Yaounde, Cameroon Africa. (Cameroon News) – Famous Atlanta based genealogical researcher William Holland, traces his roots to African royalty in Cameroon and Ghana.

After having analyzed his genetic profile in detail, William Holland now is sure that he is a descendant of royal families whose origin traces back to more than a millennium.

From the time the story starts off to the present, however, his ancestors have moved all around the African continent and are scattered everywhere.

Holland believes that a whole group had been transported to America as slaves. Holland says that his family’s roots can be traced to the royal blood that was brought in from Africa to the US as slaves.

Now, Holland is delving into the centuries-old story of his family full circle by extending an invitation to his new found relatives to pay him a visit in America all the way from Africa.

If they do accept Holland’s invite, African royalty will get a chance to have a face-to-face interaction with the descendants of slaves and slave owners in Virginia.

“It’s something that’s never been done before,” Holland states with a lot of excitement, on the last day of Black History Month. “It’s something that should not be missed.”

The whole basis of Holland’s plan can be traced back to the innumerable tours he’s taken over the course of the previous year to fill in the blanks that he came across in his genetic lineage.

Y-chromosome tests have already proven beyond doubt that his ancestors had relations with not only to a royal family in the West African nation of Cameroon, but also to a royal family in Ghana as well which is quite far away.

“I’m overwhelmed now,” said Holland, who is the great-grandson of a slave who had been forced to join the Confederate army during the Civil War.

But Holland is now facing a sense of excitement as he untangles the mysteries that shroud the highly complicated genetic tale.

This month, as he paid a visit to his genetic relatives in Ghana, Holland put together the final pieces of the puzzle revealing the tale of an exciting migration.

He undertook a comparison of his Y-chromosome markers with those of the families in Ghana and Cameroon and the results indicated that their last common ancestor lived perhaps 50 generations ago, or roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years ago.

His Ghanaian hosts, members of the Akpaglo family, informed him that their ancestors had travelled southward from Sudan and settled in the Oyo Empire. Holland presumes that his ancestors who were also part of the group had finally ended up in Cameroon.

“From there, they split up,” he told me. One ancestral line however continued to live in Ghana, while another started off in Cameroon. Holland has now travelled to both nations to throw light on his lineage. Having been able to convince them with the genetic results, he is now a part of two African families.
In Cameroon, Holland was proffered a royal title (“Ndefru”). In Ghana, the Akpaglo family now calls him by three more African names which was given to him during the course of painfully long ceremony that lasted for over seven hours.

Holland’s new names include Togbe (“old wise man,” even though Holland is in his 40s), Korsi (“born on Sunday,” which he was) and Degboe (“brave person who went away and returned”).

“I’m satisfied now — now that I have four names,” Holland says as a joke but is however proud of them.

But Holland says that he is not done with the whole thing yet. Holland still is excited about sharing the stories of his different experiences as he tried to trace his lineage with his fellow Americans, and at the same time feels that it is his responsibility to now give his African relatives a taste of America – a land in which he was brought up.

Holland says some of his friends and relatives back home in Atlanta feel irritated by the fact that they had by chance happened to be sold into slavery by their African ancestors.

His African friends and relatives affirm that the story is not what it says. So Holland is now putting his energy to arrange a daylong reunion and seminar on May 22 in Virginia, where his ancestors worked as slaves, to give Africans and Americans an opportunity to interact with each other while also walking them through the story that interweaves their history as well as destiny together.

Holland has extended an invitation to Fon Angwafo III, who heads the Mankon tribal group in Cameroon, as well as his family from Ghana.

He’s hoping that his African-American relatives as well as the representatives of the Virginia family who had taken his ancestors as slaves will be present at the meeting.

“You hope to enlighten your family about Africa and what happened in the slave trade,” Holland explained.

Holland has received conformation from “the Fon” that his invitation has been accepted and that he would be coming down, and he’s pretty confident that there will be representation from his family in Ghana as well.

The plans have not been confirmed as yet, but if everything happens as per plans , then the efforts put in by one person in his search to find his ancestors will convert into a meeting of the clans that goes beyond the boundaries of time and space.

Holland says his newfound African families are also equally excited. “They’re past excited right now,” he told me. This is the right end to the Black History Month.