by Bryan Sykes
After I found that our Y chromosomes matched and so we were likely descended from a common ancestor, I randomly recruited around one hundred other male Sykeses from the phone books of West Yorkshire, where the name is concentrated, and found that 60 percent of us also shared this same Y chromosome. I have written about this extensively in Adam’s Curse, so I won’t repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that the association must have lasted for eight hundred years, since, like many other English names, Sykes became hereditary during the thirteenth century. For that to be so, the nonpaternity rate must have been much lower than I or my colleagues had, rather lazily and certainly mistakenly, assumed. For the Sykes name this rate worked out at just over 1 percent per generation. For other surnames, like Dyson from the same Yorkshire valley, it was even less, with 95 percent of Dysons sharing the same Y-chromosome fingerprint. I was fortunate in that the shared Sykes Y chromosome was rare, rather like Jefferson’s in that respect, as this made the matches very significant from a statistical point of view because they were very unlikely to have happened by chance. I think the effect was so striking, though, that even if the Sykes Y chromosome had been a common type, the fact that 60 percent of us shared it would have shown up as unusual.
Not being a genealogist, I was not really aware of the practical importance of this discovery, but that was to change very fast. Within days of the publication of the paper announcing the Sykes results, in April 2000, the lab was swamped by requests from members of the public asking us to help with their own genealogical research.2 The scientific paper had a fair amount of press coverage in Britain, including an appearance on breakfast television where I remember sharing the sofa with the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov (and in complete contrast and basically setting the tone of the show, a man who could balance on a coconut using only his thumbs). In the United States there was an article in the New York Times. The following week the London Times carried a feature on the seven clan mothers I had identified and named, following the mitochondrial DNA research in Europe. That also triggered a huge response from the public, with requests for genetic tests. So we were very soon faced with a choice in the lab, and I called a meeting in the conference room to come to a decision.
We agreed that we could not, and should not, use our research time and money to test individual families purely for their own interest. Once the general principle of the surname/Y-chromosome link had been established with the twenty or so names we were then working on, we would not be able to justify much more work, except in special cases with their own intrinsic academic interest. Our choice was, then, whether to decline these requests from the public or to set up a proper mechanism for dealing with them. We debated this long and hard. One or two members of the lab were apprehensive and against any “commercialization,” as they saw it. But in the end the argument that won the day was that we had by chance stumbled onto something that evidently appealed to a large number of people. To do nothing about it seemed to me and most of my colleagues to be tantamount to saying that we were only doing this research for the small audience of our scientific peers, not for the public. We agreed that we should respond, and that it was right to do so. We set up Oxford Ancestors that same week, hired a technician, and began taking orders for both Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA tests, the first company in the world to do so.
It took another year to set up an operationally independent commercial arrangement with separate staff and premises in a local business park. The company is still going strong and has recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. I am sure I was mistaken in thinking that if we didn’t do something about the public demand, it would go unsatisfied—there are now plenty of other companies doing this sort of thing—but I don’t regret doing so for a minute. Oxford Ancestors has helped tens of thousands of people “explore their genetic roots,” as it says in the company logo. It has been a great experience seeing so many aspects of what people can discover from their DNA, and along the way I have encountered some absolutely fascinating reactions. As I write, a decade into the era of public accessibility, I estimate that almost a million people have had their DNA tested for either mitochondrial or Y-chromosome DNA, or both. A lot of this has been personally financed, as it should be, through private companies like Oxford Ancestors in the UK, Family Tree DNA and Relative Genetics in the United States, as well as through American companies specializing in African ancestry.
Though Oxford Ancestors began in my university genetics lab in response to an unanticipated demand, other companies had different primary motivations, even if all of them ended up doing much the same thing. In the case of Houston-based Family Tree DNA, it was the curiosity of its genealogist founder that provided the vital spark, as the ebullient Bennett Greenspan explained when I visited him at the company premises on the top floor of a commercial building on the outskirts of this thinly spread city. Greenspan had taken an interest in the work on the Y chromosomes of the hereditary Jewish priesthood, the Cohanim. Briefly, the male descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses, were selected to serve as priests. Genetic corroboration of the Old Testament tradition came when a particular Y chromosome was found at much higher frequency among Ashkenazic Cohanim than in comparable non-Cohanim. Greenspan became aware of this when he read the Wall Street Journal report of the earlier Nature publication in July 1998.3 He knew nothing about DNA, as he readily admits, but was already an experienced genealogist and, as a Jew, the Cohanim story caught his eye. The news also came at a time when he had just sold his photographic-products business, having correctly anticipated the effect of the digital camera revolution on the demand for film. So he was on the lookout for something new into which to channel his energies. His first visit was to the University of Arizona and the laboratory of Dr. Michael Hammer, one of the early pioneers of uncovering the genetic variation in the Y chromosome on which all subsequent studies depended. Although Hammer was not one of the members of the Cohanim project, which was carried out in England and Israel, he was the obvious man to speak to. And, in American terms, it wasn’t that far from Houston to Tucson.
