(bright music) - [Byron] Who isn't curious about family history, where we came from, who our people are, - We know nothing.

We have to rely on some of our older family members to really tell us what they remember.

- I heard that they say he was a tall, fair-skinned man with green eyes and red hair.

- [Byron] My family is on a quest.

We are hoping that DNA testing can unlock secrets of the past, because like so many families like ours, our family tree is incomplete.

- [Voiceover] Before we started this ancestry research, I didn't know anything about Lee Hurt.

- [Byron] Lee Hurt and Eliza Waller, our oldest known patriarch, and matriarch, sit at the very top of our family tree.

They're kind of like our families' Adam and Eve.

(audience laughing) Lee and Eliza had 14 children, and spawned a long line of descendants.

But other than that, we don't really know that much about them.

Who are Lee and Eliza, and where did they come from?

I'm Byron Hurt.

I'm a documentary filmmaker, and I'm a member of the Hurt Waller family.

I've always been super curious about our family's origins, beyond Lee and Eliza.

Many European Americans are able to discover their family roots using public records, and genetic ancestry test kits.

But for African American families like mine, the path to learning family history is much more challenging.

Since Emancipation, black families torn apart during slavery, have had to work hard to reunite, and discover the truth about their past.

My family has no idea who Lee and Eliza's ancestors are, because unfortunately we can't go back any further than 1863, the year Lee Hurt was born.

Why is it so difficult for us as a family, to learn the information that we need to learn, about Lee Hurt's parents, his grandparents, Eliza Hurt's, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on and so forth?

- Well, our lives did not count in the way that other people's lives counted.

You know?

I mean, if we ever needed a Black Lives Matter Movement, it would've been from our very inception on these shores.

Our lives didn't count.

Plus we don't have the scientific record of Africa, that would allow us to make the the bridges that we know exist, because we are an African people in North America, - [Byron] The big DNA databases are mostly made up of samples from people of European descent, with a lot fewer DNA samples from black people, whether they are now living in Africa or the Americas, - The African database is not robust.

There's not a lot of information within the database, because the way that genetic sequencing, and ancestry reconstruction works, is that you take an unknown sample, say your sample, and then we try to match it to samples that we have already identified.

If we can't match the unknown sample to samples that we have already identified, then we have a problem.

DNA can tell you some of your family history, but it's not all encompassing.