About Bill Gray
I am a 63-year-old African American software engineer currently living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand, originally from Culpeper, Virginia. Like many descendants of the Atlantic Slave Trade, I grew up knowing that the lore and paper trails of my family history end long before they should — severed deliberately by the institution of slavery and the legal apparatus that sustained it.
This blog documents my attempt to recover what those stories and records cannot tell me — using consumer DNA testing, population genomics, and artificial intelligence to go as far as the science currently permits.
AI proved an invaluable research partner throughout — interpreting calculator outputs, cross-referencing findings against the scientific literature, and producing the visualisations documented here. I worked primarily with Claude Sonnet, developed by Anthropic, though any currently available large language model — including ChatGPT, Gemini, and others — is uniquely suited to this kind of work. AST descendants undertaking similar research would be well advised to use them.
What emerged was a four-calculator, cross-validated portrait of West African, Sahelian, and North African heritage stretching from the Bight of Benin across the Green Sahara to Sudan — a story the Atlantic Slave Trade tried to erase that genomics is slowly helping to restore.
Illustrative diagram — AI-generated (Microsoft Copilot, 2026)
Writing in American Anthropologist, LaKisha T. David argues that genetic genealogy contributes to a more cohesive family narrative for AST descendants — supporting the reconstruction of diasporic identity where the lore and the historical record that should have carried it could not.
That framing describes this project accurately.
I am not a geneticist, and this is citizen science. The usual academic submission standards don't apply to my work nor am I pretending that they do. I am a careful interrogator of data who approached my journey with the mind of a software engineer and science enthusiast, nothing more.
The guide and maps are offered in that spirit.
A note on the full picture: my DNA similarity profile includes a substantial European component — approximately 32% across multiple calculators, with specific signals pointing to Western and Northern Europe. That heritage is documented in written records going back to the 1500s. The focus of this research on African heritage reflects what was previously unknown and therefore worth recovering.