DNA Fingerprinting to Discover Your Ancestors

How to Test Your DNA for Family History and Interpret the Results of a DNA Ancestry Test

By Donald N. Yates

Chapter 1: Strange Genes in the Hills of Appalachia

      Albert Einstein was at a dinner party in Princeton, New Jersey, where he held a position at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies during the 1950s. Among the scientific world’s glitterati, the conversation turned to the physicist’s recent comment that God did not play at dice. The universe was not entirely the result of random chance. Was God then evil that so many events in our lives seem as if they come from bad luck? “The good Lord is not malicious,” Einstein laughed, “but watch out! He’s cagey.” Something similar can be said of DNA. It does not lie, but it is often rather oblique. It may be that even geneticists – the scientists dedicated to unraveling its mysteries – are only at the beginning of understanding how it can make us smarter, or taller, or more artistic, or better at math, or prone to certain diseases, or able to excel at running long distances. The 6- billion-marker-long map of our genes from the Human Genome Project was completed just a few years ago. It is still a matter of dispute exactly what a gene is in the first place. How can the layman fathom the intricacies and ever-changing revelations of such a field? It is like trying to know the mind of God.

      As with most people, I had a very rudimentary, not to say non-existent, knowledge of genes and genetics. I had only a passing interest in genealogy, which I considered was “for the birds.” And then, out of the blue, I got an email from Elizabeth Hirschman, a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, just down the road from Einstein’s old haunts. I’ll never forget the subject line: “Cooper Ethnicity?” As it turns out, Beth is a distant cousin. She like me is descended from a Kentucky pioneer named Isaac Cooper, whose grandfather William Cooper acted as guide and scout for Daniel Boone, and whose descendants intermarried with the Choctaw and Cherokee Indians. Was I aware that those pioneer Coopers were Melungeons, part of that rare Appalachian ethnic group? We went over how we were related. Isaac Cooper married a daughter of Cherokee chief Black Fox, so we shared a Cherokee heritage. Did I know where the Coopers came from? Was I ever told they were Jewish? Did I have a male Cooper uncle or cousin of my mother, Bessie Cooper, whom she could test with DNA to confirm it?

      I knew at once it was true. There was no question in my mind. It hit me like a thunderbolt. In a heartbeat, my newfound identity settled on me as something wonderful and comfortable at the same time. Despite the saying that nature does not like sudden leaps, I took in one breath as a Scots-Irish-part-Cherokee Southern Baptist and exhaled as a Jew. It was time for me to lock my office door and go home. My wife Teresa was waiting in the parking lot. I threw my briefcase and a pile of library books in the back seat of our Camry and said, “Guess what, Babe. We’re Jewish...at least, I am.” I filled her in on Cousin Beth’s email and the Melungeons. My wife and I are cousins, too, so it seemed in the heady shock of recognition that her family must be Jewish as well. Little did I know what the immediate effect was for her. A passage from a diary she kept during these times illustrates how one man’s mead can be another man’s poison:

      I wanted to go back to before I had got in the car, before I had left our Low Country home in the pinelands. If I could just retrace my steps backwards to that safe haven of innocence! He had to be wrong. He must be wrong. Either that or I have to discover a way to make this unimportant.

      “Melungeons are Sephardic Jews! My people are Jewish! We are Jewish! Your Rameys, my Coopers, most of the other lines.”

      This was too, too much. Now in my forties I find I am Jewish? I thought, “I can ignore this,” and I did. 

Bessie Louise (Cooper) Yates, born 1918 on Sand Mountain, Alabama.

