GENE GENIE? "…Adam called his wife's name EVE, because she had to become THE MOTHER OF EVERYONE LIVING." "So Noah went in, and his [three] sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him, into the ark ahead of the deluge…and only Noah and those who were with him in the ark kept on surviving…" How old does fact have to be for it to become relegated to fable? For how long does information last before it becomes so taken for granted that it is discredited into myth and legend? What do the above verses, taken from the bible at Genesis Chapter 3 Verse 20 and Chapter 7 Verses 7 & 23 respectively, have to do with 21st Century genealogy? Ten years ago, the last question above would have generated an answer of: Absolutely Nothing. Today, the answer is: Absolutely Everything, courtesy of revolutionary discoveries in DNA research by Dr Bryan Sykes of the Oxford University et al. That research has focussed attention as never before on how DNA can help us understand the History of Humanity – no mean feat considering that although humans have been on this planet for 6,000+ years, reliable written histories only begin to exist a good two millennia after that point; for instance Queen Elizabeth II can trace her ancestry back nearly 1500 years as England's monarch, but written parish registers only exist for the last 500 years. The implications for genealogy and family history researchers were quickly grasped and have been eagerly expounded by enthusiasts, for DNA survives where nothing else can, but does the reality live up to the hype? I have put my money where my mouth is and taken the plunge into having my DNA tested by Oxford Ancestors to reveal my maternal ancestry, and because I'm basically a nice person, I'm willing to share the journey with you… But what's it all about? To understand how genetics and genealogy are now converging thanks to the wonders of modern science and super-computers, we need to go back, back, back, to the year 1593 B.C. – one thousand five hundred and ninety- three years Before (the birth of) Christ. At the time, the dominant world power in the Middle East was Egypt, and in the land of the Nile, a son was born to a slave couple. His Hebrew name is forever unknown, his adoptive mother, a daughter of Pharoah, named him "Moses", which means "drawn from the water"1a. Sixty-four years before, Moses' maternal great- and paternal great-great-uncle, Joseph, son of Jacob, had died. Having risen to become Prime Minister of Egypt under a grateful Pharoah1b, Joseph's entire family – over seventy individuals – were allowed to settle in the Goshen delta of the Nile. Though looted and vandalised in antiquity, the glorious tomb bestowed by Egypt for Joseph upon his death in 1657 B.C., for saving it from starvation in 1729 – 1722 B.C., has been excavated and some objects are on display in museums. However, by the time of Moses' birth, things had changed – an active, healthier lifestyle and the practice of polygamy had increased the Israelite population to such numbers that certain factions saw them as a political threat. Uncaring of how much his ancestor1c owed the Israelites, the current Pharoah1d ordered the midwives to smother all the male Israelite babies at birth. Possibly this Pharoah was particularly weak politically, or personally ineffectual, since the book of Genesis implies that no concerted attempt was made to enforce this command. Indeed, when Pharoah demanded an explanation as to why the order had not been obeyed, the midwives claimed that Israelite women were quick in labour, due to being more active than their indolent Egyptian mistresses, and Pharoah seems to have accepted this with a sort of "oh, well" shrug of the shoulders and simply given up. At this point, Moses was born to Jochebed and Amram; though similar in age, Jochebed was actually her husband's paternal aunt, she was the daughter of Joseph's half-brother Levi, Amram was his grandson. Moses was their third and last child – they had and elder son Aaron, born 1796 B.C. and Miriam, the eldest and only girl, about four years older again than Aaron. It's implied that hiding Moses in the basket was done merely as a precaution just in case rather than any real fear that the baby was going to be killed, but the basket drifted into view of one of Pharoah's daughters1e and the rest as they say is history – Moses was adopted by the Egyptian princess who gave him his name. Wangling herself into service as her own son's wet nurse, Jochebed also ensured her family was part of the Royal Court. It was Moses who penned the opening words of this article, sometime in the forty- year period between 1553 – 1513 B.C. A genealogist and writer once confessed that, "'though it happened centuries ago, I still mourn the loss of the Library of Alexandra, and fantasise that perhaps Hypatia guessed and managed to hide some scrolls from the murderous Patriarch Cyril somewhere. In the same way, I can never read Genesis without feeling envy for Moses, "raised in all the wisdom of the Egyptians", who had access to so many texts and books lost to the entropy of time – astronomy, history, language, medicine and so forth.'" One can only imagine being able to consult books as old as those Moses had