Gates To Establish Genealogy Summer Camp With Grant

University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., said he first became interested in genealogy the day he buried his grandfather, known in the family as “Casper” due to his light skin tone.

“I wanted to figure out how someone with my phenotype could have descended from a man, my grandfather, who looked so white,” Gates said. “I was hooked on genealogy from that day.”

Gates’s love of the subject led him to establish a genealogy and genetics summer camp for middle school children, for which he recently received a $335,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Gates also won a $304,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop college-level courses in biology with a focus on genealogy and genetics, according to the Associated Press.

His experience as host of the popular television show “Finding Your Roots” inspired the summer camp. In the show, Gates combines his passion for genealogy with the science of DNA-based ancestry tracing to unearth the family history of American celebrities.

Nina G. Jablonski, an anthropology professor at Penn State University, collaborated with Gates on the summer camp project. The camps will consist of three two-week sessions, Jablonski said, and participants’ DNA will be tested before the camp begins in a process supervised by their parents and guardians.

Students will then interview relatives and create a family tree, according to Gates. They will use census data to trace their ancestry back for decades, in addition to taking various measurements of their own bodies, including height and weight. At the end of the program, participants will use information gathered throughout the two weeks to graph and display their scientific findings.

“We’ll give them a variety of fun and beautiful ways to depict their results so that they have a lasting memory of being able not only to master their own data but to create a visual that they can, in turn, use to teach others,” Jablonski said.

The camps will be held at Penn State University and the University of South Carolina next summer and at the American Museum of Natural History in 2017. College courses will be offered at Spelman College, Morehouse College, and North Carolina A&T State University, the AP reported.

Gates said he hopes these programs will help to reverse what he termed a “negative” trend in education, in which he said many students attending under-resourced public schools consider history and science “alien” concepts.

“We have a huge percentage of kids in poor black neighborhoods for whom science is anathema,” Gates said. “So what we want to do is show them it can be fun, it can be interesting, and it can teach you something about yourself.”