The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  I thought about my uncle’s case. If his Meek match held, if he turned out not to be a Crooks, it was much more dramatic than the truth Buford had uncovered. Buford’s mistaken identity made him a mismatch with his cousins. In my uncle’s case, it would be with his own brothers. I wondered how I would feel to discover, out of the blue, that my father was not my biological parent, that my siblings were half-siblings. Would it shatter me?

  The number of men with Y chromosomes that matched my uncle’s at twelve markers kept rolling in like the tide. Hardly a week passed without the arrival of a new message informing me of yet another perfect score with the possible Crooks chromosome. The list had soared to four hundred when I left for the conference, but none of them were named Crooks. At the same time, the sheer volume only made my father’s languishing Y seem more frustrating.

  As Jin Li had suggested, I had sent my father’s DNA down to his lab in Cincinnati. But there had been no word since then. In the meantime I continued my own search for a Y that matched my father’s. Free online databases had sprung up, allowing people to upload their Y-chromosome test results and compare markers with people who had been tested by different companies from anywhere in the world. But not one of them produced a match.

  Family Tree DNA had established Ysearch.org, which, with its ties to the Genographic Project, quickly became the largest of the online genetic databases, with more than nineteen thousand Y test results on hand that summer. I checked it often, hoping that somehow a genetic cousin had suddenly added his East Asian sequences to the fold. Initially I had searched for the perfect twelve-marker match for my father. But as the weeks wore on, I became less fussy, until one afternoon I found matches with four men at eight markers. Two men were from China, one was from Japan and one was a man by the name of Huy Ton-That, from Vietnam, who could apparently trace his history back more than a thousand years. His oldest known ancestor was Nguyen Bac, born about 939 AD. On his profile page he said he had tested with the Genographic Project, and he included his email address for anyone interested to get in touch. I wrote to him instantly.

  Hello,

  I realize this is a long shot, but your Y-DNA results match 8 out of 12 with my father’s line, which we had always suspected led to somewhere in China. I am wondering if you know of any family connections on your side to China—and I thought it might be worth checking since, impressively, you have a name and date for a paternal ancestor as far back as 939.

  I would be very interested in making contact.

  Regards,

  Carolyn Abraham

  Two hours after I sent the message, Huy Ton-That had replied from his home in Miami with an exuberant subject line: “Hello Kin!”

  Hi,

  Good to hear from you! From history and genealogy I could date my family line back to 900s AD (to Nguyen Bac, the “Nation-Establishing Duke” of Vietnam). My family name is Ton-That but the original name is Nguyen (long story). Yes, we are the descendants of the last imperial dynasty of Vietnam (The Nguyen Dynasty) and that is why we have records of our family dating back to the first known ancestor Nguyen Bac.

  Nguyen Bac is suspected to be one of the descendants of a Chinese “Nguyen” who came to VN after the Chinese colonized VN in 111 BC. Our M-122 type somewhat confirms that we are from China. Thanks for writing. Bye! Huy Ton-That

  He was right. It was almost too much to digest. But I felt it again as I had the first time, when a bloodline suddenly materialized between Kerala and Maine and Gladwyn deCouto’s Y brought me to Jim List. It was a rush. Another piece of a very old puzzle had been pulled out of the past. But it seemed a stretch to make much of it. It was only eight measly markers, a bond I presumed to be rice-paper thin. However, it was something, a tiny link in the chain to China when there had been nothing for months, and even more intoxicating because it suggested we had a connection, however faint, to royalty. Royalty! Why not quit now? I thought. It’s such a happy ending. With the entry of a few keystrokes at Ysearch.org, my kin rose from rice farmer, fugitive and circus act to distant cousin of a ruling family. It was pathetically clichéd and yet … deliciously romantic. For a few minutes I felt like a Vietnamese princess.

