Wade genealogy info boosted by DNA test – Fairfield Daily Republic

My oldest brother Orvis recently submitted his DNA to Mountain View personal genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe. Hed been interested in finding out details of his genealogy for some time and finally bit the bullet.

Orvis submitted his saliva samples and got his results back in about six weeks. The cool thing is that he got a special deal where the regular $100 price was reduced to $80. The cooler thing is that brothers unless they are identical twins share 50 percent of the same DNA. Thats close enough for me to pay $0 and get a column out of it.

Here are Orviss test results:

Sub-Saharan African 72.7%European 23.4%East Asian & Native American 2.9%South Asian 0.5%Unassigned 0.6%

The fact that our ancestors were from Africa is not a surprise. The website breaks it down further. The lions share (68.9 percent) of our distant relatives came from West Africa. This is what the website says: Expanding from Senegal to Nigeria, West Africa composes about a fifth of the African continent. West Africans have a long shared history, and were united by large empires such as the Ghana Empire, dating as far back as the eighth century AD.

The great thing about the DNA results is that they can be combined with another chunk of information we already had, a 20-page document called The Wade Genealogy. I got it from a Texas Landman (an intermediary for an energy company) in 2010 whod used it to find me because of a parcel of land in the Lone Star state my late father had owned. Most of its information came from a file in (where else?) Salt Lake City called the wills of San Augustine (Texas, where both my parents were born and grew up).

The first part of the genealogy is rather detailed and the second part is less so, but lists six generations of my family. The names are just that to me, names, but then suddenly there is my grandfather whom I never met, Booker T. Wade. He married Corine Dennis and then it lists their children including my dad, Orvis T. Wade Sr.

I wish I knew more of my relatives, but I dont. One name that jumped out from the document was Carla Nicole Wade, my cousin, whom I know from Facebook.

The first time I saw the names of my brothers and myself in the document it was sort of like the part in the book Roots where Alex Haley changes the tense of the narrative as he entered into the history of his own book. The genealogy has errors and omissions. My youngest brother Scott was not listed and Kelvins name was misspelled as Kevin the story of his life.

I wrote a column about the genealogy in 2010 and here is a part:

My great-great-grandmothers name was . . . wait for it . . . Anarchy. Seriously. Ned and Anarchy Wade were listed together in the 1870 census. Her name sounds like a Marvel Comics Super Villain.

Ned and Anarchy had been the property of a man named Edward Teal and when he died in 1858 he left no will so the courts had to settle the estate. This is what it says in the genealogy:

The appointed commissioners of the courts ordered that the heirs of the estate separate the Negro property into two lots, 1 & 2, and place them in a hat and draw, and whichever one drew that lot would own those Negroes.

That is still horrifying for me to actually picture happening, but it did.

Orvis DNA test results showing our mixed heritage is boosted by the Wade Genealogy. In it, Ned was described as a Negro man of yellow complexion. Ned, Anarchy and their childrens race was listed as mulatto, meaning one-half negro blood.

The .6 percent unassigned made me scratch my head. Pod people? Borg? 23andMes explanation: There is a wide range of human diversity and sometimes our algorithm is unable to assign a region of DNA to a specific population. As we collect more data and update our algorithm, we expect that the amount of unassigned ancestry will decrease.

The ancestry DNA thing is very interesting and informative and I recommend that everyone have their sibling pay for it and then check out the results.

Reach Fairfield writer Tony Wade at toekneeweighed@gmail.com.

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Wade genealogy info boosted by DNA test - Fairfield Daily Republic