DNA USA

by Bryan Sykes

  In feudal estates, like that granted to Ralph de la Pomerai and maintained by his descendants, there are two forces at work that can disengage the surname of the lord of the manor from his Y chromosome. There is no doubt that the privilege of the position was accompanied by increased mating possibilities. One of these was enshrined in the custom of droit du seigneur, when brides-to-be had to endure a night with the lord before beginning normal married life. When a son was born as a result, he would have the Y chromosome of the lord of the manor, but the surname of the woman’s husband. Sometimes the son would be given the lord’s surname in exchange for material support. That would not necessarily disengage the surname from the Y chromosome, unless the son was actually fathered by another man, the woman being happy to keep quiet and take the money.

  The Pomeroy case also showed how genetics can reveal, or dissolve, links to other names with similar spellings. Alternative spellings of the same name abound, and pose a particular puzzle for genealogists. Sometimes surnames are deliberately changed, and there are abundant examples of European immigrants to the United States and to Britain who have anglicized their surnames. Gutmann to Goodman, Beckmann to Beckham, and so on. It is very common. Later the name may be reverted to the original. But mistakes, deliberate or otherwise, by officials who are either processing immigration papers or recording births, are a common historical cause of alternative surname spellings. In medieval Britain, when most of the population was illiterate, it was the job of the local parson to register the births in his parish. Inquiring what the surname of the baby should be, it was an easy mistake to mishear the parents and write down a slightly different spelling, which, being unable to read, the parents were not in a position to correct. Even now, whenever I am dictating my name for a form or booking a restaurant over the phone, more than half the time I become Mr. Skyes. The only place this never happened was when I was researching the Sykes heartland in West Yorkshire. There they got it right every time.

  Alternative spellings are very common in the United States, either as deliberate adoptions to disguise a foreign origin or by the carelessness of clerks at Ellis Island, New York, or other entry points to the United States. Genetics has been helpful in linking American citizens with altered surnames back to their European origins. There are by now hundreds of examples, but one of the first in which I was involved, through Oxford Ancestors, was when we were approached by two American families, the Lehmans and the Bachmanns, with very similar requests. They were both looking to establish links back to presumed ancestors in Germany and Switzerland. Within each of the families, their own research in the records had uncovered an array of alternative spellings in the United States, so there were good reasons to turn to genetics to check whether the genealogical connections that had been made within each family were real or not.

  To cut two very long stories short, the Y chromosomes in both families gave a very clear idea of the different branches and the range of spellings within them. Among the Lehman family, there were three clear branches defined by Y chromosome signatures, but the distribution of alternative spellings was more or less random between them. One branch contained mainly Laymans and Laymons, but another Layman clearly belonged to another branch with Lemons, Lemmons, and Lehmans while a third had a bit of everything; Layman, Laymon, Lemon, Lemmon, and even La Mance, all of them genetically related to one another. Among the Bachmann family, on the other hand, there were only two alternative spellings, Beckman and Baughman, but that was no help in defining the family structure as both were found within each of the four main branches defined by their Y-chromosome signatures. Once again genetics had shown the dangers of assuming that individuals with the alternative spelling of a surname were necessarily related. With the real branch structure now revealed in both families, they were able to link members of each branch to the correct relatives back in Europe.

  In England it is surprising how many people claim to have ancestors who, like the Pomeroys, “came over” with William the Conqueror in 1066. This is a generally harmless boast, but I doubt if it is true in most cases. I hope it has not come as too much of a disappointment to the Pomeroys who have been proved to be genetically separated from Baron Ralph. I suspect, however, that the news will not have diminished their aspirations to a distinguished Norman ancestry.

