Why Louisiana Has America's Most Mysterious Ancestry

By Hidden DNA

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Why Louisiana Has America's Most Mysterious Ancestry. Louisiana produces DNA results unlike anywhere else in America, exact parishes, specific islands, traceable ship manifests from the 1700s. This video explains why, through the story of Homer Plessy: the man who sat down on a whites-only train in 1892, knowing he'd be arrested, to expose a law that defined race down to a fraction. From there, we trace the three-tiered racial system Louisiana operated under French and Spanish rule, the 1803 collision with American law, Plessy's Supreme Court case, and Naomi Drake, the mid-1900s registrar who reclassified thousands of families by surname. Along the way: the Cajuns, the Isleños (who still speak a Spanish dialect found nowhere else), the United Houma Nation (still without federal recognition), and the Louisiana Creoles, identified by 23andMe as two distinct genetic clusters. Plus what's still unresolved: the disputed origins of the Redbones, and why this law wasn't repealed until 1983.

Tags: louisiana ancestry, homer plessy, plessy v ferguson, louisiana creole, cajun history, ancestrydna, 23andme, dna test results, one drop rule, jim crow laws, family tree, finding your roots, genetic genealogy, hidden american history, isleños, houma nation, black history, ancestry, southern history, racial classification history