The Invisible History of the Human Race (29 page)

To understand it we have to understand not only the way that the living material of families is passed on but also the world in which the families were formed. While DNA was spread across Italy by all the normal processes of reproduction, those processes were shaped by the culture and geography in which they took place. Genomics by itself won’t give us the whole picture of European history.

There are many stories that might explain the peculiar pattern of Italian common ancestry. For example, Ralph and Coop suggest that the region may have been less affected by the population expansions that spread across the rest of Europe in the last two thousand years. To test the possible scenarios, said Ralph, they would have to look at demographic, linguistic, and other historical patterns. Many factors would have to be taken into account, such as whether the difference in common ancestors was true for people whose families had lived in Italy for centuries (which would confirm that the effect did not exist simply because an entirely new population moved in from a different country five hundred years ago).

I was intrigued by the way that, in addition to the larger group of common ancestors from 2,500 years ago, other genetic analyses of Italy show that many small different genetic groups are related to each other in a way that forms a gradient from north to south in the country. I asked Guido Tabellini, the economist who measured the difference in social capital between the north and south of Italy, if he could think of a reason why there were fewer common ancestors between some groups in the most recent 2,500 years. He pointed out that the political entities that ruled northern and southern Italy were separate until the middle of the nineteenth century, and that separation reduced economic and social integration within the country as a whole. In addition, he said, the north and south were ruled in very different ways: “
Northern Italy had the tradition of more independent and enlightened government, whereas southern Italy had the tradition of being dominated by external influence.

“A second important difference which has not been studied much,” said Tabellini, “is the role of the family. If you look at the family traditions within Italy, they are also very different, and so are attitudes towards females. The attitude towards people outside of the family can also be explained by these different family traditions.”

It is possible that the social currents that Tabellini describes could help explain the unique pattern of ancestor sharing in Italy. It is possible that the pattern may be explained by an entirely different story. To find the best story, geneticists, historians, and other researchers will have to work together.

 • • • 

As dazzling as the possibilities of genetic history are, it wasn’t the possibility of uncovering realities that were once completely invisible that motivated some of the first genetic genealogists. James LeVoy Sorenson died in 2008, and when I asked Woodward why he and Sorenson did what they did, he leaned back in his chair and, making air quotes, said one of the big goals was a “‘Miss America’ kind of goal. World peace. That kind of thing.”

Woodward said that the men had dreamed that, once their project was completed, they would be able to take any two people in the world, sit them down, show them a piece of DNA that they shared, and say, “Here’s the common ancestor that you share.”

As he and Sorenson went back and forth, Woodward recalled, they thought “perhaps if people understood and knew how closely they were related to each other, they would treat each other differently, hopefully better.”

By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.

—Confucius

F
or almost two hundred years the official biography of one of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, stated that the philosopher, statesman, architect, president, writer of the Declaration of Independence, and designer of the graceful manor at Monticello was married to Martha Wayles. Jefferson and Wayles had six children, but only two daughters survived to adulthood. Jefferson documented his own family history back to Great Britain; his father’s family was from Wales, and his mother’s family had come from England and Scotland. Recall that when he discussed his pedigree in his autobiography, he added that the reader should ascribe to that information “the faith & merit he chooses.”

Yet even in Jefferson’s lifetime another story competed with the accepted version. In this tale Jefferson’s family included many more children than those of Martha Wayles. It was alleged that after the death of his wife, Jefferson began a thirty-eight-year-long liaison with his slave Sally Hemings, who herself had been born to a white father and a mother of mixed race. The story was reported in the press in Jefferson’s day, beginning with the claim that Jefferson and Hemings had a son, Thomas Woodson, who was sent to live on another estate when he was twelve. It was also said that Jefferson fathered the six children that Hemings raised at Monticello.

The most compelling evidence for the Jefferson/Hemings relationship exists in the testimony of many people who lived at Monticello at the time and passed the story down to their children. Strong and detailed oral histories were kept by generation after generation, especially within the families that descended from Hemings, all testifying to the fact that Jefferson had fathered Hemings’s children. Even in the late twentieth century, distant Hemings cousins who had never met told similar stories about the day their parent pulled them aside and whispered to them that one of America’s most venerated founding fathers was also more directly one of their own.

Up until then some scholars had been willing to concede that Hemings’s children may have been fathered by Jefferson’s nephew, but not by the great man himself. For most the official story held sway. Its power, legal scholar and historian Annette Gordon-Reed argued, derived mostly from the fact that historians tended to use a simple rule to evaluate evidence: The word of white people was good, and the word of slaves was not.