  The English are not alone in craving a noble ancestry, and genetics has reignited this desire by opening up the possibility of proving it. Again, an early case in which I became involved concerned the Cloughs of New England. The Clough Society of North America is one of hundreds of one-name groups that, very early on, saw the benefit of genetics in testing the links between their members. The society had the advantage of having an experienced genealogist, Sheila Andersen, who got in touch with me to test the link she had found, by working through the records, that the U.S. Cloughs were related to the Welsh nobility of the same name. Accordingly my lab tested Clough Society members and Sir William Clough, the head of the Welsh noble branch of the family. Like many American genealogy groups, the Cloughs enjoy coming to Britain to search out the locations of their ancestors, and Sheila is very good at organizing these tours. This one included the fairy-tale village of Portmerion, built by another ancestor, the late Clough Williams Ellis. The location for the denouement, where I was to reveal the results of the Y-chromosome tests, was to be in St. John’s College in Oxford. Not my own college, but considered appropriately medieval for visiting Americans. This is not the only time that visiting groups, especially television documentary makers, have transplanted my perfectly good study to more “authentic” surroundings. No substitution was more impressive than when I was engaged to help unravel the Welsh ancestry of the actress Susan Sarandon. The producer decided that the appropriate location for our scene together should be none other than the stately home of the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace, a few miles north of Oxford and known the world over as the birthplace of Winston Churchill.

  Even the fabulously wealthy St. John’s College could not match the opulence of my “study” at Blenheim. Even so, the richly decorated college room with a fan-vaulted ceiling was a suitably historic venue, and after my introduction to the mechanics of the genetic tests, I came to the results. Most of the group of seven were women. They were Cloughs, all right; but, not having Y chromosomes themselves, had obtained the vital DNA samples from their male Clough relatives. In two cases this was from their husbands, so the women concerned did not have any strictly genetic Clough ancestry, but that did not diminish in the slightest their thirst for a touch of nobility in the family. I could sense the anticipation in the room when I flashed up the slide of the results, which was in the form of a color-coded table of the Y-chromosome fingerprints. Muffled yet audible sounds of delight filled the room as it became clear that the Clough Society Y-chromosome fingerprints matched the sample from Sir William. All except one, which was entirely unrelated. This chromosome, unfortunately, came from the holder of a high office in the society.

  Sometimes the records are ambiguous and point in two different ancestral directions. This was the case with the Lockwood family in America. They had been researching their English origins for several years, but the majority had been unable to discover where their ancestor had lived. Only one had been able to follow a paper trail back to an Edmund Lockwood, born in the Suffolk village of Combs in 1574. The others did not know whether they too could claim Edmund as their ancestor or whether they were from somewhere else altogether. To try to untangle this, the family had spent many years combing the records in the two English locations where Lockwoods were concentrated. One was in Yorkshire, in northern England, while the other was in Suffolk, in East Anglia. But so far the effort had been in vain. Uncertainty always saps enthusiasm, so the Lockwoods had a very good reason to want to know which of these two locations was home to their ancestor.

  This was a case ripe for genetics, and before long we had enrolled half a dozen male Lockwoods from either the old weaving town of Halifax, which our surn
ame map soon showed to be the present-day epicenter of the Yorkshire branch, or from around Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk. Their Y chromosomes immediately revealed that the Yorkshire and Suffolk Lockwoods were unrelated to each other, but that within each region their chromosomes matched. When six American Lockwood chromosomes were tested, they were all identical, and not only did they match one another, they also matched the Suffolk Lockwoods but not their Yorkshire namesakes. At a stroke the ambiguity had been eliminated, and the American Lockwoods could concentrate their considerable energies on Suffolk, freed from the gnawing anxiety that they were wasting their time. Which, in Yorkshire, it turned out they had been.

  The link I had discovered, almost by accident, between surnames and Y chromosomes has certainly found a use in testing the genealogical links between men with the same surname and illuminating the process of alternative spellings, as we have seen. This is all very interesting in what it says about surnames. But it also says a lot about men, and seemed to me to have the potential to explore the contrast in mating habits between the aristocracy and the peasantry, which my work on the genetic history of Britain and Ireland for Saxons, Vikings, and Celts had indicated was extreme. In the Pomeroy case there was circumstantial genetic evidence that the surname of the original Norman baron had been adopted by other men in the vicinity, and I have suggested how the behavior of the feudal lord and his descendants may have played a part in this. However, the Pomeroy case did not prove that the baron’s Y chromosome had been dispersed within the local population, as I suspect it very well might have been.

