Cowards Die Many Times

by Peter Hey

  Her excuse was that she hadn’t got round to having her own DNA analyzed yet. Initially she’d dismissed it as only useful for giving an ancestral ethnicity profile. It might be fun to be told she was 60% English, 25% Scottish/Irish, 10% Scandinavian and 5% Sherpa, but she’d heard the results were of questionable accuracy, with different companies giving different breakdowns when presented with the same genetic material. Nonetheless, this aspect of the test was what the advertising campaigns focused on and presumably was what had attracted Guy and his cousin.

  Jane had heard an increasing buzz about DNA, but had always assumed she could call on Tommy’s help if she needed it. It made her realise how much her business model relied on her friend. The more she now read, the more she began to appreciate DNA’s power for finding broken links or breaking through dead ends in a family tree.

  As Jane trawled other websites to delve deeper into the science it quickly became more opaque, a thick soup of chromosomes, autosomes, genes, alleles, chips, snips and centiMorgans. One forum article attempted to summarise the concepts.

  ‘I’ve been researching my family history since the s-l-o-w old days of whirring microfilm readers and having to travel to London to wade through names printed in real-life, physical index books. And yet, after all these years, I still haven’t found the link back to the blue blood that I know courses through my veins. Now I’m being told that DNA is the biggest thing in genealogy since the Internet. Sounds promising, but how does it work?

  ‘I’m no biologist – and huge apologies to any propeller heads reading this - but we’ve all heard of the “double helix” and the “blueprint of life”, right? We may also have heard that the human genome is made up of three billion “base pairs” of coded information that tells our cells how to develop and do the jobs our bodies need of them. We may know that 99.9% of that code is the same in every human being – or else we’d be chimpanzees, or bananas – but it’s the tiny differences or “mutations” that make us individuals with differing appearance, abilities, susceptibility to disease and so on. We certainly know that we inherit our DNA from our parents – who’s the father? Take a DNA test.

  ‘But when we’re researching our family tree, the question is more likely to be – who’s the great-great-great-grandfather? Then it gets a little more complicated.

  ‘First of all, let’s explain that there are different types of DNA you can have analyzed. Only men have a Y chromosome and its DNA is passed down on a strictly father-to-son basis, generation after generation after generation. There’s another type of DNA, I won’t bother you with its name (but it’s “mitochondrial”), which goes down the maternal line, pretty much back to Eve herself. So test both of those and you’ve covered everyone? Think again. They only cut narrow swathes through your ancestral past – every mother’s father and father’s mother doesn’t get a look in.

  ‘So the most popular type of test is the one which looks at the vast majority of our DNA, where we get 50% from dad and 50% from mum. (I just can’t stop myself giving you names – my mum and dad were Maggie and Jim and this DNA is called “autosomal”.) Okay, 50% from each, that makes sense. But which 50%? Nature deliberately splits it into chunks and jumbles it up in a process called “recombination”. For reasons of genetic diversity (think Darwin), siblings, other than identical twins, don’t get the same mix of DNA from their mother and father. If they did, all brothers and all sisters would look the same. Again, you knew that already.

  ‘Going back a generation, our parents also got 50% of their DNA from their dads and mums. So a quarter of our DNA comes from our grandparents? On average, yes, but because of that mixing up, we don’t necessarily get a full 25% from each of them; we might get more from some than others. The idea that little Kathryn favours Grandma may have a good scientific foundation. This is really important because it means it can be difficult to determine exactly how closely two people are related by the amount of DNA they share. The closer the relationship, the more confident the prediction can be. Also, some lines may fade away and become undetectable much sooner than others. Our DNA is the combination of a few hundred ancestors, but ultimately we have thousands upon thousands of forebears and only a small fraction can leave their genetic mark upon us. (But I sense my royal genes have fought their way through the pack.)

  ‘So how does one of these DNA genealogy tests work? You send in a sample, say of saliva, which contains cells from the inside of your mouth. It gets analyzed by some high-tech wizardry (a machine) that looks at sections of the genome known to contain individual variations. Obviously your great-great-great-grandfather is dead (I’m guessing) and won’t be submitting a sample any day soon. But one of his other descendants (your 4th cousin or 3rd cousin twice removed, etc., etc.) might have done. A computer compares your unique code sequences to all the others in its database. Significant areas of correspondence (measured in the delightfully named “centiMorgans”) suggest there is likely to be shared ancestry somewhere in the reasonably recent past, say up to eight generations back.

  ‘Okay, so the computer gives you a list of people to whom you’re probably related. All that mixing up means it doesn’t know what your relationship is; it just has a rough idea of how many degrees of generational separation are involved. It might take an educated guess you’re 3rd cousins for example. Then what? Well, if you’re lucky, your 3rd cousin will have a meticulously researched tree posted online and which takes you back to 1066 and William the Conqueror. Job done. Maybe. More likely, you’ll just have a set of names, often anonymised, and with variable amounts of family information attached, often none at all. And there’ll be a lot of these new cousins, like thousands. The computer will try to estimate how close you are to each one, but as we discussed above, it won’t always be right. Even if it does correctly predict you and ‘CHRIS355’ are descended from the same great-great-great-grandparents, the DNA data alone doesn’t reveal which.

