To touch a pair of shackles that belonged to a child is a powerful experience. Seeing the items in a display case is sobering enough, but to actually hold the items in your and imagine the tiny legs that must have been in them is overpowering. I wonder if the tiny legs that fit into those shackles were the legs of one of my ancestors who have origin in Ghana, Benin, and other sub-Saharan African countries.
Centuries-old DNA helps identify specific origins of slave skeletons found in Caribbean
A newly developed genetic technique enabled researchers to sequence DNA from the teeth of 300-year-old skeletons, helping to pinpoint where in Africa three slaves had likely lived before being captured.
March 9, 2015 – By Krista Conger
More than 300 years ago, three African-born slaves died on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. No written records memorialized their fate, and their names and precise ethnic background remained a mystery. For centuries, their skeletons were subjected to the hot, wet weather of the tropical island until they were unearthed in 2010 during a construction project in the Zoutsteeg area of the capital city of Philipsburg.