      The Melungeons are what anthropologists at first termed a tri-racial isolate and what the ordinary person today might call people of color. They form a remote, intricately inbred population separated by geography or topography from their neighbors, and their genetic background is mixed, exactly how mixed varies on a case-by-case basis. Their largest concentration lies in the rural, mountainous intersection of eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, and southern West Virginia.  Other Melungeon communities are found in southern Ohio (Mt. Carmel Indians), central Tennessee near Chattanooga (Graysville Melungeons) and Sand Mountain, Alabama (where my mother’s family was from). Estimates of the size of the Melungeon population range from 50,000 to more than 250,000. They constitute a not-insignificant ingredient in the American melting pot. Typical surnames have been identified (Cooper among them), and certain medical conditions noticed, for instance, familial Mediterranean fever, an inflammatory disorder passed down in families coming originally from countries around the Mediterranean Sea. The word Melungeon could be French (“mixture”), Turkish (“accursed souls”), the name of an Angolan tribe Malunjin, or malungu, a Portuguese-African term meaning “shipmate.” Theories abound. By all accounts, these enigmatic people were discovered already in place when the first English settlers crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains into the interior of North America. John Sevier, later governor of Tennessee, was one of these intruders into Indian Country along with the pioneer Daniel Boone, long hunters like Elisha Walden and Daniel Blevins, and James Adair, the Carolina Indian trader who wrote History of the American Indians. Sevier described a mysterious white mountain-dwelling people with guns, a community bell and all the appurtenances of settled living. They spoke an unfamiliar tongue and were unusually suspicious of strangers.

      Were they the remnants of a Portuguese colony? Shipwrecked Moors? Phoenicians? Welshmen? Some sort of “white Indian” tribe? Runaway slaves? Whoever they were, and wherever they came from, it is clear they do not enjoy a very savory reputation. The first recorded use of the word “Melungeon” occurs in the minutes of the Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia, in 1813. One of the members, Sister Kitchen, accuses another of harboring “them Melungins.” Nashville journalist Will Allen Dromgoole, a descendant of Scottish Indian trader Alexander Dromgoole and Cherokee chief Doublehead’s daughter Nanny the Pain, catapulted the Melungeons into public awareness with a series of newspaper articles in the 1890s. She paints a lurid picture:

      Their complexion is a reddish-brown, totally unlike the Mulatto.... They are not at all like the Tennessee mountaineer, either in appearance or characteristics.... The Malungeons are filthy, their home is filthy. They are rogues, nature, “born rogues,” close, suspicious, inhospitable, untruthful, cowardly, and, to use their own word, “sneaky.” In many things they resemble the negro. They are exceedingly immoral, yet are great shouters and advocates of religion.”

      Insult turned to injury with Walter A. Plecker, director of Virginia’s department of vital and health statistics. Appointing himself keeper of the Old Dominion’s racial purity policies, and practicing a sort of “paper genocide,” Plecker treated Melungeons as mixed bloods trying to pass illegally as white. He kept lists of surnames (including Cooper) and branded those bearing these surnames “mongrels.” The state accordingly denied many of these people the right to vote or attend school. Melungeon families ended up going under cover, some destroying their birth certificates in a strategy to conceal their origins. Likely, they tended to stop telling their children the truth of who they were as well. When my mother entered Berry College in Georgia, her father J. W. M. (Dolph) Cooper of Sand Mountain, Alabama, swore an affidavit that she had no birth certificate. Plecker’s reign of terror lasted thirty years, from 1912 to 1942.

      At this point, many readers are probably wondering why if these people were so despised and persecuted would anybody want to own up to being one of them. Remarkably, there are thousands today who cherish the idea. Popular and scientific interest in the Melungeons was revived in 1994 with the publication of Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People by N. Brent Kennedy. Born in the Melungeon heartland in Wise, Virginia, with an extra digit on his hands (removed at birth -- a rare genetic trait known elsewhere in the Appalachians, also in regions of Turkey), he went on to recover from a near-fatal attack of familial Mediterranean fever. Brent began investigating his own ancestry in order to discover how “a Scotch-Irish white boy could get a Mediterranean-Jewish-Arab disease,” especially one requiring the presence of a recessive gene on both his mother’s and father’s side.  Kennedy’s decidedly “non-white boy” appearance, as well as those of his parents, cousins and some of the neighbors, together with his discovery of falsified family records claiming “white” ancestry, led him to speculate that he was, in fact, of Melungeon descent. His book sparked awakenings by many others. A whole new generation who had gone to bed white, woke up to find themselves brown, according to Elizabeth Hirschman. “And what was (possibly) more troubling,” she writes, “having gone to bed Christian, they awoke to find themselves having potentially Jewish or Muslim ancestry along with hereditary Jewish and Muslim diseases . . . The seemingly quaint practices of their grandparents – for instance, naming children Mecca, Omar, Menorah and Alzina, discarding eggs with blood spots, avoiding pork, and thoroughly washing and salting all other meats – took on an ominous new meaning.”

