By this analysis, you quickly learn the places from which your immigrant ancestors came, according to your DNA, within an easy-to-read color-coded pie chart method.
By this pie chart presentation, we were able to deduce that a great great grandfather Fuller from Northern Ireland whose given name we do not know can't possibly have been a Scotch-Irish individual, as our father had always told us, but rather a wholly Scandinavian individual probably from the Scandinavian quarter of Londonderry.
However, the Ancestry.com DNA data told us some other things of a soapy and surprising nature.
One of the services provided by Ancestry.com is that they give you a list of others whose DNA has been tested who are related to you.
Though it is a statistical association -- ultimately, in every case, they are saying, "Odds are that you are related to this person" -- I have been able to verify the relationship to even some of the most distantly-related people in Ancestry.com's list, because of a fluke in my family's genealogy.
We are descended, in our family, from people in history with some of the most well-established genealogies in the world, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower. As a result, our family's family tree goes back very far. When the list of people whose DNA shows that they are cousins of ours, according to Ancestry.com, includes someone who names a very remote ancestor on their family tree, we can frequently verify that Ancestry.com's allegation of DNA connection even with such a person is substantially reliable, because the same remote ancestor is in our family tree, too.
This reliability of the work of the Ancestry.com folks makes significant two other trends within their DNA data ...
INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS
So far, out of about 2,500 people that Ancestry.com has identified as being visibly related to me on account of DNA similarities in our respective DNA test results, about 10 of them have been distant African American cousins.
African American distant cousins
Yes, in fact, they are, as far back as anyone can see in the records.
However, something else in the data explains why there are African Americans whom I should address as "blood." (One of my good friends is a former law client named Delevear. Del is one of the most honest, hard-working people I know. When I got back my DNA test results showing that I have African American cousins, I called him and with an African American lilt in my voice I greeted him, "Hey, blood!" Del, who is a really smart guy, responded, "You had your DNA checked!")
The other tendency within the data which helps to explain having African American cousins -- but this time within the pedigree charts of the African Americans whose DNA verified relationship with me and my family -- is the appearance of two surnames in their pedigree charts that are surnames of ancestors in my pedigree charts -- Pitman and Snapp.
Why would these two surnames feature prominently among distant African American cousins?
Because of this ...
Because I have slave owners of the Old South -- of the pre - Civil War South -- among my Pitman and Snapp ancestors.
White owners of the slaves in the Old South regularly "took adulterous sexual liberties with" the good-looking women and girls among the black slaves working on their farms and plantations when the wife wasn't around.
Famous southern Civil War chronicler Mary Chestnut wrote ...
"God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system of wrong and iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad—this only I see. Like the patriarchs our old men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think."
So, it is not surprising that, several times, the ancestors in the pedigree charts of those African Americans who are my cousins include Pitman's and Snapp's, the surnames of the two families as to whom records, beginning with the Census of 1790, verify that they were slave-owners on their farms in the Old South.
In other words, the same southern men of German extraction who fathered my ancestors engaged in "The Southern Vice" -- choosing mistresses from among their female slaves and fathering children by them, who carefully preserved the memory of that paternity by adopting their master's surname.
The most famous master-and-slave couple
from the pre - Civil War South,
President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemmings
Since Ancestry.com surely received DNA samples from less than 1/10 of 1% of African Americans, we can, with relative statistical certainty, assume that I and my siblings have upwards of 10,000 African American cousins.
After the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of liberated slaves who had long since survived wave after wave of tropical disease on the farms and plantations of their southern slave masters came north with the returning Union soldiers and settled in the cities of the North, unaware that many were carriers of those tropical diseases and so bringing the diseases with them to the cities of the North.
And so we see the cities of the North afflicted with one epidemic of tropical disease after another in the post - Civil War period. More Northerners were killed by these epidemics than Southern bullets.
My great grandfather William Samuel Charles Dawson was among those killed. When at 39 years of age he and his wife Annie Fuller Mallon Dawson and their 5 kids were hob-nobbing with the Upper Middle Class in their large Uber Street residence just off Columbia Avenue in North Philadelphia, in 1868 to 1869, a boarding house for liberated slaves was opened in the residence next to his. In short order, William Samuel Charles Dawson was dead of typhoid fever.
How ironic it would have been if this ancestor of my father had contracted the disease which killed him by shaking hands with a descendant of one of the slave-owing ancestors of my mother who had had sex with and conceived a child by one of his female slaves.
The master / slave relationship which was the context of such interracial concubinage in the pre - Civil War South does not permit any easy distinction between concubinage and rape by historians: "The boss says, 'Lay down,' and so I got to lay down!" So, if we ask, "Which was it? Concubinage or rape?," no one can tell.
Whatever it was, it ultimately had a good result, ironically. It generated African American descendants which challenge us descendants of European immigrants with African American cousins, more than other Caucasian Christian folks, to accept the concept of "The Family of Man": "They" aren't "they." "They" are "us."
ADULTERY
A few of the folks who had their DNA tested by Ancestry.com and whose DNA proves that they are distant cousins have their pedigree on the pedigree charts worked out nearly as thoroughly and as far back as I do.
Now, the list of DNA cousins which Ancestry.com gives you, and constantly updates, as more DNA results come in, is broken-up into several groups of closer and more distant cousins:
The "4TH COUSINS" group, which itself is re-parsed into the "EXTREMELY HIGH LIKELIHOOD" group and "VERY HIGH LIKELIHOOD" group.
This group includes everyone from brothers and sisters to first, second, third, and fourth cousins.
And then there is the "DISTANT COUSINS" group, which is again re-parsed into a "VERY HIGH LIKELIHOOD," "HIGH LIKELIHOOD" and "GOOD LIKELIHOOD" groups.
This group includes relatives who are usually in the 4th to 9th cousin range.
Now, a mystery sometimes arises in the DNA results when someone is in the "4TH COUSINS" grouping, or in the top of the "DISTANT COUSINS" grouping, and also has an extremely well done pedigree chart:
They share no surnames, at all, with my ancestors.
How could this be? There are several cases where the DNA results prove that so-and-so is a very close relative, but yet his ancestry shares no last names with my ancestry on the pedigree charts.
I puzzled over this for a few years -- and then the obvious explanation dawned on me:
Philandering.
Liaisons.
Adultery.
Unknown to daddy, some of the children who popped out of mommy in my ancestors' families or in my relative's ancestors' families, who later became my ancestors or his ancestors, WEREN'T daddy's!
And, lo and behold, we know of at least one philandering ancestor on my mother's side.
No comments:
Post a Comment