For Jaiden Mosley, A25, history is fascinating—and sometimes personal. 

He’s a history major and is set to begin a master’s program in the subject at the University of Virginia in September. He’s also long been fascinated by genealogy—which is history in its own way. After doing family genealogy research, he was intrigued and did DNA tests with Ancestry and 23andme.

The results he received from the genetic testing services didn’t surprise him too much. “They test your DNA against reference populations around the globe, and mine came back mostly West African—from Nigeria and Angola,” Mosley says. “But I also had white ancestors in my DNA—England and Scotland showed up in smaller amounts. That was confirmed through doing my family tree.”

Using Ancestry’s database for this family genealogy work, he put in the names of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and the service suggested matches for prior generations. That led to sorting through things like census, marriage, and probate records, searching for clues.

“Sometimes you’ll reach a dead end, though, especially with African American genealogy—you can only go back so far on the African American side because of slavery, when personal records were erased,” he says.

Even so, he was able to trace back to his fifth great-grandmother (five generations before his grandmother), Mary Green, who he found was enslaved in the 1820s on a plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina. He also traced his fifth great-grandfather, Jabez Weeks, an overseer on the same plantation, which is near Columbia, South Carolina. 

“Jabez Weeks went on to have a child, James Weeks, who was born in 1833, with my fifth great-grandmother, most likely through a forced relationship, which was common back in slavery times—overseers and plantation owners would have sexual relationships with the enslaved people who worked there,” says Mosley.

Having learned about Jabez Weeks, Mosley was interested in his ancestry, too. What he found in his search was a big surprise. “I traced his line back to colonial Massachusetts,” he says. 

Jabez Weeks’ fifth great-grandfather was a man named William Weeks; he married Mary Lynde, whose brother Thomas Lynde married Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter Tufts. Peter Tufts was also an ancestor of Charles Tufts, who donated the land for what became Tufts College in 1852 and is now Tufts University.

“Peter Tufts is something like my 13th great-grand uncle, and the Tufts family are like my cousins through the Lynde-Tufts marriage,” says Mosley. 

These complicated genealogical histories take a lot of work to discover, of course. Mosley learned about archival research in a class with the Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies initiative at the university, and with a later Gill Fellowship he did additional research at the Tufts Archival Research Center on those long-ago family connections to Tufts University.

“I’ve always felt connected to the school—people are welcoming here—but it made me feel even more connected to Tufts and Medford and this area, knowing that my distant ancestors were here,” he says. “I mostly thought my ancestry just came from Southern states, like South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina, and I never really thought about any connections to Massachusetts before that.” 

His family was surprised by the news, too. “My family’s very Southern,” Mosley says. “They didn’t know we had any ancestry in Massachusetts.”