      The first attempt to define Melungeons with the contemporary tools of genetics was a study by English biologist Kevin Jones, working with the University of Virginia's College at Wise and University College in London in 2000. Sampling men and women regarded as part of a “core group” from Newmans Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee, the Jones survey found that Melungeons, on the face of it, and on average, were about 90% European, 5% Native American and 5% African – not much different from the surrounding population. This was not the whole story, though. Within the European lines of descent, “there is significant diversity, and some seem to reflect areas outside the traditional northern European sphere,” noted Jones. And according to the president of the Melungeon Heritage Association, Wayne Winkler, “The presence of Turkish and northern Indian haplotypes [descents] within the mitochondrial [female] DNA samples taken from modern-day Melungeons indicates that women of European/Asian origin were a part of the original mixture that made up the Melungeon ancestry.” One of the female lineages in Brent Kennedy’s family, for instance, proved to be of the N haplogroup (branch), the first out-of-Africa human beings, in his case tied possibly to India’s Dravidian people or maybe the Roma (Gypsies). This finding put to rest the assumption that European males, marooned Spanish and Portuguese sailors perhaps, took wives with Native Americans and African-Americans to produce the Melungeons. Since mitochondrial DNA is passed exclusively by mothers to their children, and only their daughters can continue to perpetuate the exact type, its presence meant that women formed part of the original nucleus of the settlement. The conclusion was that the Melungeons were a coherent, interbreeding population group, not just an ad hoc mix that happened to bubble up on the Tennessee frontier. They had a homeland – but where?

      The topic of Melungeons is nothing if not controversial. Some players in the still unfolding drama, even a number of whom might themselves be entitled to call themselves Melungeons, have rejected the very concept of Melungeons, maintaining Melungeons are one and the same with the predominantly Scots-Irish and English settlers of the surrounding region. Leading the charge for the non-believers is professional genealogist Virginia E. DeMarce, who released a scathing review of Kennedy’s book in 1996. DeMarce assembled details from courthouse and other public records showing that the Goins, Gibson, Collins, Chavis, Riddle, Bunch and other surnames identified as Melungeon were actually surnames borne by mulattos, taxed Indians or just plain white persons moving to the frontier from the coastal settlements in Virginia and North Carolina. It remained for others to point out that the names, nevertheless, had an exotic element. Chavis, for instance, plainly came from the common Sephardic Jewish surname Chavez, derived from the name of a town in Portugal. Casteel probably originated with a native of Castile in Spain. Dula was the name of a Berber clan. Mozingo and Cumbow (Gumbo) were transparently African, perhaps Muslim. Hyatt and Elliott were Arabic, as was Mustain. Tolliver came from the Spanish word for blacksmith. Lopes was Portuguese for Spanish Lopez. Hendrix was Henriquez. Sephard meant ... well, Sephardic, and Moore .... well, Moor. The Kennedy name itself seemed to come from Turkish, designating someone connected with the “seat of the khan, or governor,” as in Candy, the capital of Crete (now Irakleion). There were yet other camps. Paul Heinegg, a retired engineer who has studied free African Americans for many years, believes the Melungeons are examples of early colonial blacks who were able to marry white women and own land in a day before discrimination. Eloy Gallegos and Manuel Mira both have written books tracing Melungeons to the Portuguese colonists of St. Elena (a sixteenth-century fort near Beaufort, South Carolina). Adam Eterovich has argued they were Croatians. Theories about Melungeons are all over the place. Like invisible ink, the Melungeon disappear in the act of being written down and defined.