access to, that enabled him to write down as fact the knowledge that all the world's billions are the children of just two people, millennia before this fact would be re-discovered. For centuries, the words were simply accepted, until the arrival of the Enlightenment in the 1700 – 1800s, which included a vociferous opposition to religion and "superstition". By the time Charles Darwin had written his Origin of Species, the idea that humanity as a whole were the children of Adam and Eve had gone the way of the dodo. Neither those who "kept the faith" nor those in the evolutionary Enlightenment camp could have guessed that barely a hundred years after Origin of Species, an English scientist named Sykes would vindicate Genesis. Dr Bryan Sykes was and is Professor Genetics at Oxford University. During his career, which saw him work on such as Oetzi the Ice Man and Cheddar Man, he got to wondering whether it was possible to extract intact, readable DNA from ancient bones. It was. Then he started cogitating on the potential of mitochondrial DNA. Every human being has it, but it can only be passed on from mother to daughter. Might it be possible to turn this fact on it's head and use mitochondrial DNA to trace back from daughter to mother to mother to mother back to the very dawn of time itself? It was. Dr Sykes and his colleagues tried an experiment in tracing mitochondrial DNA. To their absolute astonishment, they ended up proving that 95% of Western Europe (including the British Isles) are descended from just seven women. To reduce these numbers to something more tangible, stop reading this article for a moment, get up, go to your window and look out across your town or city. How many people live in your town or city: 20,000? 30,000? 50,000? One million? Dr Sykes' discovery was like you finding out that every single person in your hometown – all 50,000 of them for example – were all descended from one Gladys Smith, born 1503. It was mind- blowing. So the gang went global. What about other continents? Astonishment turned to awe when they discovered that these seven "clan mothers" were the norm, not the exception! Native Americans have only four clan mothers, Asia eleven and Africa thirteen. But more was to come. Examining the mitochondrial DNA – "mDNA" - of the clan mothers, Dr Sykes and his merry band discovered that they were all the "great-granddaughters" of the same woman, "Lara", who was herself the daughter of one woman. Lara's mother Dr Sykes named, in due homage, "mitochondrial Eve". Of course, that is not to say that other women weren't around at the time – contemporaries of Lara, even her sisters. But these women were either childless or, somewhere down the line, produced only sons, breaking the mitochondrial chain. In one fell swoop the researchers had proven correct that on two counts Moses knew what he was talking about 4,000 years before anyone else on the planet. Besides Eve, Moses' other great claim was the Flood – a large population was reduced by global cataclysm to a very small one that gradually mushroomed out again to the six billion we have today. This is commonly known as the hourglass or egg- timer theory of genetics. Moses ascribed the cause to a global deluge, modern scientists accuse a meteorite strike, but the point is that Dr Sykes et al's findings showed that all humanity currently living really did come from a vastly smaller ancestral gene pool than imagined. Dr Sykes book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, was quite deservedly a bestseller and everyone was happy. But gradually it began to dawn on Dr Sykes that he wasn't really describing the genetic history of the world but rather the genetic history of women. Fully fifty percent of the human race was being ignored, not least because of the practical problems of tracing back the male Y-chromosome, which was more difficult to do than with mDNA. Things began to develop when Dr Sykes was invited by a pharmaceutical company to attend a seminar, and rapidly got sick of being asked if he was a relative of the company's representative Sir Richard Sykes, from Yorkshire; it dawned on the Dr that he didn't really know for sure, so he prevailed upon the jovial knight to provide him with a DNA sample that he compared to his own Y- chromosomes. It matched – exactly. What that meant was that Dr and Sir Sykes shared a common paternal ancestor. The thing was, Dr Sykes family had all been Southerners for generations – there was nothing to suggest any connection with Yorkshire whatsoever. Previously uninterested in family history research, individuals working on both Dr Sykes and Sir Richard accounts began to trace their histories, searching for the connecting ancestor, but came up blank. The man had moved from Yorkshire towards London before written records were kept. Intrigued, Dr Sykes wrote to 250 Yorkshiremen surnamed Sykes and requested DNA samples. Of the sixty who complied, a full 50% had the same ancestor as himself and Sir Richard. I realise it's quite hard to sit there and get all excited about the above paragraph, so let's put it into a context more readily grasped. "Sykes" is derived from a Yorkshire dialect word, "sike", which refers to a culvert or small