  Of course, math diluted the thrill. Back in 2002 the Atlantic Monthly carried a memorable article by Steve Olson titled “The Royal We.” It offered up the theory, based on some clever modelling by Yale University statistician Joseph Chang, that everybody is a royal, that all Europeans descend from Charlemagne and that all people the world over can trace a family line back to Confucius and Nefertiti. The logic flows from the notion that all of us—from kindergarten teachers to kings—share a common ancestry in the fairly recent past. Since the number of ancestors each of us has increases exponentially with every generation—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, etc.—you need look back only a few hundred years to find that collectively we have more ancestors than there would have been people on the planet. Under this theory, everyone can boast of blue blood in the branches of their family tree, because there is but one tree.

  Mark Humphrys, a computer scientist and genealogist Olson interviewed at Dublin City University, rejected the idea that this somehow undermined the joy of a royal find for a family historian. He argued that while everyone has a common ancestral past, each path back to the past is unique. The reward, he said, was in reconstructing that path. “You can ask whether everyone in the Western world is descended from Charlemagne, and the answer is yes, we’re all descended from Charlemagne,” Humphrys said. “But can you prove it? That’s the game of genealogy.”

  If math offered one sure shortcut to royalty, genetic testing provided another. With a mere swab, a Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA test can indicate in a matter of weeks if one belongs to the same familial branch as Marie Antoinette, King Sweyn II of Denmark, Genghis Khan and so on. It was a key selling feature for every genetic genealogy firm opening up shop. The Crooks Y chromosome—if it was the Crooks Y—belongs to the same R1b haplogroup as England’s Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princes William and Harry, the sixteenth-century English king James I, Norwegian kings Haakon VII, Olav V and Harald V, three fifteenth-century Swedish kings, the Romanovs, and at least four kings of Greece. And every one of the many millions of men in the East Asian Haplogroup O3 who carry the same M-122 mutation as Huy Ton-That, and every one of the many millions of women and men related to those men by blood, can also claim a familial connection to Vietnam’s last dynasty. My father just happens to be one of them. How sobering.

  Except that my father toted more than just the M-122 mutation on his Y. He shared eight of those fast-moving markers with Huy’s family signature, which suggested that our link to the regal clan was by degrees even closer. Maybe we shared a common ancestor five hundred years ago, or maybe it went back to a grandfather of Nguyen Bac from the first millennium. It still boosted my spirits to discover the partial match, as it did my dad’s when I told him he was a distant genetic relative of a “nation-establishing duke.”

  “My goodness me,” he said. “That’s amazing news, just amazing. I’m chuffed! I’m feeling so Chinese these days.… We have no real details of my grandfather, but we have confirmation again of the Chinese history, and the trail hasn’t ended yet.”

  In our great fishing expedition for a matching Y, finding Huy Ton-That was like a promising nibble for my father and me. It was just enough to keep us hopeful that patience would pay off. At the conference I managed to grab a moment with Mike Hammer to ask him if he, like Bennett, thought it was a false hope.

  As one of the world’s leading Y-chromosome experts, the University of Arizona geneticist had the aura of a rock star down in Houston, and he looked the part—boyishly handsome, thick auburn hair, wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Hammer also had a reputation for being terribly hard to reach. Reading coverage in the press about his various discoveries, from his studies on the genetic Adam to the telltale Y marker of the kohanim caste, I suspected the professor
wasn’t entirely at ease with his brand of science’s becoming a recreational tool for the family historian. His work had helped pave the intersection of molecular genetics and the masses, but few academics are comfortable in the commercial world, and perhaps they are even less so in the direct-to-consumer milieu. Bridging the gap between anthropology and genealogy, as Bennett put it, might be a legitimate aim, but it’s a messy one. When genealogists talk about the “distant past,” they’re usually referring to the centuries before surnames were adopted. To the anthropologist, that’s like last Wednesday.