  ‘That’s when the work, and the fun, begins. You need to employ strategies, like looking for common surnames, geographic locations, etc. to try to establish how you might be related to at least some of these people. If you can get other members of your family tested it will help. If your dad shares a match with you, it should be stronger as he’s a generation closer to the past, plus you can eliminate your mother’s half of your genetic background. And then you’ll find yourself getting in touch with new family, perhaps all over the world. Some of them will be keen genealogists who will have fresh insights and stories to share. Perhaps you’ve hit a brick wall in your tree that traditional methods can’t get through because people moved or the paper records are inconclusive or lost. But then you find you’re genetically related to someone and the only possible link means the wall comes tumbling down.

  ‘I’m a BIG convert. DNA testing is in no way a substitute for good old-fashioned family history research, but used in combination, the two together open up a new world of opportunities. I’ll prove I’ve got that royal blood yet.’

  Jane sat back and tried to digest everything she’d read. Guy and his cousin’s results would identify a long list of people with whom they shared DNA. Jane had to sift through the matches, researching their own lineage where necessary, to try to find a back-door connection to Thomas Ramsbottom.

  But what were the odds of finding someone?

  Perhaps the most important thing she’d discovered was that well over ten million people had now taken the same test as Guy, a large proportion of whom were in the USA. There was at least a chance she could unearth an American line of descent from Thomas and prove he didn’t die of typhus in that New York hospital.

  It sounded like it had the potential to be a lot of work, but Jane justified it on the basis of self-education: this was an embarrassing gap in the skill set of a professional genealogist. In truth, she knew there was another impulse at work. Thomas Ramsbottom was a slippery, slimy bottom-feeder of a man. She wasn’t ready to let him off the hook without trying everything she could to drag him from the de
pths of history and into the daylight.

  Shared code

  As predicted, there were thousands of people who had come up as matching some of Guy’s DNA, though the vast majority were classified as distant cousins whose shared ancestors should, with any luck, long predate Thomas Ramsbottom. That left over 300 3rd or 4th cousins who were in the right sort of range. Unfortunately, not all of them gave their real name or where they were from. And only a minority had a family tree attached that was extensive enough to go back to the 1870s. Establishing how most of these people were related to Guy would be a challenge.

  Top of the list of matches was Guy’s cousin, Betty, whom Jane had visited in Lancashire. Betty and Guy had the same grandfather but different grandmothers, so they were technically only half cousins. Unfortunately, they shared less than the average amount of DNA for that relationship and the computer suggested they were somewhat further apart. It was Jane’s first confirmation of the randomness of genetic inheritance.

  There were various ways of analyzing the results and Jane began finding her feet by searching for recognisable family names, starting with Ramsbottom and then broadening out. There were a few hits, mostly amongst the remoter cousins. Some of the individuals were or had been living in the United States in the last 150 years, but each one Jane looked at turned out to be a blind alley and she soon abandoned this approach. After all, one of her working assumptions was that Thomas disappeared from the records because he changed his name.

  There was an option to see which of Guy’s cousins shared DNA with each other and Jane quickly realised it could be the key to unravelling this particular puzzle. The fact that Betty and Guy did not have the same grandmother was actually a boon. If Jane focused on people to whom they were both genetically related, she would know she was on the Ramsbottom blood line, for two generations back at least.

  There were only a handful of profiles which came up as shared by both Guy and Betty without being too distantly related. Of those, several included at least some ancestral information and Jane busied herself working through them.

  She had started late and by midnight she felt like she was going all round the world getting nowhere. She had discovered one family cluster living in Australia and New Zealand and then found a woman who had moved to Hawaii but had actually been born in New York State. Jane’s hopes were raised and she eagerly traced the woman’s parents and grandparents only to discover she was descended from one of Thomas Ramsbottom’s nieces who had emigrated soon after the First World War.

  It was tantalising close, but not the answer Jane needed to find. Tiredness amplified disappointment into despondency. Jane suddenly felt drained and lost. This was a useless waste of time. She was useless for even trying. All the evidence said Thomas died when he got to New York. She could spend days or weeks working through all this data. But it would be just because of a stupid hunch that Thomas survived. It was a wild-goose chase to hold a deserting father to account, a stand-in for her own, a man who didn’t want her, didn’t love her, because she was an ugly, big-boned, unstable, useless lump. It was time to give up, give up for the day, maybe give up the pretence of being a genealogist altogether. She was a fraud and it was only a matter of time before she was found out.

  Jane eyes filled with tears and she clamped them shut. When they reluctantly reopened they caught a name towards the bottom of the screen. It was a match shared with Betty, but Jane had been ignoring it as it appeared to have nothing usable attached. It was just a name attached to a profile that had not logged in for over two years. But it was an intriguing name, nonetheless: Roxanne Wiser, it certainly sounded American. Jane wiped her face and breathed deeply. Maybe it was worth one last try.

  The name was also helpfully unusual. Jane soon found a Roxanne J Wiser living with her husband Frank in Minnesota in a 1990s’ phone directory. A US public records entry said she had previously been Roxanne J Arnold. That proved, however, not to be her birth name. The Minnesota divorce index said she and her first husband, David L Arnold, had parted company in the 1970s. She had entered the world as Roxanne Josette Armand in 1952 of an America father and a Swedish mother.

  Roxanne’s parents married in Montana and the record included the name of the groom’s father, Lewis (actually Louis) Joseph Armand and, significantly, the fact he was a Frenchman. Montana did not consider the groom’s mother’s full name worthy of note, but fortunately it was on her son’s social security record. Roxanne’s paternal grandmother was called Hilda Catherine Gish, hailing from Illinois. Hilda had not stayed married to Louis Armand for long, having different husbands on both the 1930 and 1940 federal censuses. But that information was mere colouring. What was important about Hilda was that she appeared on someone else’s online family tree. It proved to be the breakthrough Jane had been looking for.

  The woman who researched the tree, ‘L.Y.’ was a descendant of Hilda’s sister, Esther Mary Gish. Jane felt confident Guy and Betty did not share Roxanne Wiser’s French and Swedish blood. That suggested that, whilst L.Y. had not taken a DNA test herself, there was a strong likelihood she was also genetically related to the Ramsbottoms.

  Hilda and Esther’s father was Georg Giersch from Siebenbürgen, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but now Transylvania in Romania. Their British ancestry came from their mother, born Sarah Kathleen Ramsden in New York in 1874. Sarah was the daughter of Thomas Ramsden, an Englishman who appeared to have no traceable past before his marriage the year before.

  That was the year Thomas Ramsbottom sailed from Liverpool to America. The similarity in names was not lost on Jane. She felt sure L.Y. and Roxanne Wiser had to be descended from his second life in America. Jane had worked through most of the night but she had got her man.

  The hospital ward

  Thomas opened his eyes and was briefly disoriented. For two weeks he’d been in the fever ward, drifting in and out of consciousness, but his surroundings had changed. The wooden rafters that he stared at as they twisted and blurred had been replaced by a smooth plaster ceiling. And he could hear voices, people communicating not just coughing and groaning. Then he remembered being moved. His temperature no longer raged and they needed his bed. He also recalled being given something to help him sleep and, he was told, to ward off diarrhoea, whatever that was. He lifted himself onto his pillow. His muscles ached like he’d been hauling coal trucks all day, but the debilitating, draining weakness was gone. He looked about and felt a strange melancholy despite his recovering strength. It was a bright April day and the windows running the length of the left-hand wall had been raised, allowing fresh spring air to flood in and guard against the miasmas the chief physician still held responsible for much disease and illness. Curtains billowed in the cool breeze blowing off the Harlem River.

  Thomas pulled his sheets higher over his chest and surveyed the regimented lines of cots running down both sides of the long, white walled room. One or two were unoccupied, but most contained a man, either lying or sitting, occasionally in conversation with a neighbour or visitor, but mostly asleep or alone with their thoughts. At the far end, a cluster of uniformed orderlies and two doctors in fine suits were gathered around a patient. Their hushed words had the solemn tone of finality and impotence.

  Also watching the scene were a man and a woman standing by the bed next to Thomas. From behind, the man cut an intimidating figure. He was a little over normal height but as wide as he was tall, with unkempt reddish-brown locks streaked with white and grey. The woman was contrastingly delicate, sharing only the colouring, albeit without the trappings of age. She was wearing a rich-blue dress that reached to the floor, a checked shawl and her hair was tied back in a simple ponytail.

  The man turned first. He had a heavily lined brow, weary eyes and a battered nose, but beneath was a darkly extravagant beard that argued the vigour and strength of his youth had not deserted him. Seeing Thomas awake, he raised a hand in acknowledgement, but no smile was apparent beneath the whiskers. He spoke a name, ‘Mary’, and the girl follow
ed his voice and looked round.

  Thomas felt a tremor in his hands that could only partly be blamed on the after-effects of illness and medication. Mary was in her mid twenties and simply the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His world had been that of a small, isolated community where the faces were hardened by toil and largely interchangeable. He had heard of society belles and the alluring wives of rich men, but their orbit was far from his own. His experience of photography was restricted to formal studies of scowling families. He had visited an art gallery once in his life, but the women in the paintings were from a different age, remote and lifeless. This girl was real and breathing, a dream made flesh. But there was also a fragility about her, the quality of a porcelain doll.

  ‘You’re awake, darlin’. How are you feeling now?’ Her Irish lilt was all music and warmth.

  Thomas found himself involuntarily smoothing his matted blond hair. ‘Tired, but I think I must be much better.’

  ‘We’ve been wondering when you’d be back with us,’ she said conspiratorially, looking over her shoulder. ‘They seem to like the laudanum in here. It’s strong stuff, takes you away with the fairies. They had Patty on it for a while.’