Pearl Duncan

Pearl Duncan is not only the first African American, but also the first person in the world, to use DNA to trace her ancestors from one continent, to two other continents. Performing her DNA tests in 1999, she used the family nicknames that survived in her African-American family to trace her ancestors to families named Opare of the Akan people of Ghana, in West Africa. She then traced them to specific farmers in African villages in the 1660's. Using genealogy, she then traced her ancestors to the 1690s in Colonial America in Jamaica, and to the 1720's in Scotland. She has a Scottish male ancestor, and numerous African ancestors, whose modern-day African descendants she met and compared families' DNA to DNA.

Duncan is now detailing her remarkable story in her upcoming nonfiction book about using DNA and genealogy to trace ancestors. In this book, she highlights the "little people" who find nobles and slaves in their family trees. Given her ten years of research, the Ghanaians recognized her and the Scots granted her a medieval coat of arms of ancestors who were nobles related to royals. She was granted a coat of arms by a Scottish Court, authorized by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II.

An author and adventure sports travel writer, she has written articles about Trans-Atlantic yacht races, travel, and other sports adventures as well as a short story book, Water Dancing, which received strong national reviews. She also contributed to A Rock Against the Wind: African-American Poems and Letters of Love and Passion. Her articles appeared in Sailing, Sail, Yacht/Racing, Cruising, Billboard, Record World, Essence, Black Enterprise, The Village Voice, The New York Soho Weekly News, Class, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hartford Courant, Black World Today Online Magazine, and BET.com. Her search for her ancestors has been featured in The New York Times, The Palm Beach Post, and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune and on CBS-TV, BET-TV, and dozens of newspapers in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, England, Sweden and Brazil.

Duncan taught literature at Rutgers University-Newark, the College of New Rochelle, The College for Human Services, and Jersey City State College and was educated at Bryn Mawr College where she studied Humanities and Social Sciences.