French and European Matches

Although we are mainly interested in the African origins of the Haitian people, it is so much easier to look into European or European-descended DNA matches. In order to explore the French ancestry of Haitians, we focused on shared French-descended (or French Canadian, Belgian, and one Dutch person who appears to be of Belgian or French origin) individuals on Ancestry and My Heritage. Sadly, Ancestry does not have features that allow one to see where exactly and on which chromosomes user are aligned with their matches. My Heritage, however, has that feature. One can even triangulate quickly and easy for shared matches on the same segment. Thus, using My Heritage, Gedmatch, DNA Painter, and Ancestry, we compiled a quick table breaking down the French-affiliated matches.

Unsurprisingly, most are from France. And most of the matches were aligned on a segment of Chromosome 2 designated as "France" by Ancestry. Interestingly, this very same segment is something we share with a distant cousin whose ancestor was a brother or cousin of my great-great-grandfather. We suspect some of this French ancestry can be correlated with the Gaury or other free people of color who lived in Bainet in the 1700s. However, many of the other French matches shared a segment with us categorized as "Spain" by Ancestry. Most of these fell on Chromosome 4, a segment we also share with a Haitian with roots in the valley section of Bainet. We suspect the "Spain" category is misreading "France" but there is undoubtedly some overlap between Spain and France on these types of tests. What was more surprising was the presence of Belgian and a single Dutch match, although one can see genetic overlap between France and Belgium for myriad reasons.

Overall, the matches are usually small. But, this is to be expected when speaking of Haitians whose last French ancestors lived in the 1600s and 1700s. Since we share these matches with our Haitian parent, we assume most of these matches are Identical by Descent, too. Sadly, we lack something similar for African matches to fully explore that far more relevant and significant part of the Haitian origin story. Nonetheless, we have some theories now about the French ancestry of Haitians.