The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

by Deborah Blum

  Bettinger is Caucasian and had assumed that his ethnicity was 100 percent European. But tests revealed that he carried Native American markers. “This was a complete shock,” he says. He had known from his previous research that some of his ancestors had lived in Honduras in the mid-1800s but had assumed that they were all English missionaries. After getting his results back, he realized that some of them were native Hondurans, with ancestry from both Honduras and the Cayman Islands.

  “Genealogy is not only about names, dates, and places, but about filling out the story of each ancestor as well—what their lives were like, what their motivations might have been like, the trials and tribulations and joys that they experienced in their lifetime,” Bettinger says. “Every decision, no matter how small, by each one of these individual ancestors ultimately led to my existence—and, undoubtedly, to the person I am today.”

  For some people who do genetic genealogy, though, the information they unearth is more difficult to accept. “You would not believe the things we can find out,” particularly when genetic information is combined with searches from the Internet and social media, says CeCe Moore, the blogger who helped Cheryl. “If you’re a privacy advocate, it is worrying.”

  Over the past three years, Moore says, she has answered e-mails from more than ten thousand people interested in using genetic genealogy and has intensely worked on searches for about a hundred people. Many of these people are adoptees or, like Cheryl, have discovered that they have a mystery father. “We used to only have an adoptee get a close match every six months,” says Moore. “Now it’s happening every single week.”

  “I believe that knowledge is power, and I think we can gain much more than we will lose from this movement,” says Moore. (She is also an unpaid liaison between several genetic testing companies and the genetic genealogy community, and a paid consultant for the popular American television show Finding Your Roots, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) At the same time, though, there’s no denying that some of this newfound knowledge will be painful. “A lot of times people find out things that really shake their identity,” she says.

  After learning that Joe Wilmoth wasn’t her biological father, Cheryl began unpacking what she knew about her mother, Vivian.

  Vivian Tipton was strikingly beautiful, even in her older years, and had an infectious cackle of a laugh. She grew up in Petersburg, Virginia, a small town about 25 miles south of Richmond. In July 1941, when she was sixteen, she married an eighteen-year-old soldier named Richard Thompson. Just five months later he left to fight in Europe.

  Richard returned after the war, and he and Vivian moved into a house across from her parents. By the end of 1949, the couple had two girls, Toni and JoAnn, and Vivian was pregnant with a third. Vivian always said Richard was the love of her life, but their marriage was cut short on December 21, 1949, when Richard was killed in a dump-truck accident. Vivian was devastated, staying in bed all day and refusing to celebrate Christmas. After having her third daughter, Jayne, in February, Vivian and the girls moved in with her parents. Not long after, she moved out, leaving her children to be raised by their grandparents.

  The next few years of Vivian’s life are not entirely clear, but sometime in 1950 or 1951 she met Joe Wilmoth. They married in the summer of 1951 and moved to Chester, about 10 miles from Petersburg. They had a rocky relationship, to say the least. Joe was physically abusive at times, and the couple seemed never to stop arguing. Cheryl was born less than seven months after their marriage, on Christmas Eve of 1951, and grew up believing that she had been a premature baby. After the DNA test, though, Cheryl wondered if even that were true. The test raised so many unsettling thoughts, the kind that kept her up at night. How many of the other stories of her early life, she wondered, were fiction?

  From age one to four, Cheryl lived with a couple who had grown up with Joe. Cheryl doesn’t know exactly why. It could be because Joe and Vivian weren’t getting along—or, perhaps, because Joe didn’t want to raise another man’s child.

  The next decade of Cheryl’s life was unstable and traumatic. She lived in more than a dozen different homes in Florida and Virginia and frequently witnessed violent outbursts from Joe. Looking back, Cheryl suspects that some of Joe’s behavior could be explained by posttraumatic stress disorder—he had seen combat in the Philippines during the war. As a child, though, no explanation would have helped. She was only terrified.

