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It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live.

I've always been fascinated by family ancestry.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.

I love many places to which I have no connection, but identifying an ancestor, or someone I think is an ancestor, has taken me to places I'd never have gone to otherwise.

For me, ancestry is just one thing that connects us to people, and feeling connected to other people is generally a good thing, as long as one kind of connection does not have primacy over all the others. Heredity, race and nationhood are not the best criteria by which to judge our fellow humans.

Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea.