DNA and genealogy

Genealogy is said to be an old lady's avocation. Granted, not every old lady fancies it but these days every family has some member working on the family's origins. And that someone is often as not an old lady.

In centuries past transatlantic and transpacific voyage was time consuming and expensive. In addition there was often a good reason the immigrant left the ancestral village and journeyed to America. The founding generation and generations of Americans up to the early 20C often sacrificed their relations with families and nation states in Europe and Asia. Black slaves were entirely dislocated from their lands of origin. So piecing together the transatlantic story generations later is frequently not possible using traditional genealogical tools. This is changing as a new tool becomes available.

Note that this matter of distant origins searching applies more to persons whose families arrived prior to WWI than to new arrivals. Since today's world affords almost universal availability of telephones, timely and dependable surface mail, near instantaneous electronic mail, digital photography, and relatively inexpensive, safe, and rapid transatlantic and transpacific travel new immigrants do not suffer the paradigm of familial and cultural dislocation and divorce to the same degree as immigrants of prior centuries. Today's immigrant arrives in America with intact family ties that are relatively easy to maintain. He or she is always cognizant of the ancestral origins, and is in possession of the mother culture. I think genealogy will be less important to future generations of our new immigrants. But our culture is changing and a Confucian sort of respect for ancestors and their stories might be on the increase. If nothing else it seems to help young people to know that older family members faced trials that they now face. Makes for good story telling, too.

It is probably fair to add that this nation was more of a mixing bowl in the past, and that it will be less so in the present and the future. Even the color of the mixture in the bowl is changing as a nation that was ninety per cent European in origin from its founding up to 1960 is now seventy per cent so and is expected to drop to less than half so by mid 21C. (Open and poorly enforced immigration policy, low white birth rate, widely available fertility control including abortion, and declining influence of authoritarian institutions opposed to these forces will see the face of America change a great deal in the first half of this century.) Since, except for the maximally dislocated Native American peoples, we are all the children of immigrants there is probably no cause for alarm. America possesses a wonderful constitution, a culture of decency and accomplishment, good governmental systems, honest civil servants and judiciary, effective educational practices and institutions, hard working labor and management, good health care practitioners and institutions, and the best Congress and Executive branch that money can buy.

Back to the DNA genealogy thought: things have changed for the better when it comes to those little old ladies searching out the family origins, whether these Americans trace their origins to immigrants who left Europe, Asia, or Africa as free persons, indentured servants, or slaves. New advances in the science of DNA analysis will go where no one has gone before. There is a family record encoded in each of our cells that will read like paper trail genealogy when accessed by current and future technology. Whereas paper trail genealogy provides three, four, maybe five generations of ancestors our own DNA tells us the timeline and routes of migration of our own (straight) paternal and maternal lines all the way back to Africa. Future refinements in the methodology might even help fill in the pedigree chart between the straight paternal and the straight maternal lines.

For now DNA analysis in genealogy aims more at affirming or refuting blood relationships near and distant, as well as pinpointing the ancestral land and the route taken by our paternal and maternal line ancestors out of Mother Africa to Europe or Asia or not out of Mother Africa to Europe or Asia but rather direct to USA. The analysis looks at mutations in sections of the Y chromosome, which is in the nucleus of the cell, and studies the little circle of DNA in the mitochondria, which are in the cytoplasm. These go back to the sperm and the egg and just as you would imagine tell a story of the father and the mother of the person tested, as well as the story of the father's father and the mother's mother and so forth and so on back tens of thousands of years. One can see a map of places through which the paternal line or maternal line traveled to get to hometown, USA. The analysis uses technical manipulations and jargon but should be reasonably understandable for most people willing to work at it. Easier to understand than the inner workings of a kitchen faucet and never need to fix it.

Commercially available DNA analysis of the male line (Y chromosome typing done on male supplied specimens) and of the female line (mitochondrial DNA typing done on either male or female supplied specimens) will tell the family's distant origins. Thus one might find that a family that traces to an 18C immigrant in Virginia or Pennsylvania thought to have come from German states actually has a paternal line that originated (in Europe, that is) in what is now the United Kingdom. A half million kits for this kind of analysis have been sold and the total number of persons in the data base is increasing at twenty per cent per year. Since most people supply their own earliest known origin and since there is a system of anonymous presentation of data and since there is also the acquisition of European samples, the matching process is becoming more refined and more likely valid. This is probably more suitable for passionate amateur genealogists, especially ones facing a gap in the paper trail or an otherwise insurmountable obstacle.

The cost of DNA analysis is equivalent to the cost of a fine meal for two. No one ever said information was cheap. Accessing the information encoded in one's own DNA would seem to be something that should cost more than the price of a good meal. Check out Family Tree DNA by Dr. Bennett Greenspan. I highly recommend his organization.

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