The afternoon sun softens the walls of a modest Urbana office where Lakisha David sits, her eyes alight with the kind of resolve that can change narratives. She's not just an anthropologist, she’s a seeker, a story weaver, a bridge between fractured pasts and hopeful futures. Her “profound quest” began in uncertainty, homelessness, and even military service before DNA brought her back to herself and then led her to others.
Today, Professor David stands at the heart of a groundbreaking pilot, Illinois’s Family Roots Genealogy Program. Spearheaded under a new state resolution, this initiative offers 1,600 DNA kits free to Black Illinois residents, enabling them to unearth genetic bonds with relatives still living in Africa. At its core lies The African Kinship Reunion (TAKiR), her brainchild, powered by rigorous genetic testing and advanced digital infrastructure.
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Stories from Ghana whisper through the project, like the one where two participants, one from Chicago and one from Ghana, discovered they were kin. Their screens filled with images of rain-drenched reunions, laughter rolling across hemispheres, ancestral lines reconnecting like roots after a drought.
But the narrative doesn’t end with science. Beyond the marker counts, 1.8 million versus the 700,000 Ancestry typically uses, the project is about healing invisible wounds. It's the transformative moment when someone realizes, “I wasn’t just torn from my lineage, I belonged somewhere.” Robin Rue Simmons captures this well: “This program gives us an assist in repairing ourselves, at least by giving us access to understanding our lineage.”
David’s journey reverberates here. Inspired first by her research in Ghana and the deep emotional moment of discovering personal kin on that soil, she turned her humanity into a tool for communal repair. She built a platform, not a glorified replica of ancestry websites, but a space designed to trace diasporic connections and support identity development.
With every test, with every match, another person gains access to lineage, belonging, and pride. The pilot’s launch in Evanston during Juneteenth, where the first 250 kits were distributed, was more than an event. It was a homecoming. People scribbled names, gathered around phones, and connected threads they never knew they’d lost.
This is more than ancestry, it’s ancestry as narrative. It’s community building, identity affirmation, and social repair. And for David, it's deeply personal: a journey from disconnection to connection, from survival to purpose.
What lies next isn’t just more data, it’s deeper impact. As the pilot unfolds, those 1,600 lives might become stories stitched back into heritage, families, and pride. The goal isn’t just to tell people where they came from, but to help them hold onto it. To heal.
This recent video explores how community trust plays into identifying African American genealogies through DNA. It aligns perfectly with the emotional and ethical layers of David’s work, how knowing our roots transforms how we see ourselves and each other.
In the end, what Lakisha David offers isn’t simply a DNA match; it’s a chance to belong again. And that, I believe, is the kind of story that changes lives.