outpouring of water – usually a muddy trickle in a ditch. Such "sikes" abound all over the vast area that was the ancient County of Yorkshire, and the chances of only one man deciding that "sike" was a good surname are remote, yet Dr Sykes' experiment showed that fully half of the respondents were from the same family, not as thought from a variety of men who adopted the surname Sykes. Another, even more spectacular example is the surname Dyson. Genealogical surname books will tell you that "Dyson" is an occupational surname, meaning "son of the dyer" – as in textile worker, of which there were hundreds all over Medieval Yorkshire and Lancashire. It was therefore generally assumed that Dysons were a collection of unrelated families descended from dozens of individual men who happened to be dye workers. However, Dr George Redmonds, the man who helped Dr Sykes find his Yorkshire ancestor Henry del Sike in the year 1286, had a theory that he asked Dr Sykes to test. He had come across a woman in 14th Century Yorkshire named Dionissia of Linthwaite – "a right tearaway" – cattle thief, smuggler, drunkard and an all round female land-bound Blackbeard; in 1316 Dionissia had a bastard son who was named John Dison or Dyson, and Redmonds theorised that instead of being unconnected descendents of men who worked in the textile industry, a large proportion of Dysons were actually descended from this son of Dionissia, which would make Dyson one of the extremely rare matronymic surnames as opposed to one of the very common occupational surnames. So Dr Sykes sent off requests for DNA to men surnamed Dyson. The results were mind-blowing. Almost ninety-percent, I repeat: 90% - of those whose DNA was tested came back positive. They were all the same family, they were descended from Dionissia through her son John Dyson, including the famous James Dyson of vacuum cleaner fame - the surname was matronymic, not occupational. Of the three samples that did not match Dionissia's son, two were so close that they were clearly the same man, and one stood alone, indicating that rather than unconnected descent from dozens of men, people with the surname Dyson are actually descended from only three different men, possibly a few more if more samples were tested. Of course, any family history researcher will tell you that the more unusual the surname, the more likely it is that you are all the same family, however the examples of Sykes and Dyson demonstrated that it is possible for even "common" surnames to be far more closely linked than we might believe. So yet again, the gang went global; just as mDNA can only be passed from mother to daughter, so the old Y-chromosome, which is what makes males male, can only be passed from father to son. By tracing changes back, you can determine the connections between men just as mDNA allowed the connections between women to be shown. However, Dyson-Sykes was expected to be the exception rather than the rule. When it comes to sex, men generally have the bad reputation of being willing to make like rabbits with anything female if given the chance. You only have to turn on the news to see the large number of celebrity footballers, Hollywood stars, flamboyant business tycoons and senior politicians who are clearly controlled by what's between their legs rather than between their ears; unfortunately an increasing proportion of Joseph Public seem to view these types as ideal moral role models. The Y-chromosome was expected to reflect this exuberance. But it didn't. Despite centuries of exposure to the male attitude, "if it's female and alive it'll do," Dr Sykes et al discovered that the Y-chromosome was just like mitochondrial DNA – the more generations they regressed, the fewer and fewer different DNA strands there were, until, just like women, all men converged back to a single paternity, whom Dr Sykes again with a sense of the appropriate, named "Y- Chromsome Adam" or "yAdam" for short. Again, this doesn't mean there were not other men around but just as with Eve, these either had no children/surviving sons or somewhere down the line they had only daughters, breaking the Y-chromosome link to the next generation. There is no need or point to go into the complex sociological aspects here, but given the generally proliferate tendencies of men, why are all men cousins who can trace their line back to a single progenitor? The answer quite simply is: status. Like television, marriage "for love" is an invention of the 1950s, and for centuries men sought women who seemed to have a tendency to produce male children, and likewise women sought men with the money and power to protect and provide for them and their offspring with as little difficulty as possible – this has a direct bearing on why short, fat, ugly but fabulously rich men (e.g., Aristotle Onassis) are surrounded by bevies of young, beautiful women. The richer a man was, the more power he had, whether militarily or politically, the more women he got the chance to procreate with at the expense of men who were less well financially or powerfully endowed. For instance, in Asia, Dr Sykes kept coming up again and again with one sample – it was as if one man had sired most of Asia. But who? The