The New Englanders
Col. William Prescott, Bunker Hill Memorial, Boston, Massachusetts.
I realized at the start that this was going to be very different from all the genetics projects I had ever done. Previously, in my research into the genetic history of Polynesia, Europe in general, and most recently Britain and Ireland in particular, I had started with the presumption that I needed to study large numbers of people. Partly that was in order to satisfy the statisticians that guard the entry gates to respectable scientific journal publication and for whom nothing is true unless it is also statistically significant. They miss an awful lot. Second, I didn’t know from the start what was out there, and in limiting numbers I might have missed a vital genetic ingredient. This last point has turned out to be important, as I have been able to pick out the small proportion of people whose DNA seems completely out of place but which are the echoes of historical events. Events like the introduction of African slaves during the Roman occupation of Britain, or the Korean genes that have washed up on the shores of the North Atlantic. Very unusual DNA that might well have been missed in less substantial surveys. In America, however, this would have been impossible. It would have cost millions to use the same approach, and anyway would only replicate what others had already done. I also have to admit to being rather reluctant to write another genetic history along the same lines I had already followed in other parts of the world. Besides, there were issues I wanted to look into that would not have interested purely scientific publications.
The whole project began, in my own mind, to assume the character of the “last big job,” much as bank robbers are said to look forward to just one final payoff before hanging up their weapons. And always getting caught. For my “last big job” I decided on a completely different approach. Instead of the comprehensive and detailed planning that had gone into earlier research projects, I decided this one would be guided by chance events from the start: I would just see where they led. I think I might have been influenced by seeing Easy Rider again for the first time in years in which the characters played by Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, and Dennis Hopper wander aimlessly around the southwestern United States on their way to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Or maybe it was the image of “Shoeless Joe” Jackson materializing in the cornfields of Iowa in Phil Alden Robinson’s movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner. “If you build it, they will come.” Freed from having to please the stats police, since I had no need or ambition to publish elsewhere than in DNA USA, I would take it easy, travel around, and just see what happened.
Though I had been to America on many occasions I didn’t really have a sense of how big it really was. Like many Europeans, my experience had been more or less confined to the east and west coasts, with a couple of days in Chicago. Of course I knew it was big, but not how big. I knew it lay somewhere between the extremes of a country whose dimensions I was used to, namely Britain, and infinity. I didn’t have any real feeling for where America was on this scale. To put this right, I decided to travel coast to coast by train, at least in one direction.
My son, Richard, just eighteen, agreed to come with me for the first leg east to west. Of all my research assistants, both paid and unpaid, Richard has been on more DNA expeditions than any other, and from a very young age. He was only six years old when he came with me to Scotland and toured the blood donor clinics. He was twelve when we set off for a three-month tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Polynesia. This time I knew would be the last. He was about to leave home for college. The three weeks we would spend in America would be the last of many long adventures together, after which I knew things would never be quite the same again. On the return leg across America I would be joined by Ulla, whose natural effervescence was to prove invaluable when it came to recruiting volunteers.
I would like to say that we set off that September with the easy confidence and optimism that are essential for any road movie remake. But that was far from reality. When Richard and I arrived in Boston it was cold, gray, and pouring with rain. City rain—falling not with anger or finesse, but just dripping from the sky as though a damp gray sponge had been suspended from unseen pinnacles low across the city. The sullen drops fell languorously onto the metal window ledge of the downtown hotel, tapping out a monotonous rhythm in 4/4 time. The next morning it was still raining. The task I had set myself seemed overwhelming and without limit, mocking my conceit that I could ever tackle such a gargantuan undertaking as writing a genetic biography of the United States of America.
By the next day the skies had cleared, and Richard and I set off for our first appointment. We walked across Boston Common, past the lake, where weary boatmen propelled their swan boats brimful of visitors around a figure-eight course. The first colors of fall were touching the elm trees, their farthest leaves a pale yellow under a bright blue sky. The sun, by now well above the horizon, reflected off the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House near the top of Bunker Hill. We were heading for the affluent streets off Commonwealth Drive and the headquarters of the New England Historical Genealogy Society in Newbury Street, the oldest and best-known genealogy society in America. We passed shops that signaled the discreet wealth of the neighborhood: Chanel, Valentino, Diane von Furstenberg, past carefully choreographed climbing plants, their tendrils twined around iron railings. The headquarters building of the society had once been a bank and still retained the formal grandeur of its earlier life. Great bronze doors lay behind a cluster of clipped green bushes, their austerity mitigated by a Visitors Welcome sign. Inside we found ourselves in a large oak-paneled hall, a sumptuous chandelier dripping from the high ceiling, with books and portraits of early New Englanders lining the walls. If there was ever a place to immerse myself in this region and its people, 101 Newbury Street was it.
