I'm African American and I want to find out if possible where my family originat

Question:

I'm African American and I want to find out if possible where my family originates from Africa. How can I

Can I do it from just looks or should I get a DNA test

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: For what you are seeking, you would need to get a mitochondrial DNA test that tests for hapleotype. This traces just one line (your mother's, mother's, mother's, etc.) and is not fool-proof, but by comparing your hapleotype with a larger database, a geneticist should be able to give you a region, if not a specific tribe.

This presumes, of course, that your mother's mother's mother, etc. was from Africa - you may get a surprise (n.b. Louis Henry "Skip" Gates, prof. of African-American history and literature at Harvard and host of "African-American lives" and "Oprah's roots" whose Y-chromosome traced back, not to Africa, but Northern Europe.)

The cost is not insubstantial.

As for "looks", while there certainly are traditional features, etc. associated with one ethnicity or another, I wouldn't put too much stock in it - there's simply too much admixture (both of African and non-African stock) in a typical African-American to make this particularly helpful, unless your African ancestor was in the last generation or two, and it's little more than a generality - Hausa might "look" a certain way in general, but an individual Hausa may or may not look that way - just as not every Swede (for instance) is tall and blond, although many certainly are.