answer was Genghis Khan, who created the greatest land-bound Empire the world has ever seen. The Mongol Hordes approach was vicious and direct – slaughter everything, bar women of reproductive age. Once he'd conquered a region, Khan gave everything to his soldiers as booty, except for the most beautiful of the captured women, who he retained for himself. When Khan died, his chief wife divided his Empire amongst his "four sons" or rather his four legitimate sons. By rape, Genghis Khan sired hundreds of children, many of them male. Today, this man has sixteen million descendents in Asia, since his sons also practised polygamy and mass conquest-rape. Another example as described in Adam's Curse, Dr Sykes sequel to Seven Daughters of Eve is Moulay the Bloodthirsty, Sultan of Morocco – this charming chap had 888 children, of which 548 were male. Yet another example is found in the bible again – King Solomon, who reigned from 1037 – 998 B.C. By the final year of his reign, Solomon had amassed 1,000 spouses, seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, all of whom he had sex with at least once. If we assume for the sake of argument that a quarter were infertile and a quarter did not fall pregnant from this initial encounter, that still leaves the potential for 500 children before you start, even more considering that Solomon's ancestry had at least two sets of male twins. Unlike women, who have a relatively narrow window of opportunity in which to reproduce, male fertility only declines slightly with age, which is why men such as James Doohan of Star Trek fame could sire a child at 82 years of age. Another factor is that a woman is limited to the amount of children she can produce, as it's much more physically demanding for a woman to produce a child than it is for a man to make one; as former tennis ace Boris Becker proved, a man can do that in less than 5 seconds in a broom cupboard. Admittedly there are exceptions to the rule, for instance my own great-great-great-grandmother Ann Hill Bladon had 16 children, all single births; another instance is the European woman with 35 children, but these were all multiple births – twins, triplets and a case of quads. It would be impossible for a single Mrs Moulay or Mrs Solomon for example to churn out 888 children. But you don't have to look at Eastern Potentates to find the few "clan fathers" of humanity, the Western Hemisphere had plenty of it's own. One classic example is France when it was a monarchy; in monarchical France "King's Mistress" was an official title, like Prime Minister. The most famous is probably Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marchioness de Pompadour, a.k.a. "Madame Pompadour", who held this position from 1745 with King Louis XV. His son the Dauphin, later King Louis XVI who ended his life at the Guillotine, called her "mama" over the Queen Maria. STDs such as syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were pandemic in the West – the famous French King Francis I, son of the brilliant Louise de Savoy, Duchess of Angoulκme, had his politically astute reign cut short when, like his bitter rival King Henry VIII of England, he died riddled with syphilis. As a way to try to avoid this, one of the duties of the "King's Mistress" was to procure an endless success of virgins for the French King, thus avoiding the possibility of him catching such diseases. In practice this often didn't work. For centuries "proof" of virginity was a few spots of hymen blood on the sheets after the wedding night nuptials, and both genuine and "professional" virgins frequently took the precaution of secreting two or three drops of fresh chicken blood in a ring or tiny phial, which could then be dabbed on the bed for when the man woke up in the morning. Acutely intelligent and politically savvy, Madame Pompadour kept her position with Louis XV for decades and though his heir King Louis XVI had only one legitimate sibling, the Princess Elizabeth de Bourbon, in reality the pair of them had literally hundreds of semi-siblings; for centuries in France there were palaces specifically to house the King's mistresses – in reality his exclusive harem – and also to house and educate his bastards. Another example is King Charles II of England, who had at a conservative estimate 150 illegitimate children. It would be interesting to test all Frenchmen and all Jewish men to see how many are directly descended from French royalty or Solomon. Men who were able to produce large quantities of children thus had a head start in the race to propagate DNA, and were helped by another thing: war. Only since World War II have the vast majority of warfare casualties been civilian populations; prior to this, the greatest number of those killed in wars were soldiers. However, here status came in again – those usually killed in these wars, the "cannon fodder", were by far always ordinary men – serfs, peasants, working class – while the officers sat well back behind the lines sipping mint juleps and critiquing the sartorial style of the opposition. Up to and including World War I, knights and these military officers of higher rank were usually aristocracy, either the illegitimate sons of kings or the sons