  Through all of this turmoil, Cheryl tried to protect and care for her little sister, and the girls forged a powerful emotional bond. Still, they were different in more ways than they were alike. Sandi was tall and thin; Cheryl, short and plump. Sandi was happy-go-lucky from a very young age, and by the time she was a young woman, liked to drink, smoke, and party hard. Cheryl was shy, anxious, fearful, and prone to crying.

  Perhaps their most striking difference, though, was in their relationship with Joe. “To me, he was everything,” Sandi told me. “She was afraid of him.”

  The day after Christmas 1963, the family moved into a new home. The house was right up the road from Dickie’s family, and soon Cheryl and Dickie were sweethearts. She got pregnant in early 1966, soon after her fourteenth birthday, and they were married in May, just before Dickie turned twenty-one.

  Cheryl’s early marriage shows the extent of Joe and Vivian’s parental neglect, Dickie says. “It was pretty obvious,” he says. “I mean, you don’t let your fourteen-year-old girl go out with somebody as old as I was.”

  In 1980, when Vivian was just fifty-five, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cheryl came over most days to make food and help clean the house. One day she and Vivian opened up an old cedar chest of Vivian’s personal mementos. The chest contained a pink card issued by the hospital on the day Cheryl was born. It noted, in handwritten script, that she weighed almost seven pounds—much heavier than a baby who was two months premature could possibly be.

  Vivian was sick for three years, and Cheryl’s relationship with Joe disintegrated over this time. She has a vivid memory of confronting him one day, when he was sitting at his dining room table. “I said to him, ‘Why do you treat me so different from Sandi? What is it? Am I not your child?’”

  Joe looked out the window, Cheryl remembers. Then he looked down at his coffee cup and said, “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

  DNA tests, if done rigorously, are far more definitive than tattered forms in old cedar chests, and far more emotionally potent. The genetic genealogy industry had barely gotten off the ground before scientists, sociologists, and ethicists were debating its societal impact—for better and for worse.

  Early concerns focused on accuracy. All of the tests—whether they look at the Y chromosome, autosomal chromosomes, or other types of DNA—work in essentially the same way. They screen the billions of letters of a person’s DNA for a certain number of markers and then compare that combination of markers with those found in reference samples taken from thousands of people living in various regions of the world. Test accuracy, then, starts with two things: the number of markers analyzed and the size and selection of the comparison set of samples.

  When genetic genealogy debuted, the technology cost many times what it does today. So the first tests screened a relatively small number of markers, leading to a crude measure of ancestry. The first test that Blaine Bettinger bought, from a now-defunct company called DNAPrint Genomics, screened his autosomal chromosomes for just seventy-one markers and used those to estimate his ties to four broad ethnic groups: 88 percent “Indo-European,” 12 percent “East-Asian,” and zero percent “Native-American” and “African.”

  “Those early autosomal tests were sort of wildly inaccurate,” Bettinger says. The subsequent tests he bought showed that his Honduran ancestors had both Native American and African roots.

  Today’s genetic tests can probe many more markers, making them much more accurate. 23andMe uses around half a million markers, on all twenty-three chromosomes, to probe each customer’s ancestry. But many othe
r companies continue to use only a small number of markers, and none make their reference databases or methodology transparent to customers. As one group of scholars wrote in a 2009 paper in Science: “Genetic ancestry tests fall into an unregulated no-man’s land, with little oversight and few industry guidelines to ensure the quality, validity, and interpretation of information sold.”

  Even if all the tests were completely accurate, they’d still pose big philosophical questions: How much weight do individuals give to genes when forming ethnic, racial, and religious identities? How much weight should they give to DNA?

  Cheryl, when pressed, acknowledges that she is some combination of her innate genetic predisposition, traumatic upbringing, and six decades of life experience. But like many people, she seems to give special weight to her genes. As she posted to a site called Cousin Connect shortly after finding out that Joe wasn’t her father: “I want nothing from anyone [except] to know what blood line flows through my veins, my children, and grandchildren’s.”

