by Bryan Sykes
As soon as Richard and I were inside, my doubts from the first days in Boston began to ebb. Here we could get down to some serious work. And so it proved. We could not have been made more welcome, and within minutes of our arrival, I was in the boardroom explaining my plans for the book to the society’s senior staff. We were given a room in which to interview our volunteers and take DNA samples. It was perfect, and I began to make arrangements for the rest of the week. Although I had tried to keep prior arrangements to a minimum, for the sake of the road movie effect, there had to be some forward planning. I had asked the society whether any members had ancestors who had arrived in America before 1700. Of all the European Americans, this was the group I most wanted to meet and, if possible, to sample. Their ancestors had been among the first to arrive and had shared New England with the Indians, principally the Wampanoags, peacefully at first but not for long. If there were to be any genetic evidence that relations between them went beyond the aloofness of the historical record, then these were the people whose chromosome portraits might hold the answer.
Another topic I was eager to cover was the impact of genetic testing on genealogists since it became widely available ten years ago. I had assumed it had been useful, if only by the numbers of people who had used DNA to explore their past, but I had only rarely had the opportunity to discuss it with people who were genealogists first and foremost. I wanted to know more about the how and the where, and for this the society was the best place to start.
Two weeks before Richard and I arrived in Boston, the society had kindly sent out an appeal for volunteers among the membership through its weekly e-bulletin. The criteria were, I thought, rather demanding. I had asked for volunteers whose ancestors had arrived in New England before 1700 and who would be able to come to Boston during the week I planned to be there. I thought I would be lucky to get half a dozen replies, instead of which I got more than four hundred! Time alone meant that the shortlisting had to be brutal, and I was forced to decline some fabulous offers.
Waiting for me were twenty chromosome-painting kits. Since the lab system required me to specify the name of the DNA donor in advance, and I didn’t know who the volunteers were going to be, I had to invent a list of pseudonyms. Without a moment’s hesitation I realized there was only one possible theme: Hollywood. After all, that is how most of the rest of the world has come to know America. I decided on characters, rather than the actors themselves, just in case casual readers might think I had dreamed up a devilish way to recover DNA from, or even clone, the long-dead stars of the silver screen. When I opened the box the kits were already labeled for “Rhett Butler,” “Norma Desmond,” “Holly Golightly,” and so forth.* At first my volunteers could choose, and “Margo Channing,” played by Bette Davis in the 1950 movie All About Eve, was the first to be snapped up, but by the end the choice was governed by which characters remained. Although the Hollywood pseudonyms were a product of the lab system and my own lack of close planning, I have gotten to know the DNA results through their movie names because that is how they were sent back to me from the lab. It was quietly amusing to receive them as attachments to e-mails beginning “Dear Sugar” or “Dear Atticus.” That is when I realized that the response system was either completely automated or entirely staffed by the very young. I am keeping the Hollywood names for the narrative of DNA USA, although I have offered volunteers the chance to reveal their true identity should they wish to do so. And many did.
I had known “Margo Channing” for several years, having met her on one of the society’s many organized visits to the UK. It was through “Margo” that I had first been introduced to the society when I gave a lecture at one of its annual meetings ten years ago. That was when the use of DNA in genealogy was in its early infancy, and I think it may well have been the first time a genealogy society anywhere in the world had ever had a talk from a geneticist. And it was “Margo” who had made sure that the society welcomed me on this present visit. So she was the first of my volunteers or “victims”—as they began to refer to themselves as the week progressed. Like many of the society’s members and all of my volunteers, she had been researching her New England ancestors for many years. This had taken her back to England, where she had found several families related to ancestors she had tracked through the records as having arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century. I had worked with her on some of these and confirmed a DNA connection for a couple of them. It was a pleasure to meet with “Margo” again a decade after our first encounter, looking as young as ever, and with the same razor-sharp mind behind penetrating bright blue eyes. “Margo” settled into one of the society’s most comfortable chairs.
She began immediately with a detailed recitation of her New England ancestry. This she did entirely without notes, just like the Celtic seannachies I had heard about in the Scottish Highlands, whose job it was to recite the lineage of any new clan chief on his appointment. Though of course “Margo” had composed this history from detailed written records, she knew it by heart. To me it sounded very complicated, full of unfamiliar names, but to “Margo” it was second nature. I was at risk of being swamped with information, and I was very glad I had brought my voice recorder so I could disentangle it later at leisure. This became a frequent experience with all my volunteers from the society, and throughout the trip. I just could not pay full attention and take good notes at the same time.
“Margo” told me that her paternal grandmother had several Mayflower lines, so she was multiply qualified for membership of one of America’s most exclusive clubs, the Mayflower Society, founded in 1897 and restricted to descendants of the Pilgrims who sailed from England and arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. Her maternal grandmother, who was a Bigelow—another famous New England name—before she married was herself descended from Christopher Todd, who arrived in New Haven in 1637 with the Davenport company. An ancestor of “Margo”’s maternal grandfather was Thomas Savage, whose daughter Mary had married Capt. John Crocker, master of the Cambridge, who, “Margo” was once told, had a wife in every port. She is now on the track of this disreputable relative and is checking through port books in London and Boston to track his movements. Another of “Margo”’s ancestors was Anne Marbury Hutchinson, who made herself very unpopular with the Massachusetts Bay Company by teaching Scripture in her own home, so much so that she was told to go and join the renegade colony of Rhode Island. I felt myself embraced by New England history, recounted in living detail by someone whose ancestors had been here for a very long time indeed. The details were not so important as the experience of listening to the stories of lives lived long ago, told with such intimacy that “Margo” could have been talking about her relatives down the street.
