Surprising ancestries revealed to several residents during event at NC Rice Festival

NAVASSA, NC (WWAY) — The 12th annual North Carolina Rice Festival is underway in Navassa, and one of the festival’s goals is to share and celebrate the history of the region.

For several area residents, they got to learn more about their own history on Thursday night.

The festival held its 5th annual Ancestry Reveal at the Navassa Community Center.

Past participants of the reveal include current Leland Town Council member Veronica Carter, who emceed this year’s event.

Nine area residents, like Leland resident Barbara Scott Akinwole, learned more about their ancestry on their mother’s side, knowledge Akinwole said had eluded her for many years.

“My father’s side, I have pretty much sown up, I can trace that line,” Akinwole said. “But it’s my mother’s maternal line that I can not trace as well as I’d like to. We had different, I guess, oral histories handed down to us so what was unusual is the fact that there was no Afro-centric mention of any of her people.”

She learned her mother’s lineage connects to Bioko Island off the coast of Equatorial Guinea and to several tribes in Cameroon.

Dr. Gina Paige is the president and co-founder of African Ancestry.com, the company that ran the DNA tests as part of the reveal.

She explained why they focused on the maternal ancestry of the participants.

“That test has the greatest chance of us finding an African result,” Paige said. “Now, tonight, we found that there was one person whose result goes back to either Italy or the Middle East.”

That person? Simone Allen, who had expected some European ancestry, was surprised by the rest of her results.

“I was.” So you expected some, a little bit?” “Yeah, but I got a lot. I got Italian, Egyptian, Iranian, and Palestinian,” Allen said. “So I’m like, where’s the African? Okay, But I’d glad I did this so I can tell my daughter and my grands.”

Another interesting result from the reveal is that 6 of the 9 participants, including Akinwole, had connections to the same 3 tribes from Cameroon.