Rene Syler's Very Personal Journey

The Early Show Co-Anchor Chronicles Her Emotional Search For Her Roots

(CBS) 

"Just doing this allows us to break apart and tear down some of these boundaries that we've set up and these rules of inheritance and classification," Kittles told Syler. "Just looking at ancestry breaks down those walls."

Syler's mother also told her she was part Native American, so she took a second test that would check her overall DNA and tell her where else her ancestors are from besides Africa.

When the results arrived, Syler pored over the information inside. "It is with great pleasure that I report our matriclan analysis successfully identified your maternal genetic ancestry," the letter began. "People in the United States, belonging to this haplogroup, share ancestry with either the Irish, British or Scandinavians."

The results were not quite what she expected. "I thought, you've gotta be kidding me! Me with Irish, British or Scandinavian blood?" she said. "But what I found out is that as many as a thousand ancestral lines converged in me in just the last several hundred years. It's just that this one line led from Africa to Europe 60,000 years ago.

The other DNA test was somewhat more straightforward, showing her ancestral makeup as 59 percent sub-Saharan African, 25 percent European, 14 percent Native American, and 2 percent East Asian.

Syler described her reaction to this information as "blown away."

"Life is funny," she said. "Sometimes more information just leads to more questions."

As of now, Syler says she is still sorting out all of the emotions after her tests. She says the results don't change who she is, but they have given her and her family some specific information about where they come from.

For more information, check out DNA Print Genomics or African Ancestry.