Category: Genetics

Bure Tree Redrawn

Bure Tree Redrawn

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I’m surprised we don’t hear more DNA stories like this, particularly in Scandinavia where the widespread use of patronymics would channel research along these lines.

The Bure family in Sweden, a prominent family since medieval times, has a project devoted to using yDNA to investigate the early origins of their patrilineage.

They recently found a match whose accumulated mutations show he must belong to a branch that separated from their line in historic lines but would not be descended from their earliest known ancestor.

Every genealogist’s dream, but it takes work. And a bit of luck.

We have a similar situation with the Svanström connection to the Briese family but we haven’t attracted the same level of attention a prominent family like the Bures does.

The yDNA suggests the common ancestor of the Svanströms and Brieses lived within historic times. Maybe in the 1600s or 1700s. And now we have a closer connection to the Kruse family. The Briese family has a formal project. We’re tagged along with them.

Our earliest proven ancestor was Peter Jönsson Cavat (1732-1759). His son Jonas adopted the name Svanström. Some descendants exchanged Svanström for Ögrim and Øgrim.

Because of the geographic distribution of our closest yDNA matches, it now seems clear Peter Cavat’s paternal ancestor, not so far back, came to Sweden from what is now Germany. Perhaps from in or near Lütjenburg in Schleswig-Holstein, up near the Danish border. That’s where our Kruse cousins originated. (My sisters might perk up here: this is the same town where Grandma Place and the Gottschs originated.)

Both Peter Cavat and Jonas Svanström were connected through their wives to the German merchant community. There are several Kruse families in Sweden. The ones I’ve been able to track have been from Germany. That makes sense; Kruse is a German name that means curly. Some were even in Östergötland and Kalmar, near the Svanström family.

My guess is that we’ll turn out to be a branch of one of those families, but we need more testing of Swedish Kruses to make it work. Testing will help both by including and excluding possible connections.

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Jukes and Kallikaks

Jukes and Kallikaks

by Justin Durand

Not many people remember it now, but biologists used to like the idea of eugenics, improving humans by controlling who is allowed to reproduce. In that whole muddle the Jukes and Kallikaks were iconic.

In 9th grade biology our textbooks had a chapter on genetics. Mendel and all that. I was already a fledgling genealogist. I loved the little charts that illustrated dominant and recessive genes. That’s when I assimilated the convention that squares on the charts represent men, and circles represent women.

Source: Michelle Mischke, MIT OpenCourseWare

But the genealogical gold was in the Jukes and Kallikaks. These were two “families” that had been the subject of genetic studies in the early 20th century. Our text included them to make the point eugenics had been a thing. A long time ago.

The names used for these folks, Jukes and Kallikak, were pseudonyms used to protect their privacy.

We got little summaries, in a sidebar. Just enough to whet a genealogical appetite. In my opinion it was the best part of our Biology textbook, and far too brief.

The Jukes family were “a race of criminals, paupers and harlots”, descended from “Max”, who settled on the New York frontier in the early 18th century. One of his sons married “Ada”, “mother of criminals”.

Then there were the Kallikaks. They were descended from “Martin Kallikak”, who had served in the Continental army. On his way home from the war he had a dalliance with a feeble-minded bar maid. Their descendants were a “race of degenerates.” When he got home he married a respectable Quaker woman. Their descendants were upstanding citizens.

How odd, I thought. Martin Kallikak must have had no good or bad himself if his children took after their mothers. It was a puzzle to me for a long time. How did no one ever notice that at the time?

It would be interesting if someone now were to create a genealogy project that showed the actual families, with all their complex links. I’m not going to be the one to do it but I wouldn’t mind wasting a few hours clicking around.

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Warren’s Cherokee Ancestry

Warren’s Cherokee Ancestry

by Justin Durand

I was at coffee with a friend a few days ago when we got mired in a debate about Elizabeth Warren. I was struck by how much misinformation I was hearing. It doesn’t need to be this hard.

There is a political narrative that says Warren lied about her Cherokee ancestry. That’s a story for suckers.

First, anyone with experience doing American genealogy will be aware that stories about Cherokee ancestry are a dime a dozen. It seems like half the people in the American South and West think there’s a Cherokee princess somewhere in their ancestry. And, the number is significantly higher in Oklahoma, where the Feds ultimately settled the Cherokee tribe.

