Independent Perspective News - Where do we really come from?

By Kathleen McGowan

Brent Kennedy's 19th-century ancestors stare out from his photo albums with dark eyes, high cheekbones, olive skin, and thick black hair—a genetic riddle waiting to be solved. It comes as no surprise that Elvis Presley, Ava Gardner, and Abraham Lincoln may be among their kin, yet the members of this tribe have never fitted properly into American racial categories. Depending on the census taker or tax man, they were classified as white, "free persons of color," or mulatto, often drifting across the color line as they moved from county to county.

Kennedy calls himself a Melungeon, but no one knows exactly what that means. There are perhaps as many as 200,000 Melungeons in the United States today, all descended from a mysterious colony of olive-skinned people who lived for centuries in the foothills of the Appalachians. Some say the Melungeons can be traced back to Portuguese sailors, shipwrecked in the 16th century, or to colonial-era Turkish silk workers. Others point to Gypsies, to Sir Francis Drake's lost colony of Roanoke, or to the ancient Phoenicians. It's not even clear where the word Melungeon comes from: It might be derived from the French mélange or even a corruption of an Arabic or Turkish term for "cursed souls."

One of the keys to unlocking the mystery, Kennedy believes, lies in DNA analysis. Three years ago, he and the other leaders of the Melungeon Heritage Association enlisted the help of Kevin Jones, a biologist at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, and began rounding up genetic samples from local families. Now, on a steamy June afternoon in Kingsport, Tennessee, at the fourth Melungeon reunion, the results of the study were about to be revealed. Brent Kennedy and his people were finally going to find out what they were made of.

Up on the dais, Jones looked sweaty and miserable in a coat and tie. A wry Londoner with a brush mustache, he was used to spending most of his time researching fungi, bacteria, and the evolutionary relationships among slime molds. He had thought this project would be fun, maybe even medically important. But just now he looked as if he would rather be contemplating a patch of glop in the woods.

Genetic analysis seems to promise a final answer to the bottomless question of identity, a straightforward explanation of our species' hundreds of thousands of years of wandering the globe. Instead, Jones had inadvertently discovered, research like his has a way of stirring the ancestral pot, of upending rock-solid theories, of shredding individual identities and national origin myths alike. In short, as the Melungeons were soon to find out, DNA breaks hearts.

The human genome stashes its secrets away like a dotty great-aunt, wrapping heirlooms in rags in the attic, burying prized family portraits beneath stacks of newspaper clippings. It's hard to find meaningful patterns amid clutter, but by the early 1980s molecular biologists began to do so. The mutations that our genomes have accumulated over the millennia aren't just junk, they realized. They can be read like a ledger.

Most of the time, the 3 billion nucleotides in the human genome reproduce just fine. Occasionally, though, one of the nucleotide base pairs that make up the molecule gets switched, or a short stretch of genetic code is duplicated. Figuring out who is related to whom, scientists have realized, is just a matter of comparing these mutations. People with recent ancestors in common will have many of the same mutations. Distant relatives will share fewer of them.

To determine who donated which genes, molecular anthropologists look at two sections of the genome passed directly from parent to child. In men, that's the famous Y chromosome, which every father gives to his son. In women, it's mitochondrial DNA—small loops of genetic material tucked away in the mitochondria of most cells. Everybody has mtDNA, as it is known, but only women pass it on.

Mitochondrial DNA is the more tractable of the two molecules: It's short—only 16,569 nucleotides long—and can be isolated from strands of hair. It also mutates frequently, leaving a rich record of ancestry. Y chromosome studies are trickier and more labor-intensive because the chromosome is huge (about 60 million bases long) and not as well cataloged. As a result, mtDNA research took off first, booming in the 1980s and 1990s. Y work caught on only a few years ago.

The analysis was sheer drudgery at first, but as DNA technology improved, reading history from genes became automatic. Anthropologists now isolate the Y chromosome DNA or mtDNA from the rest of the cellular gunk and feed the purified, prepared DNA into a machine. They then read out the nucleotide sequence of A's, C's, T's, and G's that comes out on the other side and compare the pattern of mutations with those in various public genetic databases. These patterns are known as haplotypes, and sets of similar haplotypes are organized into haplogroups. A haplogroup tells where a given line came from on a global scale (sub-Saharan Africa versus eastern Asia, for example). Often—but not always—a haplotype will point toward a more specific geography, like Japan or southern India.

In the past few years, genetic analysis of this sort has become so affordable that it has given rise to a cottage industry of "recreational genomics" companies. For $150 to $500 you can now send off a cheek swab or hair sample and find out if you have American Indian ancestry, if you're related to others who share your surname, or if you're part of the Jewish priestly Cohanim line. One firm even promises to tell clients their precise racial makeup—in percentages—for just $319.

Genetic analysis is good at showing which living populations are most closely related. But going back in history to figure out more precise relationships requires mind-bending math. "We have this nice snapshot of who is related to whom," says Peter Underhill, a population geneticist at Stanford University Medical Center. "But you probably have three or four different stories that would all lead to the same genetic landscape. The debate is always, Which story is more plausible?"

In the United States, where the proverbial drop of blood was once enough to distinguish a freeman from a slave, telling such stories is far more than a pastime. Less than a century ago, for instance, the Melungeons' hazy racial status was enough to win them a long list of enemies. Virginia townspeople once hauled them into court for attempting to vote and hung them for marrying white women. One crusading Virginia state registrar launched a campaign in the 1930s and 1940s to hunt down all Melungeons and reclassify them as "colored."

The term Melungeon was a slur until recent decades. "The Melungeons were always some other family who lived over on the other ridge," says Jack Goins, a retired glass cutter and television technician who has spent decades researching his ancestors. Darlene Wilson, a 50-year-old administrator and history teacher at Southeast Community College in Kentucky, says that when she was a teenager in the 1960s, working at a lunch counter in Norton, Virginia, her boss made her scrub the booth after the Melungeons had finished eating.

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