of noblemen themselves descendants of earlier kings; these men had the money and power to ensure that their sons were kept clear of the frontlines, thus giving them a much greater chance of surviving the conflict, and of course in the aftermath theirs was the DNA that got passed on. As C.S. Lewis put it in his Chronicles of Narnia, all women really are daughters of Eve, all men really are sons of Adam. However, I can practically see the way some people are jumping up and down, waving their arms and yelling, "But! But! But!" Some people have made the valid point – the only way to absolutely prove we are all descendents of Adam and Eve is to DNA test everyone on the planet, and since Dr Sykes has not DNA tested every single one of the six billion humans currently in situ on this third rock from the sun, surely it's a bit premature to claim everyone is descended from just these two people. That's certainly a pertinent observation, however, the claim does stand up if we extrapolate. To illustrate – any science book will tell you that every single snowflake is unique, no two are alike. But the only way to prove this conclusively is to examine every single snowflake and obviously this is impossible – snow has been falling for thousands of years before we began to take scientific notice of it. However, a scientist who researched snow for nearly fifty years found that never once did two snowflakes have the same pattern. If we take that half-century of observation as being representative of how snowflakes function, then it is pretty safe to extrapolate from that the theory that all snowflakes are unique and never repeat their patterns. Likewise, when Dr Sykes and other scientists were DNA testing every single sample led back, albeit via several different clan mothers and fathers, to the same woman and the same man. Since Dr Sykes founded Oxford Ancestors, hundreds more samples have been commercially tested and none have been found to lead back to progenitors other than "yAdam" and "mEve". So now let's bring it back down to yours truly. Is it of any individual benefit – enough to justify the very expensive fees charged by Oxford Ancestors et al? All the above has been a nice meander through the history of humanity but does the ability to genetically map your ancestry back to Adam and Eve amount to anything more than something you can smugly bore other people with at parties? For certain sections of humanity, the answer is a resounding "yes". Probably the most public example is that of African –Americans. These people were brutally stolen from their homes and robbed of their culture by monsters; however, there are certain geographical areas of the world that are DNA "hotspots", that is, there is such a concentration of a particular DNA sequence that it can be claimed that it originated there. An example of this is found again in Adam's Curse, where the Hazara tribe's oral tradition claimed direct descent from Genghis Khan – DNA tests showed this to be true, but the fearsome Khan's genes were entirely missing from the surrounding populations; the Hazara are an isolated "hotspot" of Khan kids amidst a region of non- relations. Likewise, an African-American can have his or her DNA tested and find that it is scattered like confetti throughout Ethiopia, but there is none whatsoever in Uganda or Kenya. This instantly anchors them to a cultural identity – they are no longer drifting; time and time again it has been proven how psychologically beneficial it is for an individual to know "where they came from", to be able to look other people in the eye and say, "I'm Ethiopian" or whatever. Another example of this is with Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. In the 1920s and 30s the United States and Australian Governments began a shameful, national concerted campaign to destroy American Indian and Aboriginal culture, by the simple expedient of removing young children from their parents and placing them in Federal and national foster homes. Raised en masse in solely "white" culture, these young people were discharged in waves – abandoned by the state – as soon as they reached legal adulthood. Though thousands made it back to their people, the cultural chasm between these children and their biological families was often unbridgeable; not surprisingly, huge numbers of these stolen children developed profound psychological problems, mental illnesses, drug addiction and alcoholism – they weren't white, but neither did they relate to the culture they had been born into. While DNA testing may not link such a person to their immediate family, they can and do find great comfort from discovering that their DNA is exclusively New England Shoshone or New South Wales Aborigine and so forth. Of course, the most modern application is to sperm and egg donation. Many people born from an egg donor or sperm donor have a fiercely intense desire to know where they came from because one half of their genetic background is a blank – which can be very dangerous physically as well as the profoundly negative psychological impact; it was recently discovered that a Scandinavian sperm donor had passed on a 50-50 chance of developing Huntingdon's Disease. A recent BBC documentary