The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (15 page)

Sandi's first reaction was acceptance. Four days after the results came back, she sent Cheryl an e-mail: “The bottom line is that it really doesn't matter. I love you and they loved you . . . in their own way I guess. Daddy was OUR daddy, nothing can change that.”

But as the information sunk in, Sandi became distressed about the implications of the test. She was hurt when, a few weeks after the results came through, Cheryl sent an e-mail to Sandi and fifteen other friends and family with the subject line “Who is my biological daddy?”

In the e-mail, Cheryl laid out the whole story of Milton and Sandi's tests, revealing that Joe wasn't her biological father and reflecting a bit on her feelings:

 

My thoughts . . . Daddy Joe knew in his spirit I wasn't his. After all, animals know their child from someone else's, it is part of nature. AND male animals will usually destroy the offspring of other males. And momma never cared for me like she cared for Sandi, why? Because she had a problem with my father, whoever he was. Was she raped, was she involved with someone and he dumped her, or was she just ashamed for some reason. We do not know, as no one is here that we can ask.

 

Two days later Sandi responded to the e-mail and similar things Cheryl had posted on Facebook. She was upset that Cheryl referred to Joe as Daddy Joe, as opposed to just Daddy. “I know you mean no harm and [are] only trying to distinguish between sperm donor and daddy, but it really bothers me for him,” Sandi wrote. “I just feel so bad for him wondering if he knew and now I feel as though he was played a fool.”

“I should never have taken that test,” she added. “I feel so terribly guilty.”

 

Blaine Bettinger is a well-known figure in the genetic genealogy world. The thirty-seven-year-old is an intellectual-property attorney by day. “But I joke that it's just a way that I make money to pay for more genealogy tests,” he says. He has been researching his family history since he was a kid, and he studied molecular biology and genetics in graduate school, so he was perfectly poised for the genetic genealogy revolution. Bettinger bought his first genetic test in 2003. A few years later he launched a blog—The Genetic Genealogist—with the aim of explaining the science behind the tests in simple language. It now receives around a thousand visitors a day, he says.

Genetic genealogy can be extremely complicated, but most cases require only a basic understanding of our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Most chromosomes, you could say, are promiscuous. During the formation of egg and sperm, each chromosome inherited from the mother physically crosses with its counterpart from the father, and as the pieces mingle they freely exchange segments of DNA. This recombination gives our species great genetic diversity, and it's the primary reason non-twin siblings are never genetically identical.

But the Y chromosome is chaste. The vast majority of its 50 million DNA letters do not swap with other chromosomes, passing almost identically from father to son, son to grandson, and so on. That means that when a genetic change spontaneously occurs in a Y chromosome, it can be passed down to male descendants forever, serving as a reliable marker of their paternal lineage.

This was famously demonstrated in 1997, when researchers published a study of Jewish priests in the journal
Nature.
According to Jewish belief, the high priesthood began 3,300 years ago with Aaron, Moses's older brother, and has been passed from father to son ever since. Today many Jews have the surname Cohen or Kohen, meaning “priest” in Hebrew. The researchers scraped a few skin cells from the inside of the cheeks of almost two hundred Jewish men from Israel, North America, and England, and compared the men's Y chromosomes. Close to seventy had been told at some point that they were direct descendants of the high priests. And these men, it turns out, had a distinctive Y-chromosome profile. “The simplest, most straightforward explanation is that these men have the Y chromosome of Aaron,” the lead researcher told the
New York Times.

The following year, a similar genetic study made headlines when it bolstered the controversial theory that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child with his slave, Sally Hemings. The researchers looked at the genes of male descendants of Jefferson's paternal grandfather and found that they carried a combination of nineteen genetic markers that is quite rare, showing up in just a tenth of a percent of all men. But the researchers found exactly the same set of markers in a descendant of one of Hemings's sons, Eston, meaning that Eston's father was either Jefferson or one of Jefferson's close male relatives.

