Tracing Descent from a Slave Owner with DNA

Last week’s episode focused on the roots of Nas, Valerie and Angela and their connection to slavery. Most of the DNA section was devoted to revealing their admixture and, for Nas and Angela, identifying specific ancestral origins in Africa. While this can be deeply meaningful, unfortunately, taking the next step is rarely possible for African Americans. Researchers face significant challenges to reconstructing the lost branches of family trees that were broken through slavery and identifying specific African ancestors. There are reasons to believe that genetic genealogy holds some promise in this regard, but there is still much to overcome. Growth of the DNA databases, advancements in technology and breakthroughs in historical research will hopefully allow for more progress in this area in the future, but due to the current limitations, for now a large portion of my genetic genealogy research for African American guests typically involves an effort to identify their European ancestors. In many cases this means testing out theories of descent from a slaveholder.

I could write pages and pages about the research I did on the DNA of each of the guests in last week’s episode and the theorized genetic connections to the slaveholders of their ancestors. Since each of them had a substantial amount of European DNA, it was clear that they had relatively recent ancestors of primarily European descent on the branches of their family trees, but who were they? There are rarely written records that definitively answer this question. Sometimes I was unable to come to a confident conclusion regarding the identity of these European-American ancestors who were hinted at in the records and by the DNA, but other times the answer was clear.

Although one of the most exciting aspects of genetic genealogy is discovering new avenues to investigate, confirming a paper trail through DNA is a powerful tool as well and can be equally as satisfying. No matter how thorough we are with our traditional genealogy research, sometimes the records are pointing in the wrong direction. At times DNA can reveal these unexpected discrepancies, while other times the exhaustive paper trail research is thankfully confirmed through genetic genealogy.

In the case of Valerie Jarrett’s enslaved ancestor Henry Taylor, not only was the paper trail pointing to a conclusion about the identity of his father, so was the DNA. The research team had already done a beautiful job in supporting the theory that Henry Taylor was the son of his slaveholder Angus Taylor. They had gathered written and oral history to support this conclusion. Amazingly, even Booker T. Washington added to the evidence in his book “The Story of the Negro: Volume 2” with the statement, “A considerable portion of the slaves were gradually making their way out of slavery…others, though nominally slaves, were practically free… Such was the case, for instance, of Mr. Taylor’s father (Henry)…the son of a white man who at the same time was his master. Although he was nominally a slave, he was early given liberty to do about as he pleased.”  (Can you imagine finding something like that in your research?) Further, a family letter identified Angus Taylor as Henry’s father by name. Dr. Gates wanted to take it a step further and try to confirm the relationship through DNA.

We approached this research question with two different types of DNA testing. Since a Y-chromosome is passed from father to son, we wanted to attempt to use Y-DNA testing to determine if Henry’s Y-chromosome 1) was of African or European origin and 2) matched that of Angus Taylor’s family. The first task was to trace a direct paternal descendant of Valerie’s second great grandfather, Henry. Since she is related to him through her maternal side, we needed to find a maternal male cousin with a direct father-to-son descent from Henry. Fortunately, one of Valerie’s male Taylor cousins agreed to be tested. We also attempted to locate an individual who we could demonstrate through the paper trail should have the same Y-chromosome as Angus Taylor, but we were unable to do so. Paper trail research traced his family back to Skipness, Scotland, so we had a pretty good idea of what we were looking for, so we tested Valerie’s cousin with the hope that the database would already hold the answers we needed. When the results came back, there was no doubt that his Y-chromosome was of European origin. Next we looked at his match list and were excited to find several matches who carried the Taylor surname. His two closest matches traced their direct paternal Taylor lines back to Skipness, Scotland and in both cases they had already identified Angus’ grandfather Archibald Taylor as a paternal relative!

Of course, we also used autosomal DNA to address this research question. For this, we were able to use Valerie’s own DNA since she would have inherited approximately 6.25% of her autosomal DNA from Henry and about half of that from Angus if he was indeed her third great grandfather. We were unsuccessful in tracking down a proven descendant of Angus, so we turned to the descendants of his brother. Because the common ancestor between Valerie and this Taylor descendant would be one step further removed, it lessened the likelihood there would be an autosomal match between them, so we were thrilled when we received the results back and they shared a significant enough amount of autosomal DNA to confirm a genealogical relationship.

When examining the genealogical evidence provided by the paper trail, the Y-DNA evidence and the autosomal DNA evidence, this was the strongest case for slave owner descent I have seen yet. It isn’t that this outcome was a surprise considering the large amount of circumstantial evidence to support the relationship between Henry and Angus, but it is so satisfying when science can help to substantiate even an already well-supported theory.

Tracing Descent from a Slave Owner with DNA | Finding Your Roots ...

Posted By: Steve Williams
Thursday, January 29th 2015 at 7:06AM
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