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 Indians 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.
Our meeting with “Terry Malloy” was to take place outside Boston, so Richard and I hired a car and set off for Cape Cod. That is where “Terry” had been born and raised and where, by the sound of it, all of his ancestors had lived since they arrived in the seventeenth century. I wanted to see, if only very briefly, the replica of the Mayflower anchored near Plymouth and the reconstruction of the original settlement, the Plimouth Plantation, which retains its original spelling. Plymouth is on the way to Cape Cod, so we took a day away from the comfortable elegance of the society headquarters and headed off down Interstate 93. So many of the historic sites in Boston had a very familiar feeling about them because, of course, they were originally English and resembled similarly preserved examples back home. However, this illusion of architectural familiarity lasted only until we hit the highway. Once we had turned off to the little town of Plymouth, it was almost as if we were visiting a prosperous part of southern England we had not seen before. Almost, but not quite, as the gray-painted wooden houses were rather too elegant, and wooden houses in England are unusual. Even so, we were wrapped in the warm blanket of familiarity as we pulled up for a cup of coffee on the main street. Any sense of home was soon shattered by a nearby placard. It read “Ammo Special 7.62×39. $350 a case. Assault Weapons in Stock”. We were not in a sleepy Devon town after all. We hurried past the Mayflower and the original Plymouth Rock beneath its protective cover, and on to Plimouth Plantation.
Despite my reservations about reconstructions I was impressed by Plimouth Plantation, where about thirty thatched wooden cottages lined two sides of a broad sandy street on a gentle slope heading toward the sea. Long tendrils of wild wisteria wound themselves around the green-leaved shrubs, and waving beds of cat-tail reeds lined the Eel River. Inside the cottages actors played the parts of the first settlers with immaculate conviction, never once betraying through language or action that they were anything but authentic colonists. I met the rather rakish Myles Standish, who told me he had come here from Holland, as he considered the Dutch too tolerant of Catholics. In another smoke-darkened interior Constance Snow was waiting for her husband to return from England, fearful that he may have been captured by French or Turkish pirates who preyed on the fragile transatlantic traffic supplying the colonies. In another, William Brewster explained how he he had been asked to conduct the daily services though he could not give the sacrament at Holy Communion as he was not ordained.
Far less convincing were the occupants of the reconstructed Wampmanoag homesite nearby. The bark-covered winter houses were just as interesting as the cottages but, by comparison to the enthusiastic role-playing by the English, the Indians, or “Native People” as a sign informed vistors they preferred to be known, were surly and reticent. The delicate relations between the two communities that I was to experience many times on my journey were already there in what was, after all, only a tourist destination, reinforced by notices asking visitors to avoid harmful stereotypes and not to ask any questions.
We pressed on toward Barnstable, where “Terry Malloy” and his wife had invited us for lunch. The woods grew thicker and the roads narrower. Enormous houses, mostly empty, stood back from the road. These, I later learned from “Terry,” were the summer residences of the wealthy who spent the rest of the year in Florida. A few lawnmowers hummed as retainers kept the grounds in shape ready for the return of the summer visitors from the South, but overall it was silent, beautiful, and forlorn. The sun dappled through the trees, already golden-leaved, and every now and then we could glimpse the ocean. Inlets crowded with yachts sealed up for the winter came and went as we passed Falmouth, Sandwich, and finally Barnstable, all seaside towns in England but here disposed in unfamiliar juxtaposition. After losing our way several times we eventually found “Terry”’s house, in deep woods a mile or so off the main road. This was not one of the empty shells we had passed on our way but a neat, lived-in, one-story home. As soon as we got out of the car I could hear unfamiliar birdcalls, rich and strange, coming from the dense canopy of pines. A bright golden yellow bird, a kind of finch I think, landed on a branch close by then darted back into the undergrowth. In bleak comparison, our goldfinch back home has just one yellow feather on each wing.
“Terry,” tall and lean with close-cropped gray hair, was waiting with his wife to greet us on the porch. Once inside, and seated comfortably in the living room, he began to tell me about Cape Cod, his ancestors, and himself. He was both laconic and content. “My life is not all that exciting,” were his opening words in a slow, gravelly voice. “Oh, really,” I thought to myself. He was retired now but had been an engineer, graduating from Brown University and specializing in electronic control systems. I was frankly dazzled by the projects he had worked on. Starting his career designing automatic pilots and instrument landing systems, he had graduated to control systems for supersonic wind tunnels, steel mills, submarine tankers, and radio-telescopes. “Submarine tankers?” I asked. “What are they?”
