The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  At a workshop on ethics, people agreed that discovering a false paternity is the number one problem genetic genealogists face—to tell or not to tell? The desire to take a DNA sample without permission ranked as number two. Yet, as Josephine Johnston told me later, there are no clear rules that apply to DNA tests given or taken for recreational purposes. In research, scientists often tell participants they cannot share individual test results, only the conclusions of the project as a whole. “But when it comes to family members, I don’t see how you could enforce that—not giving individual results,” Johnston said. “If you tell them you won’t give them their results, they’re probably not going to give you their DNA.”

  On top of that, Johnston said that since a genetic test result could affect those related to the person being tested—parents, siblings or children—it is fair to ask if all those people should be asked for their consent as well. “But,” she acknowledged, “that’s probably not feasible.” As it is, the issue is not covered by any law or regulation, only by what actions are morally defensible. Ideally, people running a project should inform everyone willing to give his or her DNA about the possible outcomes, warning them in advance how often a man will learn he carries the Y chromosome of someone other than the father he knows. That way, she said, at least they receive fair warning and give informed consent before they swab.

  Adrian Williams told me he is always up front about the potential for family secrets to fly out of the test tube. Many of the Williams men he recruits to his DNA project are strangers to him, footing the bill for their own tests, and he feels they deserve to know everything their money might buy them. “If you don’t want to know, you better not ask,” he said.

  So when one of the Williams men in his project turned out not to match any other Williams man, but instead to have the same twenty-five markers as a man named Clark, Adrian called them both and said, “Hey, you guys are related.” Their perfect match held at thirty-seven markers, and even at sixty-seven. When the Williams man had his brother tested, he found they carried two different Y chromosomes. “So [this Williams] goes to his mama and his mama says the test is wrong. But he keeps at her and keeps at her, and then she told him that the summer before her wedding, she had a beau named Clark. He was actually ecstatic to know,” Adrian said.

  But what if the people you test are not strangers? What if they are family members providing their DNA only because you, their curious niece, have come calling? What then?

  Basil’s Tavern was packed at dinner. I shared a table with three other conference delegates, an adventurous elderly couple from California who had driven to Houston in their RV, and a helpful woman from Tennessee. Together they had clocked decades visiting archives and wandering around old cemeteries before DNA testing came along. By dessert I was telling them about the disturbing match between my uncle and a man with a name all too familiar. I asked them what they would do. All of them had the same perspective: they said they would never tell a relative if they discovered he was fathered by a man other than the one he knew as dad.

  This is just a hobby, they said. It hardly merited destroying a life. The woman from Tennessee said the chances of discovering a false paternity are high enough that as standard practice she collects at least two Y-chromosome samples to represent one paternal line. “If one turns out to be different than the other,” she said, “I never tell a soul.”

  Besides, they all agreed, it’s not blood that defines family relationships. So why mess with a family if the blood says something different? The Y can kiss and tell, but we don’t have to. It was the same tack geneticists usually take when they come across a false paternity in their research, I told them—toss the sample and say nothing. A few years before, when I interviewed Cheryl Shuman, director of genetic counselling at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, she had told me that lawyers and ethicists advised them that maintaining family peace was in the best interest of the child, that any test result challenging that should be disregarded as “uninformative.”

  By the second day of the conference I began to suspect that my fears over my uncle’s paternity were premature. Perhaps they were even unfounded. DNA tests are not infallible, and neither is the way in which they might be interpreted. Bennett had acknowledged as much in his opening remarks. He told the story of Tom Robinson, a mild-mannered Florida accounting professor vaulted into a moment of fame that summer after a British testing company found that he appeared to be a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. “From Bloody Conqueror to Guy with Calculator,” one headline said. “Khan Be Too Careful,” said another.

  A movie company bought a ticket to fly Robinson to Mongolia to feature him in a film about the legacy of the fearsome warrior, and the Mongolian ambassador to the United States promised to hold a reception to toast the Khan’s new-found descendant. But it turned out that, while Robinson shared a similar pattern of repeats on his Y with Genghis Khan, he did not belong to the same haplogroup. Oxford Ancestors, the original testing company, had checked his chromosome only for short tandem repeats, the markers that mutate so often it’s entirely possible that two unrelated men from different parts of the world, and from different haplogroups, might have a similar pattern. Robinson himself had grown suspicious, since he had always thought his ancestors came to the States from England. Sure enough, a second test with Family Tree DNA found he did indeed belong to the same European haplogroup as the vast majority of those taking ancestry tests.

  “And what group is that?” Bennett asked the audience. “R1!” the delegates hollered back, with all the exuberance of a Pentecostal congregation. Europe’s R1 haplogroup is thought to be at least thirty thousand years younger than the Khan’s C3. Not only did Robinson not descend from Genghis Khan, he didn’t even inhabit the same branch of the human family tree. Robinson’s story was not unique. From what I gathered, the wily code of the Y chromosome can be a master of mischief, particularly among those belonging to Europe’s dominant haplogroup—as my uncle did, and as we did if he actually turned out to be a Crooks on his paternal line.

