The Dangers of DNA Testing

On May 31, 2014, I made the following post on this site:

All my life I’ve been told I have Cherokee ancestry through my Knighten forebears. There are even a few interesting legends about how John L. Knighten escaped the Removal (a decade before he was born) and of family members visiting from the Cherokee “reservation”. I’ve even comments on them some (here). I’ve even commented on a possible connection to President Obama, who is purported to have descended from the first African slave in America though his mother’s line (here). I’m a natural skeptic, and though I wanted to believe my family stories, I wanted to substantiate the claims. Enter Ancesty.com’s AncestryDNA test. I spit in the cup, mailed it in, and impatiently awaited the results. And today, I received them.

Sadly, based on this DNA test, I can’t substantiate a claim to be anything other than a plain old white guy. I always thought I was a distantly-multiracial mutt, but I’m just a vanilla cracker. Here is what I learned from my results, based on Ancestry.com’s categorizations:
Europe West – 53%
Scandinavia – 13%
Ireland – 12%
Great Brittain – 11%
Iberian Peninsula – 7%
European Jewish –  <1%
Finland/ Northwest Russia – <1%
Caucasus – 2%

So based on my rank amateur genealogical research, I would have expected the Irish and British results, and I’ve even seen some information that is consistent with the Scandinavian blood. Having a couple of Scottish lines in my family could explain that, and possibly the Iberian markers, given the ancient migration of the Scots (and Irish) from the Iberian Peninsula. But over half of the genetic markers coming from continental Europe? That surprised me more than having trace European Jewish and Rus markers!

So my whole family legendarium is crushed. Not even trace amounts of Native American nor African genetics. I don’t even know how to broach the topic with my family now. I’ll stand as a heretic in their eyes. That Cherokee legend is so ingrained. I’ve had my suspicions over the past couple years, but like Santa Claus, I wanted the stories to be true. Maybe I’ll buy DNA tests for some of my aunts and uncles to see if they get different results. Is this the trap that Ancestry.com hoped to ensnare me in?

It’s been several years since I initially created this post and in that time I’ve noticed the DNA results on both Ancestry.com, and with the addition of a 23&Me DNA test, fluctuate a fair amount. Here are the present results, and some comments on what I’ve observed.

First off, it’s a bit frustrating that there’s not some standardization in the regional naming and groupings. Ancestry breaks down my European ancestry better, but excludes what appear to be non-European trace ancestry that 23andMe depicts. I don’t know that the .3% Indigenous American ancestry vindicates claims of Cherokee ancestry (see Cherokee Knightens), but it does indicate that there has been some intermarriage somewhere along the line. My family has been in the South for centuries; such marriages occurred.

This leads me to the trace amounts of African ancestry. I remember reading a press release from the folks at Ancestry.com that they’d discovered that President Obama was connected to the “first African slave in the American colonies” The release stated:

A research team from Ancestry.com (NASDAQ:ACOM), the world’s largest online family history resource, has concluded that President Barack Obama is the 11^thgreat-grandson of John Punch, the first documented African enslaved for life in American history. Remarkably, the connection was made through President Obama’s Caucasian mother’s side of the family.

Ancestry.com

That name immediately jumped out at me because I’d read of a “John Bunch” in my Blevins genealogy. The page the press release pointed to on Ancestry.com has since been deleted, but you can find an archive of it on the WayBack Machine. A detailed article is here. The article include the following family tree.

In Blevins lore, William Blevin, who was born around 1691, married Ann Bunch, daughter of John Bunch II, above. How John Punch became a slave is recorded in this document from 1640:

In a nutshell John Punch, along with a Dutchman named Victor and a Scot named James Gregory were indentured to what sounds to be a Welshman named Hugh Gwyn and ran away to Maryland. Upon recapture the to white folks were forced the complete their indenture plus one year, while John Punch, an African, was forced into servitude for life. We really don’t know what this slavery looked like, if it compared to what followed the 18^th and 19^th centuries in the South, but it would appear that his descendants weren’t born as slaves, and seemed to have done pretty well for themselves.

When you throw into this hodgepodge all the Melungeon lore, The Blevins’s and associated families who settled in territorial North Alabama – even before it became a state in 1819, were quite a genetically diverse group. When the gene pool flowed downstream to reach me and I add in my Blackwood ancestry, were a lot of the Scottish and Scandinavian (ie. Viking) lines come from, I’ve got a fairly diverse ethnicity, which I’m sure is more common in the South than may have previously been acknowledged. The most amusing part for me is despite having a Welsh surname, I’ve got a much lower percentage of Welsh ancestry than I would have anticipated.

Who knows, this may all change again the next time Ancestry.com and 23andMe do a refresh…

But this leads me back to the original title from 2014: The Dangers of DNA Testing – the danger as I’ve come to realize it is that the science on this matter is far from settled and is awful misleading. In 2014 I was ready to discount all the family lore of Cherokee ancestry as rubbish. I’m not so confident of that anymore. I’m actually more inclined to trust in the stories, albeit they may be a little fuzzy from the passing of time.

One resource that led me back down this path was listening to the audiobook for Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. In it are stories of the hubris of the scientific community from at least the Enlightenment Age forward, although I’m not certain that the author meant them that way. When I heard his words from this text, I heard a compelling argument for Intelligent Design; others may not hear the same. It helped me to understand that many things in the scientific community that are passed off as fact are at best hesitant consensus because no one else has come up with anything better, and those who may actually have came up with something better are afraid to upset the applecart and get blackballed from their esteemed communities of learnèd folk. In many instances, you can’t do research without the grant money to conduct it. If your results do not align with the bias of your backers, then the money dries up.

So what does this have to do with a DNA test? Over the past decade since I got the results back from the original test, I’ve watched the percentages of ethnicity swing widely, and since adding the 23andMe test to the mix, even add some other ethnicities that more align with the family lore. I don’t know which is right, but I do know this, my DNA hasn’t changed, and my original assumption that I am actually a distantly-multiracial mutt is probably accurate.

This circles me back to the Cherokee legends in the family. As time permits, I’ll research deeper and share what I find.