  Even Hammer’s talk at the conference had more to do with the value of the Y in forensics than in family studies. Still, as the chief scientist for Family Tree DNA, he did politely field questions from enthusiastic hobbyists over the salad-and-sandwiches lunch. And when I finally caught up with him on a break in the conference room, he seemed genuinely interested in my story, particularly the bit about the Chinese great-grandfather and my father’s result suggesting his Y belonged to the O3 haplogroup. His eyes lit up in a way that suggested, Aha … now here is something we can prove.…

  An O3 designation was unusual at the conference, and confirming a haplogroup is grounded solidly in the science of mutations, unlike the softer efforts used to predict when two men share a common male ancestor. Hammer even offered to test my father’s Y to confirm that it was in fact an O3 designation. But I was most anxious to learn about my father’s closest matches, I told him, which appeared to be only with men whom he had sampled on research trips in East Asia. Was there any chance that I could learn more about those men? None, Hammer replied, confirming what Bennett had told me about the anonymous donor samples. I asked him how long he thought it might be before enough Chinese DNA flowed into the public data banks to offer a reasonable chance of a near match.

  Hammer shrugged and smiled sympathetically, in a way that put me in mind of the looks you get at the Delhi bus station when you ask what time the express from Agra will arrive (Maybe today, maybe tomorrow …). “It could take a while,” he said. “A long while.”

  I envied my fellow delegates with their big family projects, their having detailed histories of ancestors dating back three or four centuries, assembled with the help of documents and DNA. I was a neophyte among them, with a lonely Y on my father’s side and a dubious Y on my mother’s. There were 3,642 group projects registered with the company that fall, averaging twenty members each. Some were as small as my own but others involved the DNA of dozens, and in several cases, hundreds of people.

  A retired doctor from Tennessee had enough DNA data to fuel a half-hour PowerPoint presentation on the Y-chromosome haplotypes of the McLeod clan. Other men and women took the stage and described how DNA had grown their family trees, while knitting needles clattered throughout. At lunch I met Maria Plummer, an unassuming woman from the Midwest who manages the DNA of people named Smith—Smith! Her name tag said “Smith Worldwide.” I marvelled that she had time to eat. But Plummer told me her group was not as large as I imagined, because the original Smiths project of seven hundred members had split into the Smiths of the southern U.S. and of the north-eastern U.S., which also included Schmidts, Smithes, Smyths and Smythes. But since there were Smiths who matched neither of those groups, Ms. Plummer had started Smith Worldwide.

  So it was that Walker was the largest surname project that fall, with about 380 members. The Williams group was running a close second, headed by one of the youngest delegates at the conference, Adrian Williams, an energetic thirty-six-year-old software developer from Missouri. One night after the conference, I spoke with him on the phone. Despite having a day job and five children, Adrian managed to devote long nights and any other hours he could spare to his hobby. He was a genealogy junkie, he said, and had even designed Internet tools to record, track and compare the DNA results of men in the Williams project. Every few weeks, men named Williams were sending in their DNA, and his project was growing at a steady clip of about a dozen new members a month.

  I asked Adrian why he thought so many people—people who might never have spent a minute researching their ancestry—felt suddenly compelled to find genetic relatives. “We’re lonely,” he said flatly. “Families are so fractured, and we’re all caught up in this rat race and in the process we kind of lost our identities. I’d much rather talk to a cousin I never knew I had than to a complete stranger. We don’t want to be so lonely anymore.”

  Adrian had good reason to start young. His parents divorced when he was three, his father won custody of him and his mother disappeared. At the age of twenty-one he started looking for her, and after he found her, he went on to investigate his history on both sides of the family. His efforts had taken him all the way back to 1638. His earliest known male ancestor was a Roger Williams. “But I don’t know where he came from, and that’s the problem,” he said. “In colonial America there were literally thousands of Williams who came across the pond … and one of the hardest problems of a U.S. family researcher is getting back across the pond.”

  That’s the big draw of DNA for many American genealogists, he said—the hope that a genetic match can bridge the gap between the Old World and the New. “But so far,” Adrian continued, “the British aren’t exactly jumping on the bandwagon. They don’t understand the predicament of Americans. We’re immigrants and they’re not, and they generally aren’t as interested in their genealogies as they are in their geographies. I guess their thinking is, I don’t need to know about my cousins in the U.S. For them it would be working their trees forward to find living relatives, some branch of their families that went off to the colonies.”