in England showed how a scientist husband and wife team in the 1950s secretly helped dozens of infertile couples have children by sperm donation – however, the donated sperm came from an extremely small group of close friends – including the scientist husband who provided over a hundred sperm donations; this meant an extremely high concentration of semi-siblings born in a very localised area. The doctor who made the documentary was one of two legitimate children to the scientist couple; almost immediately he discovered his half-brother in Canada, and found for one "only child" woman one of her –presumably several – half-brothers. In the state of California, where divorce and single parent families are endemic, part of the reason that blood tests for marriage were introduced was because of the ever increasing risk of two people unaware they were half-brother and sister trying to get married, in situations where usually the father had "ridden off into the sunset" after siring children in short-term relationships. Such things have happened and this is no longer an "only in America" scenario. In Britain in the 1990s a 22-year-old man mugged an 18-year-old man but was caught. When the case came to trial there was consternation in the court as the two men discovered, apparently while the defendant was in the dock and his victim present, that they were in fact half-brothers. The mugger's father had disappeared when he was a few months old, and had apparently done the same thing to his second partner, the mother of the victim, when that boy was a few months old. One has to wonder just how many children this one man left scattered around the British countryside; there was no description of how the two reacted to this news, and I have to confess I have always wondered what happened to the pair after they learned this, for the newspaper that reported it, I think The Daily Mail, never did a follow-up article. Of most interest to me, personally, and part of the reason why I decided to venture having my maternal line tested, was the potential to discover my Jewish ancestors. An actual Jewish nation did not exist from 70 A.D. (when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and began the Diaspora of Jews across the globe) until 1948 A.D. (when it was re-founded after World War II), but thanks to DNA, it is possible to locate certain Jewish "hotspots", to tell whether someone is ancestrally an Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe or a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe, etc. This is what I hope to do for myself eventually as I have been greatly frustrated by a brick wall that I ran into only as far back as 1873. What makes it doubly so is the way that I have done so well in other of my ancestral families. With the assistance of a distant cousin, Mr James Drew, I was able to take the Lomas-Bunting family of Ashover back in an unbroken line to 1285, including my 9x-great-grandfather John Bunting (1610-1667) who was a Captain in Cromwell's Parliamentary Army. Dr Andrew Peckett helped me take another line, Lucas of Cambridgeshire, back to John Lucas of 1677, who was a relative of Sir Charles Lucas of Essex, a Royalist knight killed at Colchester in 1648; the broken link between Sir Charles and John is only a short one that I hope to soon reforge, as John was an Essex native, not from Cambridgeshire. Karen Proudler helped me take the Bladens back to 1555. Though I have only traced back the family Cuttell in an unbroken line to 1707 Babworth, Notts, it seems more or less certain that all Cuttells in England are descended from one Beringar de Cotel, who came over in 1066 and who settled in Warwickshire in 1084. To be stopped dead as recently as 1873 was therefore quite embarrassing, but there are several difficulties. My great-great-grandfather William Johnson was born illegitimately to Eliza Johnson in November 1873 in Eckington, Derbyshire. His biological father (believed to be an Ashkenazi Jew?) was a "travelling salesman/merchant" type. Eliza shrouded his identity in secrecy (not surprising if he was Jewish, considering the rampant anti-Semitism of late Victorian Britain), but neither William, nor Eliza (born 1849 also in Eckington) were Anglican – the Johnson family of Eckington were non-conformist Methodist as far back as the 1840s, and non-conformist registers for that town in that period are not in the best of shape. So was William descended from a Jewish father or not? It's a question I'd like an answer to one way or the other, particularly as the Jewish race have the potential to be a genealogical goldmine for one very simple reason – for over a thousand years, the Jewish nation possessed an archive of genealogical records so superlative in scope that they have never in the history of humanity been equalled. Originally known as Hebrews, the Jews came to be called Israelites after the Patriarch Jacob also known as Israel. Jacob had at least twenty children, twelve of whom were sons and who founded the ancient nation of Israel as described in the Old Testament. Over the following centuries, the Israelites became known as "Jews", derived from Judah, Jacob's fourth-born son, whose descendents became Israel's Royal