One of “Margo”’s ancestors in particular caught my attention. Nicholas Meriwether had arrived in the Virginia Colony in the 1650s, but there was no information on his own father who was, presumably, from England. I had read about the Lewis and Clark expedition across America in the early 1800s and remembered that Captain Lewis’s first name was Meriwether, with the same unusual spelling as “Margo”’s ancestor, so I asked her if she knew whether he was a relative. She had been unable to make the connection to Captain Lewis, but she did know all about him, naturally. He had been born in Albemarle County, Virginia in 1774, and the Meriwether name came from his mother, Lucy. His father’s mother was also a Meriwether from the same valley. He died unmarried and, by “Margo”’s account, unappreciated. Although he became governor of the Louisiana Territory, he came in for a lot of criticism from the U.S. Congress at the time partly because he had built up large debts and partly because he had been very slow in filing his expedition reports to Congress. He did not die a hero’s death but met his end, either by suicide or murder, in a Mississippi boardinghouse on the notoriously lawless Natchez Trace in 1809. (There had been plans to exhume his body to solve what had become a classic historical mystery, but early permissions to do so had recently been rescinded.) One of the
fascinating anecdotes about Meriwether Lewis that “Margo” had at her fingertips was that among the medicines he had taken with him on the historic expedition across America was a colonic purge containing mercury. This bizarre fact was being used to locate the precise sites of his camps through traces of the metal in the soil.
“Margo” then told me that she had become involved in a DNA study of the Meriwether name. More than that, she had brought a summary of the results with her, which she proceeded to pull from the folder in her bag. I am glad to say that I am still close enough to the details of Y chromosome lab results to be able to read those charts and pick out unusual features. There were “Meriwethers,” “Merewethers,” “Merryweathers,” and a few other spelling variations. When I looked at the Merryweathers, there were several different Y chromosome signatures, indicative of separate founders of the name. This is not surprising given that the spelling makes its meaning clear and would likely have been chosen by several men in England when the name became hereditary around 1300. I then looked through the table of DNA results for the Meriwethers who had volunteered. Unlike the Merryweathers, all thirteen Meriwethers had exactly the same Y-chromosome profile at every single marker. This had to mean that, unlike their more populist namesakes, the Meriwethers were descended from one man in the United States. Unfortunately there were no English Meriwethers in the panel of volunteers for the simple reason that none could be found. The only Meriwether left alive in England was an elderly woman with no surviving male relatives: The name has almost daughtered out. “Margo” experienced a flurry of excitement a few years ago when she discovered the birth certificate of a Nicholas Meriwether who had been born in London only a few years previously. The thrill quickly evaporated when she discovered that he was the son of Dr. Will Meriwether, past president of the Meriwether Society, who had been working in England at the time. The search continues. The consistency of the genetic results means, I think, that all the American Meriwethers, whether tested or not, are descended from Nicholas. Or if not from him, then one of his English relatives on a different ship.
After seeing that all the Meriwether Y-chromosome profiles were the same, I began to look at the detailed results at each of the markers. It was clear that they all belonged to the clan of Oisin (pronounced O’Sheen), which I named after the mythical Irish hero but which is also known, much more prosaically, as haplogroup R1b. This is the most frequent clan in Britain and so I was very familiar with it. The clan links Celtic Britain with Iberia, from where Mesolithic maritime hunter-gatherers had moved north along the Atlantic seaboard to Brittany, in France, and on to western Britain and Ireland. However, this phase of ancestral migration took place at least six thousand years ago. Because this movement into Britain had been so early and so numerous, the descendants of these early Mesolithic Celts are the genetic bedrock of the whole of Britain, and this makes the clan of Oisin very numerous. So the detail of the Meriwether profile was very familiar as I read across the table of results. However, one result stood out and registered as unusual. The marker called 385 has two DNA segments and hence two separate results on the profile. In the clan of Oisin these are normally scored 11 and 14. But in the Meriwether Y chromosomes the first of these, called 385A, was 13 instead of 11.
I asked Richard to bring over my laptop, on which I had a lot of DNA data stored, and quickly looked up how many Oisin Y chromosomes had 11 at 385A and how many had 13. A quick scan of the last few months’ accumulated results from Oxford Ancestors customers (I had not used this marker in my academic research) showed that out of 1,285 Oisin Y chromosomes, more than eleven hundred had scored 11 at 385A compared with only fifteen who scored 13. So the Meriwether Y chromosome is not only completely consistent with that particular spelling of the surname, but also extremely rare. This means, in my opinion, that any Meriwether who also shares this Y-chromosome profile is almost certain to be a relative, even if the paper trail is incomplete. “Margo” was visibly excited by this piece of reasoning and promised to redouble her efforts to get hold of the Virginia relatives of Meriwether Lewis.
