discovery, seeing him "just overwhelmed with the knowledge of where his people came from," Roz Alston made a quick decision. She, too, would trace her line beyond her Tennessee roots.

She remembers waiting for the results of her testing and being "anxious." Then the results were in her hands and the anxiety gave way to an incandescent "sense of discovery and completeness."

"It was empowering," recalls Roz, 50, an aide to Denver City Councilman Michael Hancock. "It's like I discovered a ship that I can take back to whom I am, to where I am from."

True, her DNA linkage was far less linear that her husband's. As she read her data, she found a thread that coiled through the Fulani in Guinea, the Bubi in Equatorial Guinea, the Kotoko in Cameroon, the Mandinka in Senegal - seven ancestry groups in all, and six countries where her people might have begun.

"Even though I was disappointed that I couldn't pinpoint one place like Wil and say this is where I'm from, I was still happy," she recalls. "It's a sense of pride and dignity you feel. You find out who you are - and nobody can take that away from you."

Then, with a laugh, she notes that since she has discovered she's also linked to the Yoruba, "It was nice to find I have something in common with my husband. It took years to find that out, but at least we do."

Now they're both from somewhere.

Profiles in the series

Saturday: donnie l. betts, filmmaker, and Landri Taylor, Forest City Stapleton vice president

Monday: Dianne Reeves, Grammy-winning singer

Wil and Roz Alston, Denver politicos

Wednesday: Gin Butler, deputy director of economic development and international trade under former Gov. Bill Owens

Thursday: Gloria Neal, Sassy 107.1 FM radio personality

Friday: Wellington Webb, former Denver mayor

meadowj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2606

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