It may be in the genes, but DNA testing offers a bumpy ride to the past – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

John Gurda| Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

As summer ends and we put away the beach toys, our focus shifts to more sedentary pursuits, things we can do on rainy days and in the cold calm of the approaching winter. For millions of Americans, that means genealogy. Since the 1960s, probing our roots has been one the nations most popular hobbies, and interest in the field has only grown since then, the result of a sea change in technology.

For centuries, family history was largely the province of African griots and European royalty, whose privilege depended on pedigree. The past has been radically democratized in recent years. Genealogists once had to scroll through miles of microfilm to unearth census tables, naturalization records, birth certificates, obituaries, military recordsand other rich archival ore. Now those sources are as close to the surface as the nearest computer.

But digitized vital records arent the whole story. Perhaps the most astounding development in the entire history of family history is the recent use of DNA to establish ancestry a tool that has been in popular use for little more than a decade. It turns out that each of us bears in our own cells, in the fiber of our physical being, every step in the evolution of our families and in fact of our entire species. The biological pageant of humanity is recorded in every strand of our hair and every particle of our skin. We may move freely and widely throughout the world, but we carry with us the traceable imprint of uncounted earlier generations.

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The portal to the past is comparison. All of todays ancestry services rely on voluminous databases of DNA drawn from individuals around the world whose families have lived in one place for centuries, before the mobility revolution of the 1800s. Until fairly recently, most humans rarely ventured beyond the confines of their own valley or forest or plain, which severely limited their choices of a mate. Intermarriage was inevitable, and the result over thousands of years was a gene pool unique to each region. The descendants of those earlier generations who have remained in place carry a book of DNA that sets their locale apart from every other volume in the worlds ethnic library.

I was intrigued with genetic genealogy from the beginning, even though my own ethnic story seemed straightforward. I come from peasant stock on both sides of my family. My Norwegian ancestors tilled the stony soil north of Oslo, and my Polish forebears worked more tractable land near the Baltic Sea. Both of my grandfathers, John Johnson and John Gurda, were born in Europe (my first name was a given), and their wives were second-generation Americans of matching stock.

But physical corroboration of that story was irresistible. In 2015 I spit into a tube and sent it off with $89.95 to AncestryDNA, the company with the largest DNA reference database. The results, I must say, surprised me. The first broad strokes confirmed my family narrative: 50%Scandinavian and 42%Eastern European. But I also came up as 6%Irish. How did that happen? Who was this person wanderer or settler, lover or slave who introduced a touch of the Celt to my bloodline? A sailor washed up in Gdansk? A Dublin girl carried home by a Viking?

The revelation didnt make me feel any different. My hair wasnt curlier or thicker. My accent was the same innocuous Midwestern dialect Ive always had, without a trace of brogue. And I didnt feel either more or less interested in potatoes and cabbage. But I longed to learn more. First of all, was that Irish ancestor on my mothers side or my fathers? Equipped with only an English majors understanding of DNA and a diploma from a Catholic high school that didnt offer biology, I prevailed upon my dads sistermy last aunt or uncle by genes on either side to take the spit test. She was analyzed as 86%Eastern European, with a minor element of Scandinavian and barely a trace of Irish.

My Celtic forebear was evidently not on the Polish side, but the results, I learned, couldnt possibly be as precise as Id imagined. Each of us gets exactly half of our DNA from each parent, but the composition of each half is absolutely random, a genetic shuffle that can produce lopsided ancestry results. But there were apparently Irish genes somewhere in there.

Then, just as I was recalibrating my self-image and wondering if we should have named our sons Seamus and Declan, Ancestry sent me (at no additional charge) an update based on new information from its ever-evolving DNA database. My revised ethnic mix was 41%Swedish and Danish, 32%Norwegian, and only 18%Eastern European not even close to what my family had always assumed. Goodbye, Ireland, and, for that matter, goodbye, Poland.

Such a radical shift in results over just a few years turned on my skeptical gene. If the same DNA could have that many interpretations, perhaps the whole concept was flawed. A 2022 update slightly eased my doubts, estimating my ancestry as 43%Norwegian and 31%Eastern European, with smaller proportions of Swedish, Danishand Baltic. But its clear that describing my results as imprecise would be an understatement.

On admittedly scant evidence, I suspect that part of the problem is an inherent limitation of the process. The standard autosomal test doesnt date-stamp your DNA; different periods in the evolution of an ancestral line can be conflated and confused. Our actual migration stories disappear into the mists of time, going back into the preliterate, even prehistoric past that starts, for every one of us, in Africa.

Not everyones test results are as muddled as mine. My wife, Sonja, who has always prided herself on being a purebred Norwegian, turns out to be a purebred Norwegian. The first results from AncestryDNA pegged her as 3% Micronesian, to her amazement and amusement, but the companys updates confirmed that all of her ancestors are from Norway. The most recent estimates even correctly identified her familys counties of origin in the southwestern part of the country.

Although most of us are hoping to find our roots when we take the test, AncestryDNA has started offering, for an extra fee, information about inherited traits that have nothing to do with ancestral geographies. The company carefully avoids worrisome markers like those for cancer, depression, addiction, heart diseaseand other maladies, testing instead for more innocuous qualities. I ponied up my 20 bucks and found that Im genetically predisposed to be lousy at remembering dreams (false), a good sprinter (once upon a time), a devotee of caffeine (false), blue-eyed (true), cleft-chinned (sort of), freckled (false), wavy-haired (in days gone by), and unibrowed (false). Oh, and my urine has a distinctive smell after I eat asparagus. Hardly earth-shaking, and just as imprecise as my estimated ethnic origins.

Even if its nowhere close to definitive, DNA testing is an interesting exercise. My own results demonstrate that the road back can have as many twists and turns as the road ahead. I will never make his acquaintance, but I cherish the thought of some peasant ancestor long gone to dust, a Peder or a Janek, known in his village as a near-sighted fellow with a decent memory and a penchant for solitude or perhaps as the serious one who would rather read than plow but still liked his tankard of beer. That familiar personage is one of countless characters who reside in my familys indeterminate past, and he lives on today, however mutely, in every strand of my DNA.

John Gurda writes a column on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of every month. Email:mail@johngurda.com

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It may be in the genes, but DNA testing offers a bumpy ride to the past - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel