DNA Testing: In Our Blood

Ethan Hill for Newsweek (left); Monticello-Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. Jefferson ‘Cousins’: Did Thomas Jefferson father as many as six children with his slave Sally Hemmings? DNA evidence can’t absolutely prove it, but these strangers now embrace each other as family--all claiming America’s third president as an ancestor.

Genetic genealogy has developed a cultlike following. Last fall, 175 genetic sleuths from as far away as Hawaii gathered for the second annual Family Tree DNA conference at National Geographic's headquarters in Washington, D.C., to share their haplogroups and bone up on the latest science. The genealogy garb was everywhere. Most notable: double-helix ties and pins with haplogroup logos. Forget HI, MY NAME IS JANE. Here it was R1b (Western Europe) meets J2 (Middle East). Participants who once relied only on birth records and marriage licenses to trace their family roots now listened spellbound as scientists presented arcane PowerPoints with daunting DNA lingo ("nucleotides," "autosomes," "short tandem repeats"). Over cafeteria hamburgers and hot dogs, they shared information about roadblocks they'd encountered in their ancestral paperwork—"nonpaternity events" (polite term for an affair, for example, which may have muddied the lineage) and families that had "daughtered out" (a much-bemoaned end to the family surname). Then they raved about the new frontier of DNA testing. "This is a group of geeks," Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak said with a smile during a coffee break. Her T shirt: GENEALOGY: IT'S IN MY DNA.

For Smolenyak, DNA blew up a family legend. Paper records had her believing that every Smolenyak in the world could be traced back to one of four families in Osturna, Slovakia. But after testing the DNA of individuals in each group, she discovered no genetic connection. "I got smacked upside the head," says Smolenyak, co-author of "Trace Your Roots With DNA." "I was wrong." It wasn't just family lore that interested her: she was dating a Smolenyak at the time (now her husband), and it was nice to confirm that she could bury any fear of a kissing-cousins nightmare. "As it turns out," she says, "I could not have picked a guy more distantly related to me."

DNA testing is forcing some people to rethink their identities. Phil Goff, 42, of Naperville, Ill., thought his heritage was pure English, but a Y chromosome test matched him at least partially to Scandinavia. Now he wonders if he has any Viking blood in him. Alvy Ray Smith, 62, uncovered roots tracing back to the Puritans in 1633. "It was astonishing," says Smith, who thought his closest relatives were Irish potato farmers. "It gave me a whole different model of myself." Nick Donofrio, executive VP of innovation and technology at IBM, which is partnering with National Geographic on the Genographic Project, is a proud Italian. He was stunned when his Y test came back saying he was a member of haplogroup J2, meaning his ancestors had lived in the Middle East some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. "You could have pushed me over with a feather," he says. After Donofrio announced his results on IBM's Web site, his in box started filling up with J2 colleagues. "A lot of Armenians have been sending me e-mails saying 'J2 rocks!' "

Armed with their haplotypes, which function as genetic blueprints, genealogists can now join Surname Projects on the Internet. These online communities bring together other Doolittles or Sanchezes or Epsteins, allowing people to compare genomes. Find a match, and you may be able to fill in branches on your family tree. Looking for relatives without your surname? You can also search within individual testing companies or in public databases like the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, funded by Mormon philanthropist John Sorenson, which has collected 60,000 DNA samples and ancestral charts over the past 4½ years. "Eventually, you'll be able to query the database and find relatives you don't even know you have," says Sorenson's chief scientific officer Scott Woodward.

Some people think they already have. After genetic testing in 1998 revealed that Thomas Jefferson was most likely the father of at least one of Sally Hemings's children, Julia Westerinen, 71, of Staten Island, N.Y., and Shay Banks-Young, 61, of Columbus, Ohio, found each other. They look nothing alike—Westerinen's skin is white, Banks-Young's is black—but they claim one another as cousins. Neither one can prove through DNA that she is related to Thomas Jefferson himself, but that doesn't faze them. Nor does it bother Prinny Anderson, a white descendant of Thomas and Martha Jefferson's. Last week Anderson mingled with Jefferson's "unproven" black relatives at a gathering in Virginia. DNA testing isn't the end-all and be-all, she says. "I'm delighted with these additional cousins."

The science can also uncover links to ancient cultures, even religious heritage. Dr. Karl Skorecki was told from childhood that he was one of the Cohanim, descended from Moses' brother Aaron, a high Jewish priest. He was sitting in synagogue one day when he noticed that another Cohan who was called to the Torah looked nothing like him. "He was a Jewish male of African ancestry, I am a Jewish male of European ancestry," Skorecki, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, remembers thinking. "If he has that tradition and I have that tradition, perhaps there's a greater chance that we share similar markers on the Y chromosome." Would the oral history passed down from Cohan father to Cohan son also be inscribed in their DNA? After studying DNA samples, Skorecki and geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona uncovered a genetic Cohan signature.

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