Malagasy Roots with Wendy Wilson Fall, PhD and Teresa Vega

Wendy Wilson Fall and Teresa Vega will share the history and origin of Malagasy Roots and how DNA testing can help identify your Malagasy ancestry.

Wendy Wilson Fall is Associate Professor and Program Chair of the Africana Studies Program at Lafayette College.  Wilson-Fall has a PhD from Howard University’s African Studies Center, with a concentration in Social Anthropology. Her research engages questions of socio-cultural change and ethnic identity. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on these themes, including work from her field research in West Africa as well as her work in the U.S. on African American family narratives. At Lafayette College she and colleagues have built  an interactive website using GIS visualization to explore the early demographics of families claiming Malagasy ancestry at http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/madagascar.  Her book, Memories of Madagascar and the Black Atlantic was released in October, 2015 by Ohio University Press. 

Teresa Vega's background in cultural anthropology helped her to research her ancestral roots. She began blogging to document the genealogy research she had been doing over the past several years. She is a proud member of both the NJ and NY Chapters of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAGHS) and the Facebook Group African American Genealogy & Slave Ancestry Research. Since 2014,Teresa is the co-administrator of FTDNA's Malagasy Roots Project with CeCe Moore and a descendant of Malagasy enslaved people going back to the late 1600s and early 1700s from New York and Virginia.