      Whether carried out professionally or conceived as an amateur DNA project, the Jones study and all others have been limited in one important respect. Only the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA perspective has been represented. The strict male and strict female lines are by no means the only ones in a family tree. Conventional DNA tests don’t tell us anything, for instance, about our mother’s father or father’s mother. If you go back ten generations, you have more than a thousand distinct lines. The science of genetic genealogy can target only two of those. Only recently has it become feasible to pry loose answers regarding all the in-between and hidden lines, to say nothing of gaining a picture of overall ethnic background. Autosomal (non-sex-related) tests can look at markers scattered across a person’s entire genome. These procedures can estimate your total probable ancestral composition. They have expanded our picture of the human genetic past by leaps and bounds.

      It was time to try the emerging technology on the mystery of the Melungeons. Hoping to succeed where others had failed, Beth Hirschman and I applied the new DNA fingerprint test to a small sample of self-identifying Melungeons. Like all the other tests, the DNA fingerprint uses polymerase chain reaction chemistry to amplify a cheek-swab specimen produced by rubbing something like a Q-tip against the inside of your cheek and collecting buccal (pronounced “buckle”) cells. The swabs are usually collected at home and sent back by mail to the lab. Technicians (in this case, the staff of Sorenson Genomics in Salt Lake City, Utah) then extract your DNA. They pipette a microscopic dot of it in wells on the tray of an automated multiplex machine. The gels they harvest after a few weeks yield a blown-up barcode of nuclear-level information in which they can pick out individual variations. In this test, the markers are not sites on the Y chromosome in the strict male line or a signature in the mitochondrial DNA of an ancient female lineage, but the time-honored locations used by forensic scientists to obtain a genetic identity profile and investigate crime scene evidence. Most of us are familiar with these Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) markers from television police shows. In a revolutionary application of these markers to ancestry, an individual’s profile is put through two population databases, one for world matches (OmniPop) and another for European-specific matches (ENFSI). A strong match with any population (say, France/Toulouse or Greek Cypriot or Apache) reflects the likelihood that you have ancestors from that part of the world. The DNA fingerprint test excels at finding small degrees of admixture and was perfect for our Melungeon survey. By evaluating the top matches for our control group, we believed we might arrive at an overall ethnic profile for Melungeons, one showing what countries and parts of the world their ancestors tended to come from and roughly how much admixture they had from Native Americans and Africans.

      All of our Melungeon volunteers had exclusively south central Appalachian ancestry over the past five generations and a surname from the list published in Brent Kennedy’s book. Brent and his brother Richard both gave samples, as did our two extended families. Having siblings, parents, children, aunts, uncles and others, we decided, would help validate the methodology. More than one participant was a repeat from the Jones study. Most were prominent in the Melungeon awareness movement. Wayne Winkler, the president of the Melungeon Heritage Association, joined the project, as did Nancy Sparks Morrison, founder of a Melungeon health information service on the Internet.

      At a minimum, analysis of the data overturns any notion that Melungeons are ethnically non-diverse from the surrounding population or even among themselves. Melungeons are distinct and diversified. Their most striking features are elevated Jewish, Middle Eastern, Native American, Sub-Saharan African and Iberian ancestry. All but two of the Melungeons in the study have a match with a Sephardic Jewish population as defined by the forensic team of Antonia Picornell. All have very strong to moderate Middle Eastern matches. One participant has high matches with every Middle Eastern population included in our database. Another Melungeon has Saudi Arabia at the top and Yemeni in second position. For both, likely ancestral places of origin are uniformly distributed throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan, while Northern Europe is, to a greater or lesser degree, de-emphasized, browned out in the colors of the map. This graphically illustrates the fact that Melungeon ethnicity on an average is more Mediterranean and “browner” than that of their overwhelmingly Northern European neighbors. DNA brings out the difference like night and day – or rather, olive and white.

      The Kennedy brothers emerge with what might be termed an Ashkenazic Jewish pattern. Of course, as outlined by Brent Kennedy in his book, they have a “family origin story” suggesting the possibility of Jewish ancestors, but it was confirmed only in the past few years through genealogical research. Again, DNA seems to reveal a hidden truth that no amount of paper-driven research could prove. Genes give the lie to genealogy. Indeed, Beth Hirschman’s own pedigree on the face of it is the same as the illustrious Maryland Chases according to all the family histories and reunions over the years. Finding out that the Chase connection had been manufactured to dodge racial prejudice and safeguard appearances launched her on her journey toward discovering her true identity.