  With the size of their surname projects and the passion they put into analyzing hundreds of Y-DNA test results, many group leaders had real-life examples to prove how quickly the male chromosome can mutate, even from one generation to the next. Some of its markers are prone to shifting so rapidly that Roberta Estes dubbed them “the naughty alleles.” Naughty, she said, because they appear to make a mismatch of people who should match perfectly—fathers and sons or brothers—causing headaches, if not heartaches. Bennett noted that certain fast-moving markers are most likely to differ between a father and his youngest son, particularly if that son was conceived when Dad had gotten on in years. Over time, it seems, the biological mechanisms that preserve coding in the Y simply wear out, just as they do in other parts of a cell.

  So even if it looked as if my uncle had a perfect match with a Meek man, there was a chance it wasn’t as perfect as it looked. Observations also suggested that R1b men like my uncle seem to have a particularly high risk of so-called accidental matches. The pattern of repeats is just so prevalent among Europeans that it can suggest a family connection between two men who may not have shared a common ancestor for thousands of years. This, I heard, was especially true if the Y carries the signature of the Western Atlantic Modal Haplotype, the most common set of markers among men in western Europe. In fact Family Tree was then estimating that at least two out of every hundred western European men carry all twelve of its markers, and they warned that anyone belonging to it—which meant, apparently, me via my uncle—should start the testing at twenty-five or even thirty-seven markers, to rule out accidental matches between two men.

  Is that what the Meek match was—an accident, a fluke? Was it just quirky happenstance resulting from a genetic signature so ubiquitous in western Europe that a Crooks man and a Meek man could look like close relatives when they were not? Maybe the twelve markers they shared could be blamed on a naughty allele or two, or maybe it was a ghostly re
mnant of a common ice-age ancestor. Maybe infidelity had nothing to do with it.

  The more I heard at the conference, the more convinced I became that the Meek match could be like our supposed Native ancestry—a red herring. Before I rushed out to collect Basil’s DNA, I decided I would bump up the testing on Dennis’s Y chromosome to thirty-seven markers and see what happened to the Meek match then.

  11

  CAUGHT IN THE WEB

  Men, men and more men. Every other day brought a new man to my inbox. Emails alerting me to yet another fellow with a perfect twelve-marker match with Uncle Dennis started to feel like spam. But I opened them all in case one of them was a man named Crooks. This went on for weeks, until finally, at the end of January 2007, my uncle’s new test results came in.

  Bumping up the number of markers tested on his Y chromosome from twelve to thirty-seven had whittled down his evergrowing list of matches with the finesse of a chainsaw—from more than five hundred men to four. Just four, and not a Meek man among them. I realized that Mr. Meek, like most of the other men on the original list, had probably not been tested beyond a dozen markers, but I was content to let that lie for the moment, to dismiss him as one of the flukes I’d heard about at the conference in Houston.

  The men who did match my uncle exactly at twenty-five markers were named Barlow, Hollingsworth, Hart and Lomax. Their names had the ring of a venerable old law firm when I said them out loud, all marble and mahogany, and as British as they come. They were all close matches; Hart was off by only one marker, and the others by two. Our paternal lines must have intertwined at some point. That each man had a different surname suggested a common forefather from before surnames came into common use. But so many matching markers—nearly three dozen—seemed to suggest a more recent connection.

  Trying to estimate when two men shared a common ancestor is one of the most complicated aspects of genetic genealogy. DNA alone simply cannot provide a concrete date; only a traditional paper trail can reveal that. Even when two men match perfectly at twenty-five markers or at thirty-seven (different companies test different numbers), whether they share a common surname or not, figuring out when they shared a common male ancestor is an educated guess, based on the idea that you can calibrate a molecular clock by knowing how often mutations occur. On the Y, different markers mutate at different rates, and some much faster than others—like the naughty alleles Roberta Estes described in Houston—apt to change even between one son and the next, blurring the genetic line between brothers. But researchers have established the varying mutation rates for various markers on the Y chromosome and how often each one is likely to change per generation. So by comparing the Ys of two men, marker for marker, it’s possible to come up with a time window of probability. The more markers tested, the less likely there will be false positives suggesting that two men are related when they are not, or false negatives that suggest two men are not related when they are.

  Two men who share a marker known to change quickly are more likely to have had a common forefather more recently. If two men have a mismatch on a marker known to be as stable as the pyramids, the time back to a common ancestor is greater. If the mismatch is slight—say one man has a marker where the sequence is repeated twelve times and the other man has a repeat of eleven—that’s a single misstep in favour of a more recent family connection. Thankfully, most DNA-testing companies provide a special calculator that factors all these variables into an equation and does the math for you.