In 1997 Annette Gordon-Reed published
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
, one of the first books to systematically examine the evidence for and against the Jefferson/Hemings claims. She concluded that the relationship did exist. Many critics reacted as if she had launched a personal attack on one of the nation’s most beloved historical figures. Others were saddened but dismissive. Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and professor of history, wrote:

This idea of
an intimate and loving relationship between Jefferson and his black slave may have gained great power and increasing credibility in our culture because it represents the deep yearnings of many Americans; it symbolizes what many of us believe is the ultimate solution to our race problem.

If only it were true. . . . But wishing won’t make it a historical reality.

Two years later Eugene Foster, a retired professor of pathology who lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, realized that the new genetic genealogy meant the Y chromosome of Hemings and Jefferson descendants could throw light on the matter. He collected four samples: one from a direct male descendant of Jefferson’s paternal uncle (while there were no living direct male descendants from the Jefferson/Wayles marriage, this Y would be the same as Jefferson’s); one from a direct male descendent of one of Jefferson’s nephews by his sisters; one from a direct male descendant of Eston Hemings, Sally’s son; and one from a direct male descendant of Thomas Woodson.

Foster found that the Y chromosome that had been passed down from Eston Hemings matched the Y chromosome passed down from Jefferson’s uncle. Because the Y was an especially rare one, the match was powerful evidence that Sally’s son Eston was also a Jefferson. The old rumor that Jefferson’s nephew fathered Sally Hemings’s children was also quickly dispatched, as the Y from the nephew’s descendants did not
match the Hemings Y.

Because the Jefferson Y was shared by Jefferson’s other male relatives who are known to have visited Monticello at the time, the case that Thomas Jefferson himself was the father of Hemings’s children was still a circumstantial one. Yet the circumstances were overwhelming—not just the DNA evidence but also the persistent rumors, the detailed oral histories, the preferential treatment that Jefferson gave to Hemings’s children (not just Eston but also his brother Madison and their other siblings), and careful analyses of the times when Jefferson and other men were present at the estate.

Well-known geneticist Eric Lander and historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote at the time that the “burden of proof has clearly shifted” to those who would
deny the Jefferson/Hemings link. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation appointed a research committee, which found that the “best evidence available
suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.” Historians who had long argued that the Hemings story was a myth accepted that they had been wrong, and for many people who witnessed these dramas only from afar, the twist in the epic tale of race, power, and class in America was cause for celebration. There was a sense that thanks to DNA, the actual lives of historical figures—or anyone else, for that matter—could no longer be hidden behind a wall of respectability and lies.

Foster also tested the Y chromosome of the Woodson family. The Woodsons had a powerful oral history linking them to Hemings and Jefferson, and of all the families connected to the story, they had been the most public with their claim and were the most confident that the Y-chromosome test would prove what they had long believed to be true. As early as 1978, at the first Woodson reunion, the family had discovered that many members from lineages who had never been in contact had all kept the same story alive. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, Woodson descendants had been passing down the story that Jefferson was Woodson’s father. Even Eugene Foster, who set the DNA test up, said that he was expecting the DNA to validate the Woodsons’ claim.

On its Web site today the Thomas Woodson Family Association states that Thomas Corbin Woodson was “the issue of a union of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings.” But that is not what Foster’s test showed. The Y-chromosome test that linked Thomas Jefferson to the paternity of Eston Hemings also showed that the Woodson family were not his descendants.

 • • • 

Michele Cooley-Quille remembered when she was twelve years old being told by her father, Robert Cooley III, the first African American federal magistrate, that she and her two siblings were the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of Thomas Jefferson. “We were so excited,” Cooley-Quille told a reporter many years later. “It’s so exciting to realize that part of the blood that runs through your
veins was Thomas Jefferson’s.”

Cooley-Quille’s father explained that her fifth-great-grandfather, Thomas Woodson, was the first child of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. In 1998, when Cooley-Quille was interviewed about the family story, she was a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins School of Health, a member of the Thomas Woodson Family Association, and pregnant with her first child. She said that she would pass her family story along to the next generation. “Having a strong sense of family is so important,” she said, “and I think we undervalue it. It gives a sense of how to operate in this world and how to operate positively.”

When Foster’s Y-chromosome results were published in
Nature
, the Woodsons were devastated. According to Sloan Williams, a biological anthropologist who became involved with the family, their first response was disbelief, and they wrestled painfully with the gap between the long-held
stories and the DNA evidence. Overall, Williams explained, there was incomprehension that the oral histories could be wrong. “
They matched so well. They came from independent sources. The family couldn’t understand why Thomas Woodson would have claimed Thomas Jefferson as his father. He didn’t gain anything. He risked things.” In an account of her experience at the time, Williams wrote, “
They were extremely suspicious of the results and of the researchers who performed the work.”

