After two years of digging and testing, Alternet.org contributing columnist Christopher Rabb discovered that there is more to a person's heritage than their ancestry.

In order to learn more about his black ancestors, Rabb and his family began a series of DNA tests, which unveiled several things he found troubling. 

"I quickly realized that the more intently I sought to learn about my black ancestors, the more I would have to research the white people who owned them," he says. "A notable subset of the slave owners were also my ancestors."

Rabb discovered that some of his slave ancestors had been raped by their owners. While he always suspected this, testing and digging into his family's past confirmed it. It was not an easy fact to come to terms with.

"While I was growing up, my complexion and features constantly reminded me of this fact, a reality I only came to peace with when I learned the distinction between ancestry and heritage," he says. "Before this epiphany, the idea of white male ancestors who owned and raped my black female ancestors filled me with so much rage and frustration that I nearly lost the will to learn more."

His search did continue, however, and slowly he began to understand that genes do not define a person's history. "Often, they only illuminate the corners of this planet from which our ancestors hail," he says. "The larger narrative is what our forbearers chose to do in those corners and how that, generations later, produced us and the socio-political circumstances into which we were born. Once I drew the line between what I was (my ancestry, which I cannot control) and who I was (the heritage I choose to embrace), whatever I uncovered in my genealogical journey had little impact on my racial identity. And racial identity, not to be confused with race -- the biological term -- is an incendiary and malleable artifice of our own making. What we loosely and provocatively call race, so often conflated with color, culture and consciousness, changes with the passing of each historical moment and each footstep toward or away from those earthly corners from which our ancestors migrated."

His search eventually brought him to the plantation some of his ancestors lived on, but it was no longer the important part of his family's story. "I longed to know about my great-great-great grandparents who were kidnapped from points unknown and despaired that it might be impossible to find the names, language, beliefs and even just that small piece of the world they called home. I always knew my ancestors had a place in history. Now, thanks to science, I know where those places are, not just in history, but on a world map and amidst the tangled, blood-drenched but resilient roots of my ever-expanding family tree."

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