The ties that find

Through Illinois Computes, University of Illinois researchers like Lakisha David, an assistant professor of anthropology, have found remarkable ways to incorporate NCSA’s myriad resources into their work. In a time when people routinely use DNA testing to understand their ethnic roots, David wants African Americans to know their family histories extend far beyond the days when their ancestors arrived in the U.S., not as immigrants, but as “property” to be sold into slavery.

“There’s this idea that African Americans sprung up from slavery or from the Middle Passage,” said David. “What our project does is give people a more complete history. They can place themselves in the story of humanity, see that they came from particular families, particular communities, economies and so forth.”

David’s research involves genetic genealogy – the use of genealogical DNA testing and profiling, combined with traditional genealogical methods, to infer genetic relationships between individuals. Her specific work involves genetic testing of both people living in the West African nation of Ghana and in the U.S. The goal is to build a database of African and African American genealogy that can be used for one-to-one comparisons between people in Africa and the U.S., and discover familial relationships. She has already performed DNA testing on about 100 individuals in Ghana and is recruiting participants across the U.S. Focusing on a subset of about 6,000 DNA tests from the African diaspora from the genealogy company Ancestry, she has begun recruiting U.S. residents to her project and has built her own database of African and African American genealogy. 

She worked with Illinois State Rep. Carol Ammons of Urbana and graduate fellow Jailene Aguirre to co-write and pass an Illinois General Assembly resolution creating the Family Roots Genealogy Pilot Program earlier this year. As part of this program, David is recruiting 1,600 African Americans in Illinois to be tested, added to her database, and hopefully find connections to relatives in Africa.

Someone who already has an Ancestry profile can create an account in the Family Roots systems, David explained, and upload their profile to the system’s website on Amazon Web Services to determine if they’re related to the Ghanaians involved in the study. If so, they’re sent a testing kit so they can be tested again through the Functional Genomics Unit at the University of Illinois’ Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center. Through the state’s pilot program, people can also test directly with the Functional Genomics Unit without having a preexisting profile from Ancestry. The process means better quality control and the ability to test for 1.8 million genetic markers, compared to about 700,000 in the Ancestry data, and a better ability to build densely sampled family trees.

“We’re genotyping fresh, and we know what the error rates are,” said David. “Once the participants are tested with our lab, that data goes into our pipeline where we do the general relatedness information that people refer to as ethnicity estimates. We do the general stuff – like what percentage of your genome is related to this particular group of people – but then we’re also able to do the one-on-one comparison with the people in our existing database. So, with this group of people in this project, we know at this point that they are related.”

Illinois Computes Brings NCSA to Family Roots Project

David is a savvy website infrastructure builder, but to create a fully functional, user-friendly online tool for African and African American genealogy, she decided to turn to the experts at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). She first talked to Christina Fliege, head of genomics at NCSA, to talk about the scope of the project and eventually settled on working with Lisa Gatzke and a team of user interface/user experience designers and developers to give her data a user-facing platform that would be easy to understand for people looking to connect with their newfound family members. Her initial work, which began two years ago, was supported by faculty startup funds and an award from the university’s Campus Research Board. To work with NCSA, she applied for funding through Illinois Computes, a program that offers NCSA’s computing and data resources, as well as technical expertise, to faculty researchers across the campus. 

“It was a relatively simple process,” David said of the Illinois Computes application process. “We eventually decided that the data [analysis] pipeline would stay with me and NCSA would handle the software and web interface – both the back-end programming that connects to our data and the front-end user experience.

“It’s been a great experience,” she continued. “We meet regularly, and they really listen. Whatever features we want to roll out, or if I need anything, they are so helpful.”

“She needed a platform to host the results of the genetic testing that she was doing on African Americans and specifically African Americans from Illinois and the people she tested when she went to Ghana,” Gatzke recalled. “Her work is geared toward connecting African Americans with people from West Africa who they may be related to. Our role is to create the best interface for that; the best user experience so they can easily find and understand the information.”

NCSA UI/UX designer Kate Arneson has been working with David since early 2024 to design a user experience for the platform that offers functionality and interactivity. For example, the platform allows users to explore one-to-one relatedness between users in the U.S. and Africa and visualize family trees and ancestry timelines. 

“Our goal is to create the best user experience possible that not only communicates complex scientific results but also facilitates interpersonal connections and relationships,” said Arneson. “As designers, we work to understand everything from user stories and workflows to information architecture and hierarchy. We conduct user sessions and create wireframes and prototypes for usability testing, which simulate data and interactions that a user might encounter.”

Our developers are an important part of the team throughout the entire project lifecycle,” she continued, “Particularly after features and designs have been validated and refined, we collaborate closely with them as they help bring our designs to life in a form that is fully functional and usable and will scale over time as the project grows.” 

A More Complete History

As an anthropologist, David’s project focuses on the people involved in the genetic profiling and the connections they make. Traditionally, genealogies have been traced using written documents and public records, such as recorded births, marriages and deaths. Because of the institution of slavery, these records for Africans who came to the U.S. as slaves are incomplete and inaccurate at best. Families were often broken apart, and people were considered property and often not included in census data. Learning those family histories fills a void for many African Americans, according to David, and finding actual living family members is an added bonus that forges new emotional and familial bonds.

David said she knows of several African Americans who have tracked down African relatives through the system and have sent pictures from their visits to Ghana to meet family members. Two of her project participants – one an African American woman, the other a Ghanaian man – learned they both live in Chicago and were able to connect.

David envisions further developing the public-facing website, The African Kinship Reunion Project, and adding more features and results accessible to participants after their secure login. She thinks the site could be promoted to African Americans as a way to find connections to their African lineage and possibly even living family members. 

“We’re not just a duplicate of 23andMe and Ancestry,” she said. “Our focus is on these African diaspora connections and what we can learn from pulling all this data together from an anthropological perspective and from a human identity perspective. For those in our project, they’re now able to put together a more cohesive narrative for themselves and for their families that’s not just rooted in this traumatic event of slavery.”

ABOUT ILLINOIS COMPUTES

Illinois Computes offers computing and data storage resources, technical expertise and support services to researchers from all domains across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Through the campus-funded program, NCSA will learn what additional assets are needed to fulfill the computing demands of the university and adjust the cyberinfrastructure strategy while continuing to make access to systems, interdisciplinary and technical knowledge, and support infrastructure easy to obtain. Illinois Computes removes barriers for all Illinois researchers – especially those typically underserved – to access NCSA’s growing assemblage of research computing tools and world-class staff, furthering their innovative and novel work while ensuring NCSA is a leader in the global research community.