  A few years later I had the opportunity to carry out a direct test of this phenomenon, not around Berry Pomeroy, but on another large estate, this time in Wiltshire, in southern England. The estate was Longleat, and I had gotten to know the owner, Lord Bath, when he had asked me to see if he was related to “Cheddar Man,” a nine-thousand-year-old fossil excavated from Cheddar Caves, on his estate. I had just published my DNA results from Cheddar Man, which showed that this ancient relic was related, through his mitochondrial DNA, to a history teacher in the local school. The story encouraged much mirth, especially in the United States, as it reinforced the bucolic, stay-at-home image of the English in that the descendants of Cheddar Man had taken nine thousand years years to travel three hundred yards down the road. It turned out that Lord Bath was not related to Cheddar Man, but his butler, Cuthbert, was. If I expand on this amusing anecdote much longer I will be guilty of repeating myself, as I described the episode in The Seven Daughters of Eve.

  However, its relevance here is that when I was looking around for a test for what I came to think of as “aristocratic diffusion,” Longleat fitted the bill very well. The estate had been continuously in the hands of the Thynne family since the sixteenth century. More to the point, the majority of the estate workers, perhaps the most likely vectors of aristocratic diffusion, had come from the estate village of Horningsham a mile or so away. Lord Bath himself had become very enthusiastic about genetics and welcomed my inquiry. When I went to visit him in his penthouse at Longleat I was very pleased to see that he had mounted his mitochondrial family tree from the Cheddar Man case on the wall near his enormous chestnut desk. Lord Bath is famous as a confirmed polygamist, having at least fifty “wifelets” (his own description), who are rewarded with a cottage on the estate after sufficient years of service. Other than sexual pleasure, one objective of polygamy is reproduction, but, given that his offspring are still in single figures, I was not sure whether this has been as great a success as Lord Bath would have liked. However, the prospect of discovering that his ancestors had sired the population of Horningsham clearly had a certain appeal, and Lord Bath gave his permission for the project to go ahead. In fact he did a lot more than that, as we shall see.

  As I was going home I stopped off at Horningsham parish church to have a look round the churchyard. It was November and getting dark, but I was still able, with the help of my flashlight, to make out the names on some of the crumbling headstones. I was looking for surnames, and sure enough, there were only a few—Trollope, Long, Carpenter—with several examples of each. This is what I had expected and hoped for. It is a sign of a stable and static population, where surnames are winnowed out over the generations as families have no sons to carry them on. Genealogists know this phenomenon very well as a surname becomes less and less common and then disappears. Rather cruelly in my opinion, the surname is said to have “daughtered out.” In the United States, Dearborn is a numerous and well-known name. Almost all of the 5,000–10,000 U.S. Dearborns are descendants of one man, Godfrey Dearebarne, who arrived in New England in 1639. But while Dearborns have thrived in the United States, the name Dearebarne has disappeared from England, where it originated, the hapless victim of “daughtering out.”

  In the churchyard at Horningsham, daughtering out had reduced the variety of surnames to just a handful. This is very common in rural England, which I remember from my time as a postman in university Christmas vacations at my parents’ home in a village called Dedham on the Essex-Suffolk border. Being deep in the country, there were no house numbers. And there seemed to be only two surnames: Ablitt and Matthews. It was very frustrating trying to find the correct destinations for my consignment of Christmas cards, another unintended consequence of “daughtering out.” However, in Horningsham it worked to my advantage, and I set about contacting all the current residents with the few surviving surnames from the churchyard. Three months later, helped by the indomitable matriarch of the village, Vera Trollope, I had enough volunteers for the project to proceed.

