Pearl Duncan

Pearl Duncan is the first person in the world to use DNA to trace her ancestors' journey from one continent to two others. By taking a DNA test in 1999 and using the family nicknames that survived in her African American family, she traced her ancestors to a family named Opare, of the Akan people of Ghana, West Africa. She then traced the Opares to specific farmers in African villages in the 1660s and, using genealogy, traced them to Colonial Jamaica in the 1960's and Scotland in the 1720's. Duncan discovered she has a male Scottish ancestor and a numerous African ancestors, whose modern-day African descendants she has met and compared DNA with.

Duncan will detail her remarkable story in an 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 authorized by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II.

An author and adventure sports travel writer, Duncan has written articles about Trans-Atlantic yacht races, travel, and other sports adventures as well as a book of short stories, 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. Most recently, she has written about Wall Street and its history, as well as the Occupy Movement. Her articles have 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.