I visited Scotland after a DNA test revealed I was 14% Scottish. My results are complicated, but it's not my job to have all the answers.

29.10.2023 - 15:59 / insider.com

"Where are you from?" has always been a tricky question for me. 

As a child, I always asserted that I was from Florida — which is true — but people were rarely content with that response. 

"No, but where are you really from?" they'd ask, even more intent on unraveling a mystery I had not cracked yet. 

I'm African American, so slavery and its repercussions made answering that question nearly impossible. In the 2010s, my aunt attempted to pull public records and documents to trace our ancestry, but the work was tedious and often inconclusive.

The National Archives and Records Administration noted that the Civil War and courthouse fires destroyed many documents that could provide answers for African Americans looking for details about where they came from before enslavement. Additionally, some southern states didn't begin recording births, marriages, and deaths until after 1900. 

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In May, I decided to eliminate the ambiguity surrounding my ancestry and take an AncestryDNA test.

Nine days after I spit into a plastic tube and shipped it away to the AncestryDNA labs, I got a notification that my results were ready.

While I expected several African countries in my results, I was still surprised at which ones that made the list. According to my results, my largest DNA block comes from Nigeria at 17%. My results also showed that most of my ancestry comes from West African countries like Cameroon and Ghana, which makes sense given the transatlantic slave trade originated in the region.

Tracing my ancestry to specific African countries was thrilling. I called my parents immediately, asking if they knew we were Nigerian and from a host of other countries.

I was also shocked that two of my top five DNA percentages pointed to white European ancestry. AncestryDNA claimed that I was 14% Scottish and 9% Welsh, in addition to having origins from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, and England. I was definitely thrown off.

Those countries, while interesting, made me pause. My parents are African American, and the same goes for my grandparents. I'm not sure how countries like Norway ended up in my ancestry, but I couldn't deny that it's likely due to the atrocities of chattel slavery, which often included rape and breeding.

I decided to explore each country on the list to learn more about my ancestry, but I didn't think an opportunity would present itself one month after getting my results. In June, a friend made plans to travel across Europe and invited me to tag along for the first half of the trip. 

When she suggested we visit Scotland, I realized it would become the first country on my DNA bucket list. After months of planning, we packed our bags and flew to the United Kingdom in