Bennett Greenspan had a particular project in mind when he called on Hammer. He was trying to see whether another man named Greenspan, from Argentina, was related to himself, and having been unable to find a paper trail connecting the two of them, he realized the potential of the Y chromosome to solve the issue. It was as he was leaving that Hammer said to him, “Someone really should turn this into a business”—which is exactly what Bennett Greenspan did. Thus, Family Tree DNA was born, opening for business within weeks of Oxford Ancestors’ debut in 2000. As it turned out, he and the Argentinean Greenspan were not genetically related, and before you ask, no, Bennett still doesn’t know if he is related to his namesake Alan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
The third early genetic genealogy company also sprang from a university, but in a rather different way from Oxford Ancestors or Family Tree DNA. For many years Salt Lake City had been at the center of global efforts to map and sequence the human genome. The city’s location and its connection to the Mormon Church with its deep interest in tracing family connections and unequaled historical records made it a natural place to explore the potential for genealogy of the new genetic knowledge. I had gotten to know Dr. Scott Woodward from Brigham Young University when we had both been working in the field of ancient DNA, so it was no surprise to find him leading the initiative as head of the Sorenson Genome Institute. I had planned to visit him, but a bush fire in Yellowstone National Park intervened, and I had to ask my questions during a phone call from San Francisco. Since we had known each other a long time, this was almost as good as a face-to-face meeting, and I asked him to tell me how he had become involved.
Woodward told me of being woken in the early hours one morning by a phone call. It came from Norway, which explained the awkward timing, and the caller was James LeVoy Sorenson. Sorenson, who died in 2008 at the age of 86, was the richest man in Utah, and although Scott had never met him, he cert
ainly knew who he was. Sorenson had made a fortune first in real estate and then as an inventor of medical devices, notably the first modern intravenous catheter and, more prosaically, the disposable surgical mask. He was also a Mormon, having served his obligatory mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New England in his early twenties. While in Norway, where his ancestors had their roots, and evidently aware of the growing application of genetics to the questions of human origins, he had come up with an idea.
“Scott,” he asked, “how much would it cost to do Norway?” It became clear to the by-now-wide-awake Woodward that “doing Norway” meant DNA testing the entire population of four million people. “Tens of millions of dollars, at least,” was his off-the-cuff response. There was no immediate answer from Sorenson, and Woodward imagined that the figure was way too high, much higher than Sorenson had in mind. The call ended, and Scott went back to sleep assuming he had heard the last if it. He was mistaken. When Sorenson returned to Salt Lake City he arranged a meeting with Woodward in order to come up with a plan for “doing Norway.” (When you are the richest man in Utah, with a fortune estimated at $4.5 billion, tens of millions must seem like small change.) To his credit, Woodward managed to persuade Sorenson that perhaps “doing Norway” was not the best way to go and managed to morph the ambitious yet geographically limited project into something with much greater promise. Why not collect DNA from volunteers all over the world along with their family histories? Sorenson quickly agreed, and Woodward left Brigham Young to lead the project at the eponymous research institute. The aim was to collect and store a hundred thousand DNA samples, an ambition realized in 2007. There was also a commercial arm, Relative Genetics, which like Oxford Ancestors and Family Tree DNA offered a service direct to the public.
Last, there has been a numerically impressive initiative with corporate backing. The Genographic Project, a joint venture of National Geographic and IBM, has tested DNA from 350,000 people from all over the world since it began in 2005. The project leader, Dr. Spencer Wells, who rejoices in the enviable title of a National Geographic “Explorer-in-Residence,” is himself a geneticist, and he and I once worked in the same research institute in Oxford, though not in the same laboratory. His expertise was in the genetics of the cellular immune system, a horrendously complicated natural defense arsenal that keeps our bodies from being overrun by pathogens. Unfortunately it can take its job a bit too seriously and turn its impressive destructive powers against our own bodies, leading to rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune conditions. It is also the system that causes tissue transplant rejection. However, the bewildering genetic variation that underpins the autoimmune system has been seized upon by geneticists as a more sophisticated equivalent of blood groups, and put to use in differentiating populations for the purposes of finding out where people came from. I have never particularly liked this approach to unraveling the past, for reasons I have written about in The Seven Daughters of Eve. It meant that Spencer and I never worked closely together in Oxford. While I cut my teeth in the coral-fringed islands of Polynesia, Spencer’s chosen region was the harsh and arid steppe land of Central Asia, in particular Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. By the time he became the director of the Genographic Project, Spencer had wisely abandoned the genetics of the autoimmune system and switched to the stalwarts that are mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome.
