How Do You Know Your Ancestors Lived and Learned While Slavery Was Wrong? From the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society to the Smithsonian

Gates thinks that African Americans will be happy to learn about their links to people like the Catoctin workers by using genetics. “I have never met an African American who did not want to know as much as possible about the lives and times of their ancestors who suffered in the bowels of slavery.”

Last year a group led by David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and one of Harney’s former PhD advisers created ancient-genome data from the remains of 27 people found at the Catoctin furnace and made it public.

Data about the larger descendant community will be unavailable to community stakeholders, which further increases equity gaps because a for-profit corporation will be holding answers. Descendants need to lead and guide the research and not take a back seat to scientists.

In 1979, a previously unknown cemetery at Catoctin Furnace was found and excavated as the state worked on a highway in the area. The bodies of those who were not included in the official count were turned over to the Smithsonian. The Catoctin Furnace Historical Society has connected 27 of those bodies to 42,000 other people thanks to improved methods of collecting ancientDNA, as well as 23 andMe, which has also connected 27 of those bodies.

Descendants of a woman who died in her early 30s reside in southern California, being the highest levels of shared ancestry for 23andMe customers. Harney says there isn’t one answer. There are several different stories about what happened to these individuals.

The Lost DNA of the Catoctin Furnace: Finding the DNA of a Black Black man and his family through shared stretches of DNA

Historical records give little information on what happened to the enslaved and free African American workers and their families as the workforce became white after 1850.

More than two dozen of the people buried at the Catoctin Furnace have had their genetics analysed and used to locate tens of thousands of living descendants who are in a consumer genetics database.

Reich’s team developed a way to overcome this hurdle, and then collaborated with 23andMe, whose database contains over 9 million customers, to apply it to their data.

The researchers used an approach to find living descendants of the workers, that was based on shared stretches of DNA from other people. The more stretches that two people share and the longer the shared segments are, the closer the relationship.

But initial efforts to identify descendants failed, says archaeologist Elizabeth Comer, the society’s president. Records of the enslaved people from the site treated them as property, not as people, complicating efforts to trace their ancestry. The human story of these individuals is not told by them. According to adaoin Harney, a population geneticist at 23andMe, ancient DNA can be used for something.

Crystal Emory never knew much about where she came from. Family members took her from her mother for being in an interracial marriage in 1960s and 1970s, leaving her floating between homes. She spent time in an orphanage in Pennsylvania. These experiences, she says, helped instill a need to find out more about her history.

“I always wanted to know more about my family and myself than I already knew,” says Emory, a retired IT professional. “I’m new at genealogy.”

It wasn’t until the museum and historical society contacted her that she was able to find out what village she had grown up in. With the help of diaries and other records, they connected her to a free, land-owning Black man named Robert Patterson who lived in the area through much of the 19th century. Thanks to this, we were able to learn more about how he lived.

Black Americans are missing a lot of their ancestry. Many of them don’t have such written records that link them to the past. The first count of the U.S. population that did not include black people was from the 1870 census. During the last hundred years of slavery, families were split between slave owners and traders, who did not record their ties to the family.

Those individuals could range from five to nine degrees of separation, covering a wide range of relationships from great-great-great-grandchild to a first cousin six times removed.

Ancestry in the Catoctin Furnace: A landmark study opens a new possible way for Black Americans to trace their ancestry

“We’re able to restore some of the information about the lives of the Catoctin individuals,” Harney said. They highlight all of the family members who are buried in the cemetery. We also are able to discuss some of the health issues that they might have suffered from like sickle cell anemia, and also talk about their ancestral origins.”

“We don’t have any idea who these people were, because they’re anonymous within the cemetery,” said Elizabeth Comer, the president of the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society and a study author. “We have put together, using our genealogical research and our historical documentary research, a list of 271 names of enslaved individuals who worked at the furnace. We can’t connect those names to someone in the cemetery.

The research does, however, allow scientists to aggregate data that points to where the Catoctin residents’ ancestors once lived, giving anthropologists an idea of where in Africa they were taken from.

“If you can tie people to specific regions in Africa, it can be very helpful”, says Douglas Owsley, one of the study authors. Some people in Europe have a lot of European ancestry.

Fatimah L. C. Jackson, a biology and anthropology professor at Howard University, said that the study was ground-breaking, and that it was in its makings.

What makes the work of Harney et al. unique? so pioneering is that the research was initiated by an engaged local community of African Americans and results were structured to meet the needs, priorities, and sensibilities of the larger African American community,” she wrote in a perspective article that accompanied the paper in Science. “This is the way that this type of research should be performed, and it provides a blueprint for future studies.”

Source: A landmark study opens a new possible way for Black Americans to trace their ancestry

A Memoir of a Time and a Place for Reconnection with the Buried Sculptors of the Feynman Manifold

The Smithsonian, Harvard and the historical society have yet to contact any of the nearly 3,000 people out in the world who are closer relatives to the people buried at the Furnace.

“That history has been obfuscated, it’s been erased, it’s been eliminated from our narrative,” she said. “Our whole being is to reconnect with a descendant community, both collectively and directly.”