Pausing to collect his thoughts and take another sip of coffee, he recalled the project, now long abandoned, to load oil from the Alsakan fields at Prudhoe Bay onto huge submarines that would then travel under the ice to the North Atlantic and the east coast ports of America. It was to be, quite literally, a submarine Northwest Passage. The insuperable difficulty was not how to build these giants, but of transferring the oil, which had to be done underwater. To maintain depth the tanks had to be flooded with seawater as the oil was off-loaded, then flushed before taking on the next cargo. This simply could not be done without causing significant pollution, and, with the industry reeling from the Exxon Valdez disaster, the project was halted.
I could tell from the twinkle in his eye that “Terry”’s proudest achievement was his work on the radio telescope at Greenbank, Virginia. It had a diameter of 140 feet, yet had to be able to hold its position against the stars to within five seconds of arc as the earth rotated beneath it. That was the specification, but “Terry” built it to keep the alignment to within one second of arc routinely and to within one-tenth of an arc-second in good conditions.
Like many people, “Terry” began to be interested in genealogy after he retired. He wishes he had started earlier, before his father had died and taken so many family secrets with him. But fortunately the Sturgess Library in Barnstable had a fine genealogy section that gave him a good start. Then a chance meeting in Florida unearthed more history on Barnstable families, and as “Terry” worked his way through these, he found he was related to almost all of them. He had traced his patrilineal ancestors back to Edward, who arrived with four boys in West Barnstable in 1626. The next record was when one of the boys, another Edward, married Margaret Lombard in 1649. More ancestors peppered the intervening centuries, all of them from Cape Cod and mostly from the little corner near Barnstable. There was his great-great-grandfather Nathaniel, who had gone insane around 1800. His great-great-great-grandfather a generation earlier had been the captain of a coastal schooner that used to collect ice from Maine and take it to New York. He built a house on the water’s edge so that, as “Terry” wryly suggested, he could land, start another baby, and be off to sea again on the next tide. It seemed to have worked, as his wife produced five daughters and five sons. “Terry”’s great-grandfather, a housebuilder, had put up the first house in Hyannis and also built the Wampanoag Meeting House in Mashpee, where he was later married. Every one of his ancestors had stayed within a few miles of where the first immigrant Edward had landed in 1626. The wide-open spaces of the West did not lure “Terry”’s ancestors to move away. They did not seek their fortunes in the California gold rush or in the money houses of New York City. They just stayed where they were.
“Terry” and his ancestors were completely enmeshed in Cape Cod, a point that was amplified when we drove the few miles to a local restaurant for lunch. “You see that house over there?” “Terry” said as we passed through a small township. “The one with the blue door? That belonged to my grandfather.” Then, a mile or so farther on: “That house, the white one, was where I was brought up. It was built by my uncle, then my father built the smaller house next door, where he lived with my mother up until he died.” As we wished them good-bye and drove back to Boston through the woods, I knew we had really touched the spirit of the place. Not extravagant, nor overambitious, just regular hardworking folk who loved their piece of America even more than their ancestors had done when they stepped ashore all those years ago.
We spent the rest of the week in Boston interviewing an eager succession of volunteers and taking DNA samples for chromosome painting. Many arrived with sheaves of documentation logging their ancestry back through the geometric progression of predecessors, doubling at every generation. Some, like “Atticus Finch,” had been fascinated by genealogy from an early age, while others, like “Terry Malloy,” had taken it up seriously only once they had retired. For some the passion went much further than mere enthusiasm. “Rose Sayer” told me she had spent fourteen hours a day, every day, for the past three years compiling her complete ancestry back seven generations, at which point the arithmetic meant she had 27 or 128 ancestors. She had tracked down 126 of these—and I mean “tracked down,” with birth, marriage, and death certificates. As you can imagine, she was busily seeking the final pair to make her ancestry complete.
Quite a few of the society’s members had already used genetics to overcome the “brick walls” that every genealogist comes up against at some point—those times when the crucial records cannot be found anywhere. By establishing a genetic link between two branches, usually through finding a Y-chromosome match, they could leapfrog the gap in the records and be confident that a connection existed where before they could only assume. By the end of the week I was left dazed by the sheer time and effort that the members had invested in their search for their roots. There was never a whiff of concern about enlisting DNA to assist them. Several members knew more than I did about the latest classification systems for particular branches of the Y-chromosome tree, which I thought a fine development.
All the volunteers so far had been European Americans, as I had intended in New England, but toward the end of the week a society staff member, “Harry Lime,” asked if I could include a friend of his who lived in the same apartment house. His friend, who soon became “Virgil Tibbs,” was an African American, and when we met in the society boardroom, he had a very different story to tell. “Virgil” worked as a history teacher in a school in Brookline, a well-to-do predominantly white town in Norfolk County on the outskirts of Boston. He had been to high school there as well, thanks to the busing program run by METCO, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, which took him to school every day from his home in the inner city. I found our conversation over an hour and a half absolutely riveting, letting me glimpse a world I had never known. Whereas it was quite easy for me to imagine the lives of my other New England volunteers with their jobs in engineering or business, listening to “Virgil” as he very articulately described the everyday life of inner-city African Americans was absolutely gripping.