For genealogy buffs, these studies had thrilling implications. Since the Middle Ages, Western cultures have passed surnames from father to son. In theory, then, men who have the same surname should share markers on their Y chromosomes. This wouldn't be true for everyone, of course: multiple families may have taken up the same surname even if they weren't related, and adopted children often take the last name of their adoptive fathers. But it's true for enough people to be useful for tracing family trees.

When Family Tree DNA launched its genetic genealogy test, which screened for twelve markers on the Y chromosome, genealogists could find members of their paternal line not with treks to libraries or cemeteries, but by uploading their DNA results to the company's database.

That was in 2000. By the end of 2001, the company's customers had organized research projects for about a hundred surnames. After 23andMe launched, in 2007, it added thousands of markers associated with health risks, such as those that Cheryl heard about on
Oprah.
There are also companies that specialize in determining ancestry for African Americans, Native Americans, and other specific ethnicities.

For people like Bettinger, DNA testing has made genealogical research richer and more fulfilling. “Once I got the DNA test back, I was able to look at my family tree in a whole new light,” he says.

Bettinger is Caucasian and had assumed that his ethnicity was 100 percent European. But tests revealed that he carried Native American markers. “This was a complete shock,” he says. He had known from his previous research that some of his ancestors had lived in Honduras in the mid-1800s but had assumed that they were all English missionaries. After getting his results back, he realized that some of them were native Hondurans, with ancestry from both Honduras and the Cayman Islands.

“Genealogy is not only about names, dates, and places, but about filling out the story of each ancestor as well—what their lives were like, what their motivations might have been like, the trials and tribulations and joys that they experienced in their lifetime,” Bettinger says. “Every decision, no matter how small, by each one of these individual ancestors ultimately led to my existence—and, undoubtedly, to the person I am today.”

For some people who do genetic genealogy, though, the information they unearth is more difficult to accept. “You would not believe the things we can find out,” particularly when genetic information is combined with searches from the Internet and social media, says CeCe Moore, the blogger who helped Cheryl. “If you're a privacy advocate, it is worrying.”

Over the past three years, Moore says, she has answered e-mails from more than ten thousand people interested in using genetic genealogy and has intensely worked on searches for about a hundred people. Many of these people are adoptees or, like Cheryl, have discovered that they have a mystery father. “We used to only have an adoptee get a close match every six months,” says Moore. “Now it's happening every single week.”

“I believe that knowledge is power, and I think we can gain much more than we will lose from this movement,” says Moore. (She is also an unpaid liaison between several genetic testing companies and the genetic genealogy community, and a paid consultant for the popular American television show
Finding Your Roots
, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) At the same time, though, there's no denying that some of this newfound knowledge will be painful. “A lot of times people find out things that really shake their identity,” she says.

 

After learning that Joe Wilmoth wasn't her biological father, Cheryl began unpacking what she knew about her mother, Vivian.

Vivian Tipton was strikingly beautiful, even in her older years, and had an infectious cackle of a laugh. She grew up in Petersburg, Virginia, a small town about 25 miles south of Richmond. In July 1941, when she was sixteen, she married an eighteen-year-old soldier named Richard Thompson. Just five months later he left to fight in Europe.

Richard returned after the war, and he and Vivian moved into a house across from her parents. By the end of 1949, the couple had two girls, Toni and JoAnn, and Vivian was pregnant with a third. Vivian always said Richard was the love of her life, but their marriage was cut short on December 21, 1949, when Richard was killed in a dump-truck accident. Vivian was devastated, staying in bed all day and refusing to celebrate Christmas. After having her third daughter, Jayne, in February, Vivian and the girls moved in with her parents. Not long after, she moved out, leaving her children to be raised by their grandparents.

