My husband’s DNA testing went so well that we decided to do the same for my father’s line — Frazier. Dad’s ancestor Alexander Frazier was a Highland Scot who arrived in 1765 in Maryland. That was all we knew and we wanted to know exactly where did his ancestors live. Were they members of Clan Fraser? Now after lots of testing we know only a little bit more.
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We’ve found few relatives for my Dad here in America. We’ve linked him genetically to a fur trader on the Monongahela who was friends with a young surveyor named George Washington, but we cannot find the names that fit neatly into a tree. That’s frustrating for us.
In Scotland we’ve found that Dad genetically matches with a few distant cousins with names like Ross and Matheson. They came from a remote region of northwestern Scotland — Loch Broom, in the Region of Ross and Cromarty. It was a region that lost warriors at Culloden.
In that region during the Highland Clearances, many of the poor were forcibly loaded onto ships and sent to America to make room for his lordship’s sheep. Can you imagine sheep being more important than people? No wonder the names and the family lines all got mixed up. It was a tumultuous time and I’m thankful they persevered.
We don’t know if we will ever be able to get much more than this and this took lots of study. However, we did learn a lot of history and even more reasons why America was the land of hope for so many.
Don Wallace in Bethel Twp. has been working with DNA testing since the early 1990s when it first began. Today he is the head of the Wallace Family DNA project with Family Tree DNA, which is based in Houston. He is involved with some marvelous new innovations that are taking the DNA testing back 1,000 years and beyond. This man was a wealth of knowledge on the subject and my head was spinning after we spoke.
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Yet he still had some good advice for the beginner.
“To most of us this is a recreation and we want to keep it light,” Wallace said. “Start with conventional genealogy then use DNA testing as a tool when you get stuck or reach a barrier.”
Wallace chose Family Tree DNA because of the security and privacy the company offered back when he began. He recommends that those seeking testing should check to see what safeguards the different companies offer today.
Speaking about the DNA testing that follows the father’s father’s line, he noted that “our society is surnamed based,” but that sometimes it’s difficult to genetically follow a family name back more than a few generations.
As I mentioned last week, adoptions, affairs, epidemics, abandonments, ship wrecks and any number of reasons can be behind people having last names different than we expect on branches of our genetic trees. There was a lot of living going on back then and it wasn’t always easy.
“All of a sudden last names don’t mean so much,” he said.
To the beginner he advises them to, “have fun and don’t take it too seriously.”
Park Layne resident Dixie Gergal has recently gotten the results of the testing she did with Ancestry, and she is quite pleased.
Turning to the DNA testing after running into a brick wall in regular genealogy research, she was able to confirm her research and get some answers.
“I’ve been working on one partial family tree branch for a number of years,” she said. “Now I have another cousin. It was a nice experience.”
Former Enon Community Historical Society President Marty Stover told me that she got a quick response from her genetic testing with 23 & Me. The results have just come in and she is trying to see how it works with the genealogy she has already done. She says it’s fun and she’s considering having testing by the three major companies to compare the results.
I think one of the more interesting things people discover with this is that we are all a mixture of different ethnic and geographic groups. Learning the history of how these groups interacted and how they got here is fascinating.
One man told me he always knew he was 100 percent from the British Isles, but when he was tested he found a small percentage of Italian and Mediterranean. That seemed odd until he was reminded that the Romans invaded and ruled Britain for 400 years. Evidently history is in our genes and won’t let us forget.
More than one person has told me of a Native American, African, Viking or Turkish branch to their genetic tree that surprised them. According to what Don Wallace told me, it is all just a part of the DNA genealogy world adventure and some folks have even found a bit of Neanderthal DNA.
DNA testing is proving to us all that the melting pot idea didn’t start in America. It’s been going on for hundreds and thousands of years. Checking our DNA is just a new way that we have to find out our own personal family recipe.
If you have something fascinating show up in your DNA testing, drop me a line at pamcottrel@gmail.com and we will do another column on this later in the year.
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