  The transatlantic disconnect hasn’t discouraged genealogists in North America. They just kept recruiting and testing, recording and analyzing—the Williamses, the Walkers, the Smiths, the McLeods. There were quips about packing swabbing kits before toothbrushes when they take trips, and the powerful temptation to pluck hairs without permission or steal coffee cups still wet with saliva. There was a bioethicist from the Hastings Center in New York who felt compelled to rein everybody in, arguing from the conference stage that there should be boundaries in this fledgling field, or at least a serious discussion about how to set them. Originally from New Zealand, Josephine Johnston was a wisp of a woman with a coffee-brown bob. She stood behind the podium and teased the delegates, telling them she “understood a thing or two” about them and their desires to get to the bottom of tantalizing family tales, however they could.

  When I interviewed her later, she told me she had been preoccupied with the recent controversy that had erupted around DNA testing of the Melungeons, a mysterious mixed-race population with roots in Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. “Melungeon” was a derogatory label slapped on their dark-skinned ancestors, a number of whom were known to sport an extra thumb. In 2001, Brent Kennedy, a University of Virginia professor of Melungeon descent, collected DNA samples from more than 130 fellow descendants. Testing confirmed Native American, African and European ancestry, among others. The study angered some, who felt it had gone ahead without defining who qualifies as a Melungeon; others were riled to hear the tests had apparently proved they were part black; still others were offended that anyone should consider them Melungeon at all. And almost everyone was frustrated that the results were not published in a peer-reviewed journal where they could be properly scrutinized.

  Johnston said the Melungeon study had made her determined to caution the conference crowd that afternoon. “I wanted to remind everybody that the information from these tests can be powerful and it can have an unpredictable impact, and that genes are only one aspect of what we can consider to define ourselves,” she said. People attending a genetic genealogy conference might lean toward “genetic essentialism,” she thought, and be more likely to see DNA as the core that defines family relationships. “But families have always been about much more than genes.”

  It may have been her thick Kiwi accent or the good-natured finger wagging from a wee referee, but ever
yone accepted Johnston’s counsel with good humour. Just before she left the podium, she turned back with one last bit of advice for the DNA hunters present: “Don’t do anything in the nighttime that you wouldn’t do in the day.” I assumed it was a far-fetched admonition, even for this lot. But later I heard a talk by a woman who proved me wrong.

  Roberta Estes was one of the first people to use DNA to investigate family history. Even before surname projects existed she was sending samples to commercial labs, trying to solve mysteries on her father’s side. He’d died in a car accident when she was seven. Her story stuck with me, in part because she had a hell of a stage presence—a big-boned, no-nonsense brunette from Michigan with relatives who sounded like they’d stepped out of a Mark Twain novel. There was Uncle Buster, who told her, “I don’t care about DNA.… I am who I am,” and Hard-Cider Jack, deep in the Tennessee hills, and John Y. Estes, who walked from Tennessee to Texas—twice. Roberta’s intense commitment to her genealogical pursuit made her stand out, even in an auditorium full of family-gene hunters. She spoke seriously of exhumation and had actually secured an estimate (around $20,000) for digging up her father.

  Roberta told the audience she knew her desire to dig up her dad probably sounded extreme. “But let’s face it,” she added. “We’re all more than curious. If you’re just curious, you wouldn’t be here.” She had spent thirty years researching her paternal line, and DNA testing had only broadened her ambitions. She was running about twenty surname projects, submitting DNA from hundreds of recruits, including samples from hair follicles and a stamp licked by her late grandpa. Roberta had all sorts of lessons to share, but the most striking for me at the time was how often she had stumbled upon false paternities. She had even coined her own term. “Undocumented adoptions,” she called them. “Because these people were adopted, whether Daddy knew he was adopting or not.” The phenomenon is so prevalent, she said, “I really, really encourage you not to test close relatives.” Too late.