  In the case of my uncle’s match of thirty-five out of thirty-seven with Melvyn Lomax, for example, the calculator predicted an 80 percent chance of a common male ancestor within the past eight generations. The odds rise to 89 percent that our common forefather lived sometime within the past twelve generations, and if we reach back twenty-four generations, the chances jump all the way to 99.7 percent. If you put a generation at twenty years, the results suggested that at the outside, Mel Lomax and my uncle shared a forefather who lived sometime in the past five hundred years. That wasn’t just post-ice age; that was post-Middle Ages. It was something, finally, to work with.

  The time frame to a common ancestor was similar for all the men in my uncle’s quartet of well-matched Ys. But that was all that could be said about it without swapping details of our known histories. Once the emails started to fly, I learned that Hollingsworth, Hart and Barlow were all Americans who had spent years researching their ancestry, all with the aim of tracing their forefathers back across the pond. They were fairly certain their paternal lines led back to England, and none of them had any known connection to Jamaica.

  I came to know Mel Lomax best. He was a retired police sergeant living in Hervey Bay, a small seaside city north of Brisbane, Australia. Mel went by his mother’s surname of Lomax, but his father’s last name had been Ainsworth, and Ainsworth, he told me, was also the name of the hamlet in Radcliffe, in northwest England, where he was born. Radcliffe was historically part of Lancashire, and Mel felt that was the county that connected us all, the place where our paternal lines converged. He’d spent more than thirty years researching his ancestry in Lancashire, where the surnames Hollingsworth, Barlow, Hart and Crooks had been kicking around for centuries. I remembered reading that one of the earliest references to the Crooks surname could be found in the north of England—in Lancashire in particular—and now DNA was leading me to the very same region.

  That we all had different surnames didn’t surprise Mel. As he described it, back in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, just after surnames were introduced in England, people often changed their names like petticoats, especially if it gave them a leg up on a piece of land, entitled them to a certain position or status or improved their marriage prospects. The Crooks and Ainsworth families, he told me, had connections to the region’s famous Pilkington family, a powerful clan of knights and nobles. One Katherine Ainsworth had married Robert de Pilkington in the fifteenth century; their son Alexander, who inherited the estate at Rivington, married a Katherine de Crook, daughter of Richard de Crook of Whittle. Mel included links to websites so I could read more about them, and I did, burrowing into a rabbit hole of medieval dealings and marriages involving the Crookses of Lancashire.

  Founded in the twelfth century, around the same time that surnames were introduced in England, Lancashire was a county of green and grit, with rolling hills, pastures and farms but also quarries, mills, mines and shipbuilders, especially around Liverpool. Long before it was known for its football team or that little band called the Beatles, Liverpool was famous for its port. Nearly half the world’s trade was passing through by the early nineteenth century. And it may be that nothing did more to build its shipping business, and the city itself, than the slave trade. Ships dropped anchor with their American tobacco and cotton and sugar from the West Indies, and off it went to be milled or manufactured into goods that were shipped back to the colonies—and to Africa, to barter for more slaves to work the New World plantations. Round and round it went, with cargoes sold and resold even before they reached their destinations, making rich men of merchants and shipbuilders and making Liverpool the Empire’s slave-trading capital. According to the historian Roger Antsey, one out of every four vessels that left Liverpool in the seventeenth century was a slave-trading ship.

  Was that it? I wondered. Had one of the Crooks men of Lancashire been lured to the West Indies, to Jamaica, by the ships that docked so close to home? Even now, just south of Liverpool’s city centre there’s a road called Jamaica Street.

  I spent long nights reading up on ye olde Crookses of Lancashire, rummaging through the links Mel sent and other sites I found, all of which confirmed that the northern England Crooks clan had lived and prospered in the region for some nine centuries. From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century they had the largest manor in the township of Whittle-le-Woods (according to the digital library of British History Online, Crook Hall boasted nine hearths). There was a Thomas Crook of Hoole who founded numerous charities and lef
t a will that mentioned more than a dozen different estates, at Bretherton, Much Hoole, Mawdesley, Walton-le-Dale, Billinge, Euxton … and on it went. His widow, Abigail Crooks, passed this and more on to her son. There was a Richard Crook in 1705, “a gentleman” who built a Nonconformist chapel in Hindley, and a Samuel Crooke who registered his house in 1749 as a meeting place for Protestant dissenters. There were Crookses all over the county, in Bolton-le-Moors, in Bury, in Abram.

  Yet all the while I read, the futility of it nagged me. How could I guess if any of these people were my ancestors? What name was I looking for? I knew only the Captain’s, and he was born centuries after the people in these accounts. I knew nothing of his parents, whether they had come from Europe or been Jamaica-born. DNA suggested that Lancashire was significant, but it was useless for suggesting a when or a how. I had known this limitation going in, but I imagine that knowing about quicksand and experiencing it are entirely different things. Finding a paper trail that might bridge the gap between continents seemed unlikely; Mel had been working at his genealogical puzzle for thirty years and he was still piecing it together. But if I could somehow get a DNA sample from a descendant of one of those Crooks men in Lancashire, and if it matched our Crooks Y, it would at least tell me if I was barking up the right family tree.