However, “Virgil” had not come to see me to give me a tutorial on the sociology of race relations in twenty-first-century Boston, but to explore a very specific family myth. He and his family had lived in the Boston area for a long as anyone could remember, and he had heard his grandmother say that she (and therefore “Virgil”) was descended from King Philip. Fortunately I had read enough about early New England to know that King Philip was the son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who had helped the Mayflower Pilgrims survive the winter of 1620 and negotiated a peace treaty with them in 1621. Massasoit lived for another forty years of largely peaceful alliance between the colonists and the Wampanoag. He sold land to Myles Standish and helped Roger Williams after he had been banished from the Massachusetts Colony on his way to found his own at Providence, Rhode Island. After he died in 1661, his sons Pometecomet, or Metacomet, and Wamsutta requested English names from the colonists. Metacomet was duly named Philip, and his elder brother Wamsutta became Alexander. Metacomet became the leader of the Wampanoag on his brother’s death the following year.
Although he strove to continue the good relations with the colonists that his father had forged, increasing demands from the English finally turned Metacomet against the colonists, and he determined to stop any further expansion on their part. He attacked the Plimouth Plantation in 1675 but was decisively defeated by the colonists, and took refuge in swampland in Rhode Island. He was hunted down and shot the following year, his wife and child sold as slaves. In a final grisly reminder of the brutality of war, King Philip’s head was mounted on a pikestaff at the entrance to the Plymouth Fort where it stayed for twenty years.
Five thousand Indians and 2,500 colonists were killed in the war. “Virgil” was hazy about his precise line of descent from Massasoit and King Philip, and although he did have some documentary evidence that his great-grandmother had received an annuity granted to descendants of Massasoit, it had been disputed by another family. “Virgil”’s cousin had a specific reason for wanting to establish his descent from King Philip, which was to support his application for membership of the Wampanoag Nation. The reason he gave was that he wanted the reinforcement of the feeling of connection to the place where he lives that an ancestor among the Wampanoag would give him.
As “Virgil” explained to me, black people don’t feel that they have roots. They may be living in Harlem or Chicago or Tallahassee or San Francisco, but that is not really where they are from. Even in the South, that isn’t really where they are from either. I asked him what he felt about African Americans who had reinforced their links to Africa, with or without a genetic test of the sort Rick Kittles and Gina Paige had developed. He told me that his grandmother had gone back to Senegal, where she thought her ancestors might have been from, but for “Virgil” the slave trade was a long time ago, “sort of hollow,” and it was time to move on. “Everyone makes a big deal of race, but now we are all just Amazon-shopping, Big Mac–eating, Gap-clothed Americans.” But to be a descendant of a Native American, a people who had been in this country for thousands of years before any European or African had set foot in the place—that was really something. Richard passed him a glass of water, “Virgil” filled the tube with saliva to the line, and the DNA that might hold the answer was soon on its way to the lab.
“Virgil” had been our last appointment in Boston. What a difference a week makes! What started as a rainy weekend facing a seemingly overwhelming and terrifying prospect of getting nowhere, ended in a slow walk back from Newbury Street to our hotel across Boston Common on a warm early autumn evening. The welcome we had received from “Atticus Finch” and the other members of the New England Historical Genealogy Society, the willingness of the volunteers to part with their DNA and to tell us about themselves and their families, could not have been surpassed. Richard and I sat down on a bench in the sun close to Swan Lake. He had sat in at every interview, worked the voice recorder, brought glasses of water to parched volunteers, and coaxed them to fill the sample tubes when the talking was done.
As we sat there after a very full week, I was contrasting the warmth of our reception in Boston to the time I traveled a hundred miles to give a lecture to a genealogy society in Northhampton, England. After I talked for an hour and answered questions for a further thirty minutes the organizers came round with a very welcome cup of coffee and a plate of cookies. I picked up a Rich Tea biscuit and my hand moved toward a Jammy Dodger on the other side of the plate. Before I could pick it up, the plate was whisked away. “Only one biscuit I’m afraid,” came the stern admonishment.
I never again accepted a lecture invitation from an English genealogy society. On the bridge about a hundred yards away from where we were sitting, a saxophonist was playing. Low sunbeams illuminated hundreds of mayflies that were performing their mating dance, rising in columns, then falling back toward the water. Then something remarkable happened. The saxophonist let out a loud blast, and every one of the mayflies responded by flying upward much higher than before. It was as if they were dancing to the music.