A Melungeon’s matches shows Jewish ancestry with green diamond located in Israel. Red denotes absence of ancestry.

Another Melungeon’s matches indicate possibly Muslim ancestry. Note all the Middle Eastern matches in green with only a medium match with Jews (brown diamond in Israel).

      Native American matches appear in the profiles of all Melungeons, according to our study. They are dominant in my own, Athabaskan Alaskan being No. 1, and ten out of twenty falling into the category. In my case, most of Northern Europe is, again, browned out. Also, as it happens, most of the Middle East is extinguished, the exception being the Jewish match lit up in Israel. When I learned of these matches, it meshed with my own understanding of my genealogy. In the study, the Native American Lumbee population of North Carolina registered as the top match for three Melungeons and in second place for one other. It appeared somewhere in the lineup of one-fourth of all the participants. The Lumbee are often compared to Melungeons because of their mixed ancestry, marginalized history and unusual customs and traditions. Notably, however, none of the participants identified as Lumbee. It seems clear Lumbees are a population related to the Melungeons, but not overlapping with them.

My own matches include hits on three-quarters of total Native American populations/tribes in North America.

      Like Native American and Middle Eastern ancestry, Sub-Saharan African roots are an important part of what it means to be Melungeon. Certain families such as the Goins, Collins and Driggers were either rumored to be black or part-black in origin or confessed as much themselves. African matches had a strong showing in two-thirds of the group studied by us. Sub-Saharan African appears to be the overriding ancestry in at least two (although remember that matches cannot be equated with percentages). One of these, a Goins descendant, belonged to one of the “core” Melungeon families. Yet some Melungeons do not appear to have any indication of Sub-Saharan African heritage whatever. Based on our limited sample, Sub-Saharan ancestry seems to be common, but not universal. Overall, the amount of admixture for both ethnicities is about the same as in the Jones study – 5% Sub-Saharan African and 5% Native American.

      Going together with these findings is a markedly low incidence of ancestry from England. This phenomenon can be glimpsed in the browning out of dots in Northwestern Europe. Matches to what the database labels “Caucasian American” are few and far between, as is appropriate for people of color. For some Melungeons, Sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern, or North African ancestry evidently replaces Caucasian as the salient component of their ethnicity on a genetic level . . . manifestly also in the eyes of their neighbors. Non-English looks combined with an affinity for Scottish, Irish and other minority cultures would have sealed their fate at the hands of an English majority population around them.

      The lack of English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh forebears is particularly obvious in Wayne Winkler’s case. He seems to exhibit a Romani (Gypsy) pattern of distribution with supporting South Asian matches. According to population genetics studies, the Gypsies originated in India in the eleventh century as mercenaries in a sultan’s army. They cut a path across the Middle East to Constantinople. From Greece and Romania, they spread all over Europe.

A Goins participant’s Sub-Saharan African matches.

Wayne Winkler’s possibly Gypsy distribution.

      As proposed in much of the literature, Iberian ancestry outranks any other in Melungeons. Although it is something totally counter-intuitive, people who live in Kentucky and Tennessee and other Appalachian locations have a lot of Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American and Hispanic genes in them. One-third of our Melungeons emphasized these ethnicities in their overall makeup. This fits well with the abundance of Spanish and Portuguese surnames among Melungeon families. The modal, or most common, response in the study is Andalusia in the South of Spain, a strongly Arab part of the country and last refuge of the Moors. Berber is another ethnicity that provides a common thread in Melungeon identity, and this was also borne out by the study. Moroccan and related North African populations are found at the top in several of our participants’ profiles. Recall that some of the surnames regarded as Melungeon are Berber: about fifteen percent of all Sephardic Jewish surnames are, too. The high Berber element seems related to Andalusian ancestry, since following the conquest of Spain by Berber armies in 710, Andalusia became their stronghold.