Soon after finding the genetic link between the Y chromosome and a handful of English surnames, including my own, and while the whole field was firmly within the “research” phase—meaning that we weren’t going to get any objections from our main funders, the Wellcome Trust—an opportunity came my way to test, in depth, the usefulness of the surname/Y-chromosome association. With the Sykes study and the other names used to check that Sykes was not for some reason unique, there was no parallel genealogical research. I had basically picked the volunteers randomly. So long as they shared a surname, that was all that mattered. While I was on the lookout for a surname with a well-researched genealogy behind it, I was contacted by Chris Pomery. An interesting man in many ways, he had recently returned from a spell as a correspondent in the Berlin offices of the London Times as well as other assignments in Prague. He has since written two successful books on DNA and genealogy that have been very useful practical introductions for genealogists all over the world. When I first met Chris he exuded—whether deliberately or not—something of the air of an international man of mystery, which added spice to his visits to my lab in Oxford.
In between his (as we all liked to imagine) murky dealings in Eastern Europe, Chris had done a huge amount of genealogical work on his own surname. He had tracked down 825 living holders of the Pomeroy name and its variants and linked them through the records to one of fifty-one named ancestors. Some of these ancestors lived a long time ago, the oldest in the 1600s, while others were much more recent. There were also different spellings to be considered, like “Pomery,” “Pomroy,” and “Pummery,” that might or might not be genetically related. As so often in genealogical research, there were no reliable records with which to connect the different branches, and Chris approached me to see if genetics might provide the means of doing so. When he outlined the situation to us in Oxford, his project seemed to have all the ingredients we were looking for as a practical test of the Y chromosome, and we immediately decided to go ahead.
One of the advantages of working in Oxford is that undergraduate students in the biological sciences have to do a piece of original research during their final year and write a dissertation. Each year I took on at least one of these bright youngsters, and I could see that the Pomeroy project would be ideal. It would be bound to generate results for the dissertation, it was contained rather than open-ended, and above all it was original and interesting. The student in 2000 was David Campbell, and the three of us met in the coffee room at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, the location for many a planning session, to map out the details. Chris explained that the surname Pomeroy originated from the Norman adventurer Ralph de la Pomerai, who was granted a number of English manors by William the Conqueror as a reward for his loyalty and support during the Norman invasion of 1066. The manors were mainly in the southwestern county of Devon, with the family seat at Berry Pomeroy castle. The castle, now a ruin, is tucked away in a steep wooded valley a few miles outside the picturesque and historic town of Totnes. It was sold in 1547 to Edward Seymour, the first Duke of Somerset and brother of Jane Seymour, the third wife of King Henry VIII. Berry Pomeroy, now uninhabited except by the ghost of the White Lady (ghosts are considered a de rigeur accessory in all the best castles), still belongs to the Somerset family, now headed by John Seymour, the nineteenth duke.
We picked one member of each of the fifty-one groups that Chris had identified as being related through the records, and David began the (at that time) laborious process of generating their Y-chromosome signatures. By then we had expanded the number of markers we used from four to seven, still very limited by today’s standards. Even so, when the results were all in, they were very revealing indeed. Despite the fact that the name originated in a single individual, Ralph de la Pomerai, the genetics revealed that the fifty-one volunteers belonged to at least eight genetically unrelated branches. Chris expressed little surprise at this, but I was certainly taken aback. In the other names that I was researching at around the same time, the general rule had been that when a surname was rare and its geographical distribution localized, there was usually just one major branch descending from a single ancestor. Of course that would not be the case in a common occupational surname like Carpenter or Fletcher, or names that were clearly derived from a feature of the landscape such as Bush, Hill, or Greenwood. But for Pomeroy, confined as it was to Devon and Cornwall and having a very definite origin, I thought something else must be going on. But from a very practical point of view, the genetics had shown Chris and his fellow Pomeroy researchers which of the links between the fifty-one groups could be followed up in the reco
rds with confidence and which would be a waste of time. Since then Chris and his colleagues have expanded the Pomeroy project to become “probably the most advanced surname project in the world,” according to the project Web site. They have thoroughly investigated the genetic links between alternative spellings of the name: “Pomery,” “Pummery,” “Pomroy”; in Australia, “de Pomeroy” and “Pommeroy”; and, in the United States, “Pumroy.” Interestingly, men with some spellings, like “Pomery,” usually share the same Y chromosome, while with others the genetics bears little or no relationship to the spelling, a reminder to genealogists everywhere that names can mutate much faster than Y chromosomes.
In some cases we know the precise origin of a surname, and can be certain that it was unique. Take Dyson as an example, which careful research by Dr. George Redmonds has shown to be an unusual case of a matronymic name meaning “the son of Di.” The Di in this case was an unmarried cattle rustler called Dionissia of Linthwaite who named her son, John, born in 1316, after herself rather than his father. With this unusual single origin, it is far less surprising that the name Dyson has a very tight association with a particular Y-chromosome fingerprint, which also has the advantage of itself being quite rare in the general population. In the case of Pomeroy, where there is a named ancestor, Ralph de la Pomerai, what is the cause of this unexpected surplus of genetically different ancestors all with the same rare surname? Here we see for the first time that the rules that apply to the peasants, and I have to include the Sykes line here, do not apply to the nobility.