  Longleat is one of the most beautiful stately homes in the whole of Britain. Built during the reign of Elizabeth I in 1580, it has a symmetrical elegance not always found in houses of that period. Its position in a shallow bowl of land embraced by low rolling hills means that the first sight you have of the house is a distant one, looking down from the wooded rim set in parkland laid out long ago by the prince of landscape gardeners, Capability Brown. Longleat was built by Sir John Thynne, a man who was not born into great wealth but who worked his way up by administering the affairs of others, finally becoming the right-hand man, or steward, to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, whom we have already met as the owner of Berry Pomeroy castle. At the same time Thynne began to build up his own property holdings, culminating in the purchase of Longleat in 1540. In 1549 he married into the wealthy Gresham family and began to plan the present house on the proceeds of his wife’s not inconsiderable dowry. Later the same year Edward Seymour lost not only his power base but also his head, but Thynne avoided execution and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was eventually released and, warned off politics, settled into country life at Longleat, where he and his wife, Christian, had nine children, with a further five, all sons, coming from a second marriage following Christian’s death. The Thynne dynasty continued to thrive in succeeding generations as their titles reflected their gradual ascent through the ranks of the peerage, first as baronets (1641), then viscounts (1682), and finally marquesses in 1789. Alexander Thynn, the current Lord Bath, who dropped the final e from his surname during the 1980s, is the seventh marquess, and a direct patrilineal descendant of Sir John. Thus he has inherited Sir John’s Y chromosome. The question was, could I also find the Thynne Y chromosome among the good people of Horningsham?

  The day of the DNA collection had arrived, a brilliantly sunny Saturday in late February, and about fifty villagers had assembled in Longleat’s sumptuous Red Library. I arrived with two assistants: my son Richard who, at fifteen, was already a veteran of several sampling expeditions all over the world; and Charlotte, a Danish graduate student from Oxford who had answered my advertisement for research assistants. Before the sampling session began we had been invited to a drawing room to meet Lord Bath and his weekend guests. I remember feeling slightly nervous going into the room and being met by the eyes of a dozen or so people arranged on comfortable sofas and easy chairs. Lord Bath was there, of course, wearing
a trademark embroidered skullcap, and he introduced us as the DNA collectors. Curled on the floor at his feet lay a cream Labrador. By his lordship’s side a strikingly elegant woman, her long blond hair interlaced with colored beads, reclined on a green velvet chaise longue. In an attempt to defuse my apprehension with bravado, I walked straight up to her and said, “We’ll start with you.” That is how I first met Ulla, my future wife.

  The magnificent Red Library, with its leather-bound volumes filling shelf upon shelf of gilded oak, had been laid out with chairs that were filled with eager Horningsham residents. After a short speech by Lord Bath introducing the purpose of the day, Richard, Charlotte, and I set about collecting the DNA by means of cotton swabs rubbed on the inside of the cheek. I used to do this myself until the occasion, in the Shetland Isles, when an elderly lady’s false teeth came loose and clamped the swab fast. After that I asked people to do it for themselves. Before long everyone had given a sample and their consent. Even the dog, whose name was Boudicca, joined in, though I was obliged to sign the consent form on her behalf. This had been a very special day.

  Returning to the scientific purpose of the visit, I was looking to match Lord Bath’s Y chromosome with men from Horningsham. If I found a match it would not necessarily mean that Lord Bath himself was the father of the man, though that was a formal possibility, but that the Thynne Y chromosome had escaped from Longleat House through the energies of one of his ancestors. The prospect appealed to Alexander, which is why he not only gave permission for the experiment but was wonderfully generous in making the arrangements, not only for the original collection but for the day when I returned to Longleat later that year to announce the results.

  This meeting took place in the vaulted undercroft, where chairs and tables had been arranged around the stout pillars that supported the house. I left the announcement until lunch was over. First I went through the results for each family that had taken part. Within each surname the Y-chromosome signatures had been the same. I wasn’t surprised by this, so was taken aback when one of the Trollopes asked, “Are you saying that we are related to the Trollopes from past the church?” “Well, yes,” I replied. “No, that can’t be right, we are from completely different families,” came the response. I had clearly scratched a deep sore in the village.