      Several other countries cropping up in the profiles are Turkey, Croatia, Serbia, Greece, Bosnia, Slovenia, Italy, and Poland—some of which we have seen in the theses of books explaining Melungeon origins. Except for Poland, all these lie within the Mediterranean genetic orbit. What is more remarkable is that places like Livorno and Venice, Italy; Thessaloniki, Greece; and Izmir and Constantinople, Turkey were way-stations in the diaspora of Sephardic Jews after the explusion from Spain in 1492 and increasingly vindictive measures of the Spanish Inquisition. Florida Atlantic University sociologist Abraham Lavender believes this distribution of DNA reflects the very footsteps of Jews fleeing persecution during the modern era, although he also raises the possibility that it represents a far more ancient pattern of Jewish populations.

      What European countries emerge as important? Here again there are distinct peaks and valleys. France exhibits the highest number of matches, with the South (Toulouse) exceeding the North (Lille). Notably, southern France experienced a large population influx from Spain and North Africa during the Middle Ages. Scotland is not far behind, however, and in fact, on a basis combining the two sub-populations of these countries, wins the top spot. The Northeast (Dundee) greatly surpasses the Southwest (Glasgow). This is consistent with the thesis presented in our book When Scotland Was Jewish suggesting that there was a strong Sephardic/Moorish presence in northeastern Scotland following the Crusades. Melungeons seem to have far more Highland than Lowland kinsmen.

      

Leading European Ancestries for Melungeons.

      In sum, Melungeons apparently have primarily northeastern Scottish ancestry along with southern European elements such as Portuguese and southern French. They exhibit a lesser degree of solidarity with the northwestern European countries adjacent to Scotland -- England/Wales, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Denmark -- neighbors that might be expected to figure more prominently in their mix. Whenever such an anomaly occurs, it must be the result of more than simply a process of the expansion and blending of peoples. Borders and barriers become less open and more fixed. Some deep-seated aversion can be suspected behind the trend. Notably, northern Scotland, especially Aberdeen, has had closer historical links with Poland and the Baltic than, say, England. Scotland traditionally seeks alliances with France, not England. It seems that the isolation of Melungeons began before they arrived in the future United States. They brought over to the Appalachians an essentially disparate and standoffish Highland Scottish culture. What they share physically are, of course, darker coloring of their skin, hair and eyes and more “exotic” looks. On the English frontier, these traits set them apart from northwestern Europeans and led to being stigmatized as “foreign,” “colored,” and “non-white.” Moreover, it is easy to imagine that most of the original Melungeon founding mothers and fathers were not Christian. Native Americans, Berbers and Sub-Saharan Africans would have held religious beliefs of an animistic form, likely invoking solar, lunar, water, earth, fire and seasonal deities and traditions. Arabic and Turkish-descended Melungeons probably shared Muslim traditions of a syncretistic blend of Sunni and Shi’ia theology. Iberian and Polish/Balkan Jews would likely have blended their Sephardic and Ashkenazic religious practices. And, if South Asians were present in the early Melungeon population, they probably contributed Hindu and Muslim religious traditions to the culture. Autosomal DNA clearly shows that Colonial North America – at least in the southeastern territory – was inhabited by a multi-ethnic, multi-religious population from its inception. There is an astonishing level of diversity buried in the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee.

      Let us end by returning to the beginning of DNA ancestry testing several years ago, when I received that email from Elizabeth Hirschman. “I should have known,” I said to her at the time, “with a grandmother named Palestine and an uncle named Josephus.” But why hadn’t my family told me of this? When I confronted my mother, she just said, “Well, what of it?” Teresa’s experience was similar. Her father admitted being made to wear a yarmulke as a little boy and having an aunt who sang in the synagogue. Wondrous artifacts and customs crept out of the closet now – a silver menorah, letters between two great-granduncles calling each other Jews, whispers of free loans from a “private bank” run by relatives . . . We were suddenly Jewish (as the title of a recent book has it) and ventured on a tour of Mickve Israel in Savannah where we met Rabbi Arnold Belzer. He knew about the Melungeons and had heard similar tales about crypto-Jewish, or secretly Jewish, families. “You can’t convert to Judaism,” he said. “You can only return.” He told us that when Bevis Marks Synagogue was built in London in 1703 (he was just then about leave on a trip to attend the 300^th anniversay, where the guest of honor was Prince Charles), Spanish and Portuguese crypto-Jews were returning to Judaism after as long as 400 years, after long periods of exile in the Netherlands, Greece and Italy, often after several generations of pretending to be French Huguenots. So we returned.