  Many people find religious and cultural identities in their DNA. Take Andrea, a thirty-five-year-old adoptee. When she was less than two years old, her biological parents put her and two older brothers in foster care. The children were soon adopted, but their new parents were alcoholics, and they had messy and difficult childhoods.

  At sixteen Andrea left home and, a few years later, began searching for her birth parents. She found her father’s profile on a dating web site and called him. “That was a really hard phone call, because he was not interested in me,” she says. He also told her about her biological mother, and some searching revealed that she had died. “It was very upsetting.”

  But Andrea was profoundly uplifted by the results of her DNA test, which she bought from 23andMe about a year ago. The test indicated that she’s approximately one-quarter Ashkenazi Jewish. “That was like, the shock of all shocks,” she says. Though she is a practicing Christian, she has felt strong ties to Jewish culture since college, where she was a religious studies major. “I was very, very drawn to Jewish studies classes, I took biblical Hebrew, and always wanted to go to Israel,” she says.

  Finding out that she had genetic roots to Judaism was bittersweet, she says, because she would have liked to have grown up in the Jewish culture. She’s making up for it now by reading all she can about Jewish history. “I will sit at home and watch documentaries on YouTube about Jerusalem,” she says, laughing. “I love it. And it’s so fascinating to me—the personal connection I had [with Judaism] even before I knew, and the one that continues now in my life.”

  That kind of emotional connection, the “Aha!” moment, is what Cheryl has been searching for all her life. She’s always wondered why she and her children don’t look like her sisters, Vivian, or Joe. Her son, Travis Whittle, has curly hair and a gregarious personality that Cheryl says resemble no one else in the family.

  She wonders about her own traits and predispositions too. She has had several bouts of depression over the years and is almost always anxious. “I know that my mother had some depression. But I wonder if my father might have had some problems too.”

  It wasn’t enough to know that Joe wasn’t her father. To feel whole, she had to know who her real father was. “You know how in the Bible it says so-and-so begot so-and-so begot so-and-so?” Cheryl says. “If you leave out a begot, there’s something missing. It doesn’t quite fit.”

  Cheryl’s fervent hunt for the mystery man responsible for half of her genetic identity has consumed much of her time over the past three years.

  She didn’t have much luck browsing the Relative Finder section of the 23andMe web site, which compared her DNA to that of the other people in the company’s database who had opted to share with the community. Her only genetic matches were estimated fourth, fifth, and sixth cousins—nowhere near close enough to trace back to her father.

  In June 2010, Cheryl bought Family Tree DNA’s genetic test, “to fish in more ponds,” as she puts it. The $293 cheek-swab test gave her access to all of the people in Family Tree DNA’s database, any one of which could have been a match. Unfortunately, though, she caught no fish.

  Cheryl’s search went cold for nearly two years before picking up in April 2012, when CeCe Moore put her in touch with Diane Harman-Hoog of Redmond, Washington. Diane has spent her retirement years—“seventeen hours a day, seven days a week,” she says—as a genealogy “search angel,” helping hundreds of people, mostly adoptees, figure out their family mysteries at no charge. Diane had just started to add genetic results into her search methods and was eager to look into Cheryl’s case.

  By pooling information from various sites, Diane created a spreadsheet showing more than five hundred people who shared some of Cheryl’s DNA. Each line of the spreadsheet gave the person’s surname and the precise chromosome location where their DNA matched Cheryl’s. But, big as it was, Diane’s spreadsheet didn’t identify any useful leads. “Diane wrote me and said, ‘Cheryl, we do not have enough. Your matches aren’t close enough yet,’” Cheryl recalls.

  That was in August 2012. Just a few months earlier, Ancestry.com—the largest genealogy company in the world—began selling its first autosomal DNA test. Cheryl bought one in September for $99, to try her luck in yet another pond. Eight weeks later she had her matches: nobody was closer than a fourth cousin.

