Ghana, Togo and Benin

Although our Haitian parent shares a Ga DNA match with me, suggesting an identical by descent relationship, we wonder if we are matching these Ga from Ghana via their Benin & Togo marked chromosome segments or via what Ancestry refers to as "Ivory Coast and Ghana." We suspect part of the reason for matches with Ga from southern Ghana is their genetic overlaps and historical interactions with the Ewe and peoples to the east, a major source of the Haitian people's ethnogenesis (the Slave Coast).

We were able to check on Gedmatch for a Ga person (judging by their surname, suggesting roots in the Ada region) who matched our parent, and compared the shared DNA segment to the label assigned to Chromosome 18 from Ancestry (with the help of the DNA Painter tool). Well, it turns out this Ghaianain person's shared segment with our parent falls under the Benin and Togo-marked segment. We wonder if it is similar for the other Ga we matched with, all of whom had very high Benin and Togo estimates. As for the Ga in Saint-Domingue, Geggus has described them as being lumped into the Coromantees (Cramanti in the Saint Dominguan press) category with the Akan. If one of our ancestral regions, Bainet, was partly supplied in captives by British smugglers, then the "Coromantees" were definitely present in the Jacmel Quartier, perhaps under the more frequent name of Mine (Mina). What makes things more confusing is the broad use by the French of the term Gold Coast, likely overlapping with the Slave Coast trade and perhaps bringing in Ga and Ewe groups from southeastern Ghana to French ships there, too. Descourtilz even mentioned the Ga peoples of "Acra" in a short chapter of one of his books on the African "nations" of Saint Domingue. There they were, unsurprisingly, lumped in with Akan groups.

Interestingly, our mother matched a Mandinka person from Sierra Leone on a segment of Chromosome 2 marked Ivory Coast & Ghana. We would love to know which populations were used for the reference panel for that area, although it is no surprise if someone from Sierra Leone might have similar DNA to some of the groups in Ivory Coast and Ghana. However, at least her match with a Congolese person did fall on a segment assigned to "Western Bantu Peoples" even if the specific match is not from one of the ethnic groups present in colonial Haiti.