A white Utah woman’s life changed forever after she made a remarkable discovery. She gave up her DNA to learn more about her family’s history.
Deena Hill, a genealogist from Mount Pleasant, Utah, submitted a DNA sample to Ancestry.com in 2016. The results revealed that her family roots spanned a wide range of geographies. The results showed that she once had roots in Igbo Land, Nigeria.
She initially took the test hoping to debunk a long-running family rumor about Cherokee blood, but soon discovered she had several African-American cousins, including Desi Campbell of North Carolina.
Wanting to learn more about her family history, Hill contacted Campbell, and in doing so, she unraveled the mystery surrounding the relationship between an Italian-English woman from Utah and an African-American man from North Carolina.
“I was shocked when I found out I had African-American blood, but I was also very excited by this new information,” Hill said The pilot.
Deena Hill, a genealogist from Mount Pleasant, Utah, submitted a DNA sample to Ancestry.com in 2016, only to discover that her family’s roots crossed many waters. The results showed that she once had roots in Igbo Land, Nigeria.
She originally took the test in hopes of debunking a long-running family rumor about Cherokee blood, but discovered she had several African-American cousins, including Desi Campbell of North Carolina.
Hill already knew she had family roots in the Sicily region of Italy on her father’s side and English ancestry on her mother’s side, but she still tried to find her common ancestor with Campbell’s
Hill already knew that she had family roots in the Sicily region of Italy on her father’s side and an English background on her mother’s side, but she was still keen to find a common ancestor for her and Campbell.
After many phone calls and in-depth studies of documents—wills, deeds, and census records—the picture became clear to the newly discovered cousins.
Hill is the third-great-granddaughter of a man named Nelson Holder Ritchie, whose mother was a slave and eventually became pregnant by a cousin of the Holder family.
A neighbor bought Jane and moved her to Missouri, where she gave birth to Hill’s great-grandfather, Holder Ritchie, who would later settle in Utah.
Jane’s parents are Sarah and Sherod McNeill, who had 13 children – one of whom was daughter Jane and the other a son named Gabriel McNeill, the great-great-grandfather of Desi Campbell.
Here Campbell and Hill’s lives intersect: they are fifth cousins.
Since their life-changing discovery, Hill and Campbell have gone on to contact dozens of their Nigerian relatives. Some of the relatives contacted were Uzoma Kalu (left) of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Oliver Udemba (right) of Raleigh, North Carolina.
“We started reaching out to them and trying to figure out our heritage, and we were actually able to narrow it down to one town — it’s in Igbo Land. Igbo Land is just a small part of Nigeria,” Hill told KUTV
Since their life-changing discovery, Hill and Campbell have contacted dozens of their Nigerian relatives.
“We started reaching out to them and trying to figure out our heritage, and we were able to actually narrow it down to one town — it’s in Igbo Land. Igbo Land is just a small part of Nigeria,” Hill said. CUTTV.
The research duo discovered that Igbo land consists of five states: Anambra, Abia, Imo, Ebonyi and Enugu.
One of the family members Hill contacted was Uzoma Kalu, who lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“Since then, Deena has contacted me for information and also Mr. Campbell from North Carolina. I have passed the information on to my family in Nigeria in Ohaifia,” she said.
Campbell contacted Oliver Udemba, another cousin in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“I am 100% Igbo, so I am as African as it gets! I have met many groups, DNA testing groups, that are connected to my family,” Udemba said.
Hill’s now very thorough research has led to the conclusion that many African Americans have ancestors who were forced into the US as slaves, thereby destroying their identity.
Even in this reality, DNA technology offers hope to families seeking answers and provides a few surprises.
Udemba said he regularly gets calls from new relatives of a different ethnicity, but he still has DNA matches, just like Hill. because they wanted to know more about their Nigerian heritage.
“So even though their color, their pigment may look different than mine, but right in what runs through their veins, there’s a lot of Igbo. There’s a lot of my family,” Udemba said.
Since Hill shared her story about her research into her family’s history with KUTV, she has received many questions from people who wanted to know more about their own family’s ancestors.
She mentioned requesting documents from the Freedman Bureau and others resources, including DNA genealogy sites, that have helped reconstruct missing parts of her ancestry.