Not only was the family taken aback by the test result, but they were also angry about the way the results had been announced. Foster had assured them he would let them know what he found before it was published, but the news was leaked to the press before the family was informed. Robert Golden, the head of the Thomas Woodson Family Association, learned of it when
U.S. News & World Report
phoned him and asked him how he felt about the DNA result.

In response to the announcement and the ensuing media onslaught, the Thomas Woodson Family Association formed a research committee to investigate the experiment. Because one Woodson family member, the historian Carolyn Moore, was a colleague of Sloan Williams, she asked her for assistance. Moore’s first request was that Williams simply help the family understand the genetics. Williams expected this would take a lunch, followed perhaps by a phone call or two. But when they met, Moore pulled out an enormous tome, “The Woodson Source Book,” which contained copies of all the documents pertaining to the family’s history. It became apparent to Williams that her involvement was going to take a while.

Explaining the basics of the genetics tests and whether they were valid required many sessions. In 2000 Williams traveled to a Woodson family reunion and met with members of the research committee and other family to discuss the case further. The committee representatives asked her whether mutations could explain the results (they couldn’t) and if differences between the Y chromosomes had been appropriately interpreted (they had). Their main goal, according to Williams, was to find plausible alternative explanations for the results.

But none of the alternative explanations were appealing. As Williams pointed out, the descendants of Thomas Woodson’s two oldest sons shared the same Y, which meant that the two sons themselves shared the same Y, which in turn implied that Thomas Woodson himself, their father, had that Y. The fact that this Y did not match the Jefferson Y suggested that Thomas Woodson was not fathered by Thomas Jefferson. If, for the sake of argument, you accepted that Thomas Woodson
was
fathered by Jefferson, then the only explanation for the Y shared by Thomas Woodson’s two eldest sons would be that they were not actually Thomas Woodson’s sons. Perhaps they were Woodson’s wife’s sons from a previous marriage? If that were the case, these Woodson descendants would not be able to claim either Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Woodson in their ancestry.

The Woodson family asked Foster to also test the Y chromosome of a descendant of Thomas Woodson’s younger son. The test confirmed that the Woodson sons shared the same chromosome, leaving the modern Woodsons with the same dilemma: Either that Y was Thomas Woodson’s or it was someone else’s. In either case it was not Jefferson’s.

Since its first generation the Woodson family has included many admirable, talented, and strong leaders, including Lewis Woodson, a preacher and abolitionist, once called “the father of black nationalism.” “The Woodsons were understandably proud of their successful and accomplished family,” wrote Williams. “The loss of oral history that they had all shared and passed down from generation to generation shook their belief in the qualities and values that their family represented.”

By the time of the next family reunion, some Woodsons had begun to grudgingly accept the DNA results, but others refused to believe. Williams wrote that many family members took a similar position to that of the head of the association, who recalled that Woodson descendants from all over the United States had shared the same oral history when they met for the first time in 1978. “So I don’t care, you know,” he stated. “I have respect for the DNA study and et cetera, but I still wonder. . . . It hasn’t changed my belief at all.”

According to Williams, Michele Cooley-Quille was vehement in her rejection of the results. Yet Williams carried out an independent test and she confirmed Foster’s finding. Byron Woodson, Cooley-Quille’s brother, suggested at the time that the DNA results had been tampered with. Such is the jumbling of genetic material when anyone reproduces that siblings may look quite alike or quite different. Even though they were full brothers born within three years of each other, Madison and Eston Hemings looked different enough that when Eston moved his family to Wisconsin, he changed his surname to Jefferson and from then on identified as white. Madison’s family stayed in rural Ohio, and while it was said that some family members had “disappeared into white society,” many remained in African American communities and identified as black. Byron Woodson pointed out that the only confirmed connection to Jefferson was with the descendants of Eston, who had moved into white society long ago. He attributed this to racism. Still, the claim confused Williams, given that the men in the Eston Hemings line were confirmed descendants of Jefferson, and by implication the men in the Madison Hemings line—many of whom identified as
black—were as well.

The Woodsons then located some descendants of the owner of the estate on which Thomas Woodson grew up. Although the Woodson Y did not match the Jefferson Y, it was notable that the Y was a type that was associated with a European heritage. As was common at the time, young Thomas took his surname from the estate master, John Woodson. The family asked Williams to test the new Woodson Y. She found that the descendants of John Woodson shared the same Y, but it was different from the Y of the Thomas Woodson family. The Woodsons then discussed the possibility of locating the graves of Thomas Woodson and Sally Hemings with a view to running a DNA test on their remains, but the exact location of neither grave could be found. Later a family member had his DNA tested with a genetic genealogy company and asked Williams to help him understand the results. They confirmed what was already known.