      The revelations of genetics often have a deep impact on people’s lives. Giving up the teaching profession, I ended up founding a DNA testing company, DNA Consulting. Few customers, I have noticed, turn their face from the results of a DNA test. Examples of those for whom it has been a life-altering event are much more common. Their testimony to the uncanny nature of DNA tests pours in on all sides. Fellow Melungeons are particularly grateful for answers to the longstanding questions in their lives. Richard Stewart in West Virginia writes, “I was always told that we were Scottish, English, Irish. Now I know I have more Southeastern Europe (Turkey) and Middle Eastern (Jewish) ancestry than I do in Northern Europe.” Julia Starnes, whose mother and father’s DNA happens to have a healthy dose of Middle Eastern in it, although they are fifth and sixth generation East Tennesseans, tells a Melungeon discussion board

      What I find personally interesting is that for seven years I have been studying dances of the Middle East, Spain, Turkey, and most recently India--following the Romani trail. I have a particular passion for the music and dance of the Turkish Romani. . . . It took very little for me to become attuned to the instrumentation and rhythms associated with the music of these countries . . . . Maybe I'm just being silly, but I feel that the Romani music especially speaks to my heart and soul. I feel that I perform at my best when picking music from the regions that are connected to my genetic (though not cultural) heritage.

Julia Starnes in dance costume.

Bowled over by consistently Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American matches, another member of the discussion boards wonders, “Ethically and legally, on a census or job form that asks for racial identity, should I now be filling out Hispanic instead of Caucasian?” Nancy Sparks Morrison, who runs the Melungeon Health discussion list, passes on story after story from those who have benefited from DNA by being better able to accept or manage their health. One Appalachian woman finally got her doctor to diagnose her with familial Mediterranean fever and prescribe the drug colchicine after bringing in an ancestry report demonstrating she probably had genetic forbears in Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean. The family practitioner knew very little about the disease before, except that it was confined to Jews and other Mediterranean people and was clinically insignificant in Tennessee.

      The opportunities to learn from DNA are especially rife for adopted children who do not know their biological parents or ethnic background. It is estimated as many as 15 percent of Americans are either adopted or descended from an adopted person. I will let one of these – or rather her adoptive sister – tell in their own words what taking a DNA test did for them.

      When Tina [not her real name] was given up for adoption, all information about her birth father was provided by her birth mother, who was Caucasian of Czechoslovakian/German heritage and stated the father was very light-skinned African American. The last dozen years or so, Tina has questioned her ethnicity. She has been asked repeatedly if she is African American, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Latin of various types, East Indian, Middle Eastern, Jewish, Greek, or Armenian. Some people have said she looks Russian, Native American Indian, Hawaiian or even Asian!

      Tina’s report showed Hispanic (Spanish/Portuguese) and Scottish/English/Welsh with Middle Eastern and American Indian admixture. Also, it said, there may be Slovenian/Polish/Gypsy . . . with a medium match to Sephardic Jews. There was no Sub-Saharan African or East Asian. Her deep ancestry was all Mediterranean, North African Arab and/or Berber, Portuguese and Middle Eastern. In my own ignorance, I had not realized that other groups of people also had her markedly curly hair. It was so much fun finding pictures of Berber/North African Arabs with my sister’s hair and nose.

      Tina is delighted with her Mediterranean and Middle Eastern roots. . . . She was not as surprised as I was. It is as if her spirit bore witness to the truth for years before this testing was even possible. It settled her. . . . It gives her a settled identity, not a presumed identity. It has opened my eyes to the beauty of many people in the world I had never paid attention to before.

      If DNA is a hobby, it is a serious one with far-reaching ramifications. It is not a quest that should be entered into lightly. The most fulfilling aspect of DNA testing for me personally and professionally is to see the effect it has in opening up an interest in other peoples and countries. By revealing the interrelatedness of us all, DNA can not only give new meaning to self-identity but also be a potent force in fostering tolerance and peace around the world. And now let us proceed to a description of the tests available today, with some practical hints on how to start your own genetic journey. Were we only able to read it all, DNA contains an entire library of information, including the lives of every ancestor in our family tree.