Very few people who claim Cherokee ancestry can prove it. Many of them spend a lifetime trying to find some evidence, anything at all. It shouldn’t surprise anyone–except maybe an insular New Yorker–that Elizabeth Warren, who is from Oklahoma, would have a family tradition about Cherokee ancestry. It’s even less surprising that she can’t prove it. (Welcome to the club, Liz.)

Second, Warren made the mistake of taking a DNA test, in hopes of ending the controversy. That was probably just about the worst thing she could have done. The test ticked off Indians across America without producing an answer that would satisfy non-Indians.

Anglo America has defined tribal membership for Indians by using European kinship rules rather than Indian rules. Anglos ask how much Indian ancestry someone has. Indians nowadays generally want to ask whether someone is part of the culture of their tribe. One of Warren’s mistakes was exactly this. By taking a DNA test Warren was using Anglo rules to claim an Indian identity.

In an ideal world, the DNA test that showed Warren’s Indian ancestry might have satisfied non-Indians but it didn’t. The test showed she is about 1 / 1024 Indian. In other words, speaking very approximately her DNA is about what it would be if she had a 10th great grandparent who was Indian.

Except it doesn’t work that way. The science isn’t that exact. One of the problems (there are others) is that DNA gets shuffled. Percentages are an average. No one gets an exactly equal amount of DNA from every ancestor in a particular generation. After about 5 generations the DNA tends to wash out. In other words, there is no way to know whether Warren’s 1 / 1024 is luck of the draw from a 2nd great grandparent, or a miraculous survival from 10 generations ago, or even a false positive.

The Cherokee Tribe presents another wrinkle to the problem. Almost every Cherokee I know, including some close relatives, appears to be very Anglo judging only by physical appearance. One reason for that is membership in the tribe depends only on having an ancestor who appears on the 1906 Dawes Roll, a citizenship roll prepared by the Federal government. Neither biology nor cultural plays any role here. If Warren were to discover an ancestor on the Dawes Roll, the political debate would be resolved immediately.

Over and above these problems, there is another. Not all Indians are critical of Warren’s claim of Cherokee ancestry. There are competing schools of thought. One is that Anglo America can never be secure in their conquest until they have entirely exterminated or assimilated all Indians.

The other school of thought is that Indians gain increased security for the future by having White allies. The Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma in reported to have said in 2012 that he wished “every congressman and senator in the U.S. had a kinship or felt a kinship to the Cherokee Nation.”

Elizabeth Warren’s case interests me because in my father’s family we have some contested Indian ancestry, although the details play out differently than Warren’s. For myself, I find the problem of Indian ancestry to be a reason to ask questions, to learn and grow, and not so much a reason to dig in. If Warren weren’t so busy with other things, that would be my advice to her.

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DNAPainter

DNAPainter

by Justin Durand

So. I was using Genome Mate. It was a lot of work for not much result. There was an update. Always more work. I never got around to doing it, and never went back.

So now I’m looking at DNAPainter. Worth taking a shot, or will it just be extra useless work?

Roberta Estes says, “DNAPainter is one of my favorite tools because DNAPainter, just as its name implies, facilitates users painting their matches’ segments on their various chromosomes. It’s genetic art and your ancestors provide the paint!

“People use DNAPainter in different ways for various purposes. I utilize DNAPainter to paint matches with whom I’ve identified a common ancestor and therefore know the historical ‘identity’ of the ancestors who contributed that segment.”

I wonder. Painting is fun, but I’m more just a genealogist. Cousins are fun, but they’re not the entire game. I’m going to always lose interest in any tool that doesn’t help identify new ancestors.

What Happened to the Old Europeans?

What Happened to the Old Europeans?

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Here’s a video from Masaman about the Old Europeans. He explains, they are “the original people groups of Europe that inhabited the landmass before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, a group which would later evolve into the vast majority of European nations we see today, from the Russians, Italians, Irish, Norwegians and Greeks.“

Not much is known, but our knowledge is inching forward with new techniques and discoveries.

I’m posting about the Old Europeans here because the G2a Hauris — along with other members of haplogroup G2a — are probably among the survivors of this older European population that was overrun by invading Indo-Europeans in the Bronze Age.

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Updated Oct. 22, 2019 to add an additional link.