  During this lull in her search, Cheryl says, she had a profound spiritual experience. “One morning I got out of bed—and this sounds crazy probably, but, you know, I believe in God. I was just feeling real down about it. But then something inside of me said, ‘You will find your father.’ And so I was clinging to that. I knew that it’s just a matter of not losing hope.”

  One February morning this year, Cheryl received a note via Ancestry.com’s internal message service from a woman named Jeannette Morrison, a genealogy hobbyist who had taken the test to expand her tree. She had identified Cheryl as a possible second cousin. Cheryl wrote back immediately and updated Diane about the new lead. A second-cousin match, Cheryl knew, could be a very big deal.

  While Ancestry.com’s test will estimate the relatedness of two people, it doesn’t allow customers to compare their genetic data chromosome by chromosome. And Cheryl couldn’t tell from Jeannette’s family tree whether they were related through Cheryl’s mother or father. So Cheryl bought another 23andMe kit and sent it to Jeannette’s house in Ohio.

  When Jeannette’s test results came back, in April, Cheryl discovered that Jeannette did not share any DNA with Sandi. In other words, Jeannette was exactly what Cheryl had been praying for: a solid lead to her biological father.

  23andMe showed that Jeannette and Cheryl shared seventeen segments of their DNA—including, crucially, two bits of the X chromosome. Through logical inferences and painstaking searches—comparing trees, geographical locations, birth and death dates—Diane found one of Jeannette’s relatives, Joseph Parker, who was about the right age and had lived in the right place to be Cheryl’s biological father.

  Joseph had died in 1987, leaving behind a son, Joseph Jr., and one daughter, Effie Jane, who lived in Richmond. According to Diane’s analysis, Effie Jane could be either Cheryl’s first cousin once removed or her half-sister.

  There was only one way to find out.

  Genetic genealogy is part of the much broader cultural trend of uploading personal data to the cloud. We willingly flaunt photos, videos, and demographic information on social media—Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, match.com—and give our credit card and social security numbers to banking and retail sites. Even seemingly private data—e-mails, cell phone records, Internet browsing patterns—is actually, we’re learning, under government surveillance.

  What’s fascinating about genetic genealogy is that it brings together two very different perspectives on privacy. DNA is arguably as personal as it gets. It’s an individual’s unique code of life. That’s why, among doctors and health care workers, genetic data is subject to strict privacy regulations.

  The tra
ditional genealogy community, on the other hand, is all about sharing—sharing family trees, sharing documents, sharing stories. “The only way you can connect with people is with some loss of privacy,” says Yaniv Erlich, a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Erlich is a world expert on genetic privacy. Earlier this year his team caused a stir among medical researchers with a study in Science showing that supposedly anonymous participants in genetic research studies can be identified using simple software and an Internet hookup.

  But Erlich is also an avid genealogist. In the past few years he has bought DNA tests from 23andMe and Family Tree DNA and has chosen to upload his genetic data to their databases. In doing so, he discovered that he carries the Cohen profile on his Y chromosome, confirming what had been passed down through his family’s oral tradition. He also found a fifth cousin, whom he later met at a family reunion in Poland. That cousin grew up as a Christian, but because of his genetic discoveries is converting to Judaism. “It touches people, what they find in their DNA,” Erlich says. “I think it’s wonderful.”

  The core privacy tension in genetic genealogy, Erlich notes, is that your DNA is not yours alone. “By putting your data out there,” Erlich says, “you’re not only sacrificing your own privacy but also the privacy of people who are connected to you, because you share DNA.”

  In June the Times, a British newspaper, ran a front-page story with the headline “Revealed: The Indian Ancestry of William.” Two distant cousins of Prince William had their DNA tested with a company called BritainsDNA and discovered that they carried a rare set of markers that had previously been found in only fourteen people: thirteen Indian and one Nepalese. Because the DNA in question passes only from mother to child, and the cousins shared a great-great-great-great-grandmother with William’s mother, Diana, they could infer that the heir to the throne also has these Indian roots.