Terms to Know

admixture – a minor constituent of your ethnic mix, resulting from one or more of your ancestors marrying out of their group.

Appalachia – a broad region in the eastern United States defined by the chain of mountains of the same name, which stretches from New York State in a southwestern direction to north Alabama. Aside from these two states, it embraces parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. At its southern end, it comprises the Allegheny, Cumberland, Great Smoky, Blue Ridge and certain other mountain ranges, including Waldens Ridge, Sand Mountain and Lookout Mountain. Socially. culturally and economically, the region is often viewed as impoverished and backward.

Ashkenazi Jews – the Jews of Eastern Europe, usually contrasted with Sephardic Jews.

cheek swab – the basis of every home DNA test. It involves rubbing a Q-tip-like wand inside your mouth to collect cells from which DNA can be extracted.

crypto-Jewish – practicing Judaism secretly or privately but not openly or publicly

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid ) - the chemical inside the nucleus of every cell in our bodies that carries the genetic instructions for making living organisms and regulating their metabolism.

ethnicity – one’s country or people of origin, a term that replaces race in “politically correct” usage, with socially conventional, legal, governmental, historical, genetic and medical definitions varying widely.

gene - the functional and physical unit of heredity passed from parent to offspring. Genes are pieces of DNA, and most genes contain the information for making a specific protein. – National Institutes of Health “Talking Glossary”

genetics – study of genes and heredity, a branch of biology and the life sciences.

genomics laboratory – a commercial or educational research organization where scientists process DNA for a wide variety of customers and purposes.

Human Genome Project – ambitious initiative of the 1990s to map in chemical terms all 6 billion locations on human DNA strands with the aim of conquering disease.

Melungeon – a central to lower Appalachian ethnic group that may pre-date English settlers in the region. The word has not been satisfactorily explained.

Middle East (British usage, Near East) – that part of the world conventionally defined as ranging from Turkey, Syria, Israel, Arabia and Egypt in the west to Afghanistan in the east, including Iraq and Iran. Sometimes, the concept embraces North African countries like Libya and Morocco so the approximate meaning is Islamic countries.

Native American (American Indian) – “a descendant of any of the original peoples of North America” – U.S. Federal Code.

population genetics – study of the changing structure and genetic characteristics that define self-contained human populations throughout history and pre-history.

sample – a small representative portion of blood, tissue or body cells collected for testing. In statistics, a cross-section.

Reading and Resources

Lisa Alther, Kinfolks: Falling off the Family Tree. The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors. New York: Arcade, 2007. 25.00.

DeMarce, Virginia E., review of The Melungeons: Resurrection of a Proud People by N. Brent Kennedy, in National Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 84 (1996) pp. 134-149.

DNAcommunities.com. Discussion boards for those who have taken autosomal DNA ancestry tests.

Elizabeth C. Hirschman, The Melungeons: The Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2005. 19.00.

Radee P. Iovita and Theodore G. Schurr, “Reconstructing the Origins and Migrations of Diasporic Populations: the Case of European Gypsies,” in American Anthropologist, vol. 106/2 (2004) pp. 267-281.

Kevin Jones, Melungeon DNA Study. Paper presented at Fourth Union: A Gathering of Melungeons, June 15-17, 2002, Kingsport, Tennessee. Z-wire article

N. Brent Kennedy, with Robyn Vaughan Kennedy, The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1994. 17.95.

Barbara Kessel, Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots (Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture and Life). Waltham: Brandeis, 2007. 15.95.

Melungeons.com. Regularly appearing feature articles published by Helen Campbell.

MelungeonHealth.org. Information about the major Mediterranean illnesses that are inherited through Melungeon ancestry. Website managed by Nancy Sparks Morrison.

Antonia Picornell et al., “Jewish population genetic data in 20 polymorphic loci,” in Forensic Science International, vol. 125 (2004) pp. 52-8.

Wayne Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004. 19.00.