I had been so gripped by “Margo”’s accounts of her ancestry that I almost forgot to ask her for a DNA sample. She agreed, chose her pseudonym, and then prepared herself. Unlike the usual kind of DNA test that requires only a discreet cheek swab, chromosome painting needs a lot more DNA and asks for 15 ml of saliva. That doesn’t sound like much, but believe me it is a lot to summon up especially when put under pressure to perform. Having discovered that a sharp lemon candy stimulates the salivary glands, I had a supply at hand. Richard and I left “Margo” to it. Five minutes later we came back, capped the vial, mixed in a preservative, and the DNA sample was ready to send to the lab.
My next appointment was with “Atticus Finch,” who occupies a senior position at the society. As a child he had met Gregory Peck and was delighted to be named after his character in the 1962 movie To Kill a Mockingbird, for which Peck won the Academy Award. We met in his office overlooking Newbury Street toward a skyline dominated by the mirror-glass monolith of Boston’s tallest building, the John Hancock Tower. The tower commemorates, on a monumental scale, the memory of John Hancock, one of fifty-six signatories of the Declaration of Independence and the first governor of Massachusetts. In “Atticus Finch”’s office there was an altogether more intimate reminder of the great patriot—John Hancock’s yellow wingback chair. Newly restored to its original condition, it was a handsome and stylish reminder of the comfortable life enjoyed by some citizens in eighteenth-century Boston. There was only one place for my photograph of “Atticus Finch” and that was in the famous chair. (Only afterward did he tell me that this had been the first time he had sat in it.)
Like all my volunteers from the society, “Atticus Finch” knew an enormous amount about his long ancestry in the New World. It was dominated by English and Dutch immigrants, most of whom had arrived in America in the mid- to late-1600s. Among them was Cornelis van Slyke, born near Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1604. He was a carpenter and stonemason who had come to the Dutch colonies of New Netherlands in America as a thirty-year-old. There he was indentured to Kiliaen van Rensselaer on his farm near Albany, New York, on a fixed-term contract that included repaying the cost of his transatlantic passage. Cornelis prospered and in 1664 obtained a deed to land at Schenectady, farther up the Hudson River. This was Mohawk territory and Cornelis became a trusted intermediary between the Dutch settlers and the Indians. His skill as an interpreter and a negotiator was evidently appreciated on both sides as the Mohawks also gave Cornelis some land at Cohoes, a few miles down the Hudson from Schenectady.
It was during the course of this work that he met and married Ots-Toch, the daughter of a full-blooded Mohawk woman and a French woodsman and trader named Jacques Hertel. Hertel had been born in Normandy, France, in 1603 and had arrived in America in the 1620s, to live among the Huron. This was a time when France and England were battling for the province of Quebec, and Hertel, resolutely anti-British, tried to persuade the Indians not to trade with them. When Quebec was returned to French rule in 1632, Hertel was recruited by Samuel de Champlain, the explorer and and eventual lieutenant general of New France, sent by Cardinal Richelieu to improve relations with the Indians.
“Atticus Finch” believed himself to be a descendant of Ots-Toch, and according to the chart that he laid on the desk in front of us, she was his ninth great-grandmother. When she married Cornelis van Slyke and settled in the Dutch colony, she became one of the first documented cases of an Indian woman who had left her tribe to live with Europeans.
Ots-Toch became very well known in her time and smoothed relations between the early colonists and the Indians. “Atticus Finch”’s line of descent came through Cornelis van Slyke and Ots-Toch’s son, Jacques, and from there through six generations of Dutch and five generations of English Americans. His ancestry was a web of intersecting lines that went right back to the days before the Pilgrim fathers arrived in 1620—back to a time when Europeans and Indian
s were still feeling their way and 150 years before John Hancock put his signature, with a flourish, to the Declaration of Independence, sitting in the very chair from which “Atticus” had led me through this wonderful story.
The question on “Atticus”’s mind was whether he had inherited any of Ots-Toch’s DNA. I knew the chances were slim. There were twelve generations between Ots-Toch and “Atticus”’s, and thirteen between him and her mother, the full-blooded Mohawk. With, on average, a two-fold dilution at every generation there certainly wasn’t going to be much Indian DNA left in “Atticus.” I worked out that we might expect one two-thousandth of his DNA to be from Ots-Toch. And even that figure, as we have covered, is subject to enormous variation. The two champions of genetic genealogy, mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA, would have shown a clear result as they are not diluted by DNA exchanges. But neither of them would work with “Atticus”’s genealogy because, first, Ots-Toch was a woman and so did not have a Y chromosome to pass on, and second her mitochondrial line would not have gotten past her son, Jacques. As a man, he would not have passed his mitochondrial DNA to his daughter, Lydia van Slyke, who was “Atticus”’s ancestor. So the only chance of finding a genetic link was through testing his entire genome and looking for any tiny remnants of Native American DNA that had survived in his ancestors. It was always going to be a long shot, but well worth a go. In no time “Atticus”’s DNA was on its way to the lab.