The next few years of Vivian's life are not entirely clear, but sometime in 1950 or 1951 she met Joe Wilmoth. They married in the summer of 1951 and moved to Chester, about 10 miles from Petersburg. They had a rocky relationship, to say the least. Joe was physically abusive at times, and the couple seemed never to stop arguing. Cheryl was born less than seven months after their marriage, on Christmas Eve of 1951, and grew up believing that she had been a premature baby. After the DNA test, though, Cheryl wondered if even that were true. The test raised so many unsettling thoughts, the kind that kept her up at night. How many of the other stories of her early life, she wondered, were fiction?

From age one to four, Cheryl lived with a couple who had grown up with Joe. Cheryl doesn't know exactly why. It could be because Joe and Vivian weren't getting along—or, perhaps, because Joe didn't want to raise another man's child.

The next decade of Cheryl's life was unstable and traumatic. She lived in more than a dozen different homes in Florida and Virginia and frequently witnessed violent outbursts from Joe. Looking back, Cheryl suspects that some of Joe's behavior could be explained by posttraumatic stress disorder—he had seen combat in the Philippines during the war. As a child, though, no explanation would have helped. She was only terrified.

Through all of this turmoil, Cheryl tried to protect and care for her little sister, and the girls forged a powerful emotional bond. Still, they were different in more ways than they were alike. Sandi was tall and thin; Cheryl, short and plump. Sandi was happy-go-lucky from a very young age, and by the time she was a young woman, liked to drink, smoke, and party hard. Cheryl was shy, anxious, fearful, and prone to crying.

Perhaps their most striking difference, though, was in their relationship with Joe. “To me, he was everything,” Sandi told me. “She was afraid of him.”

The day after Christmas 1963, the family moved into a new home. The house was right up the road from Dickie's family, and soon Cheryl and Dickie were sweethearts. She got pregnant in early 1966, soon after her fourteenth birthday, and they were married in May, just before Dickie turned twenty-one.

Cheryl's early marriage shows the extent of Joe and Vivian's parental neglect, Dickie says. “It was pretty obvious,” he says. “I mean, you don't let your fourteen-year-old girl go out with somebody as old as I was.”

In 1980, when Vivian was just fifty-five, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cheryl came over most days to make food and help clean the house. One day she and Vivian opened up an old cedar chest of Vivian's personal mementos. The chest contained a pink card issued by the hospital on the day Cheryl was born. It noted, in handwritten script, that she weighed almost seven pounds—much heavier than a baby who was two months premature could possibly be.

Vivian was sick for three years, and Cheryl's relationship with Joe disintegrated over this time. She has a vivid memory of confronting him one day, when he was sitting at his dining room table. “I said to him, ‘Why do you treat me so different from Sandi? What is it? Am I not your child?'”

Joe looked out the window, Cheryl remembers. Then he looked down at his coffee cup and said, “Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that.”

 

DNA tests, if done rigorously, are far more definitive than tattered forms in old cedar chests, and far more emotionally potent. The genetic genealogy industry had barely gotten off the ground before scientists, sociologists, and ethicists were debating its societal impact—for better and for worse.

Early concerns focused on accuracy. All of the tests—whether they look at the Y chromosome, autosomal chromosomes, or other types of DNA—work in essentially the same way. They screen the billions of letters of a person's DNA for a certain number of markers and then compare that combination of markers with those found in reference samples taken from thousands of people living in various regions of the world. Test accuracy, then, starts with two things: the number of markers analyzed and the size and selection of the comparison set of samples.

When genetic genealogy debuted, the technology cost many times what it does today. So the first tests screened a relatively small number of markers, leading to a crude measure of ancestry. The first test that Blaine Bettinger bought, from a now-defunct company called DNAPrint Genomics, screened his autosomal chromosomes for just seventy-one markers and used those to estimate his ties to four broad ethnic groups: 88 percent “Indo-European,” 12 percent “East-Asian,” and zero percent “Native-American” and “African.”

“Those early autosomal tests were sort of wildly inaccurate,” Bettinger says. The subsequent tests he bought showed that his Honduran ancestors had both Native American and African roots.