Family. Genealogy was of crucial importance to the Jews in terms of inheriting land, money – and making marriages. The firstborn son received two portions while the other sons got one. If a man had no sons, the firstborn daughter inherited two portions while subsequent daughters got one, with a proviso that they kept their marriages within their own tribe to stop some tribes acquiring land at the expense of others. Up until the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., these genealogical records were all stored in the Temple at Jerusalem, and could be checked and cross-referenced at will. But were they accurate? We can say yes for two reasons, the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. Both these books were written before the temple's destruction but first in the queue for copies weren't those belonging to fledgling Christianity, but those most virulently opposed to Christianity. The reason for this enthusiasm was Luke Chapter Four and Matthew Chapter One, both of which list the genealogy of Jesus Christ through his mother and father respectively, and both of which show that he was directly descended from the Israelite Kings of the Davidic line. As any aficionado of Heroic Fantasy fiction will tell you, the story of how ordinary farm boy Joe Bloggs really turns out to be long-lost Prince Boris, heir to the Great Throne of Wallah-Wallah is standard fantasy fare, most recently seen in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy where Aragon (Viggio Mortenson) turns out to be heir to the throne of Middle Earth. The point is that we know these Gospel genealogies are accurate because if they weren't the opposers of Christianity could have had a field day – the records were there for everyone to check if supporters of the hated new religion had tried to pull a fast one by making their dead founder a member of the Davidic Royal Family. Up until the records were burned in 70 A.D., any Jew or Jewess could, with ease, check the records and verify that they were of the tribe of Benjamin or Gad, etc. DNA testing has the potential to be able to recreate that database. The Israelite nation was founded by the twelve sons of Jacob. Born in 1858 B.C. the younger of twin sons to Isaac (1918 – 1738 B.C.) the son of the great Patriarch Abraham (2018-1843 B.C.) and his half-sister wife Sarah (2008 – 1881 B.C.), Jacob had two wives, sisters Leah and Rachel and two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, who provided him with his score plus offspring. If all Jewish men had their Y-chromosome tested, then in theory these should be able to be separated into twelve strands that could be grouped into four clusters – Leah had six sons by Jacob, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah two each. If Jewish men also had their mitochondrial DNA tested, then they should lead back to three "clusters" – Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah. It appears that Rachel had fertility problems – Genesis implies that she had no daughters – indeed, her only two children Joseph and Benjamin were born a decade apart and Benjamin's birth killed her. Likewise, if all Jewish women had their mitochondrial DNA tested then this should lead back to one of three clusters – Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah – all of whom had several daughters, Bilhah and Zilpah being most prolific in producing female children. You would end up with a pattern of mitochondrial and Y-Chromosome sequences that could be grouped together – for example, Joseph and Benjamin would be closer than Joseph and Judah because both were the sons of the same parents, Jacob and Rachel, whereas Judah was Jacob's son by Leah. If the graves of any one of Jacob's twelve sons (Joseph's tomb is known, although there is no body there anymore) or his four wives could be reliability located and DNA extracted, then this would show that, for example, group A was Bilhah and Jacob's descendents, or DNA sequence F was Simeon. Just imagine – after a gap of over 1900 years, Jewish people again could say, "I'm a Benjaminite" or "I'm a Judean". Assuming that William Johnson's biological father was Jewish, I might one day in the future be able to pinpoint that he was descended from Leah and Jacob through Zebulun. To bring the potential closer to home, I'm going to share with you one of my favourite daydreams: suppose some billionaire philanthropist (are you listening, Mr Gates?) were to fund the extracting and DNA testing of the remains of every single man, woman and child buried in every churchyard in every parish of the British Isles. Suppose this philanthropist (still there, Mr G?) were then to fund the creation of national "DNA Parish Database". Just imagine, by having a DNA sample tested and submitted to this database, you would know within weeks the exact parish that your ancestors originated from, even if at the present time there was absolutely nothing to suggest any connection with it, like Dr Sykes had nothing to suggest his ancestors originated in Yorkshire. Enabling a researcher to immediately target parishes J, M and Y, it would save months and years of work from having to methodically plod through parishes from A-Z, and often times it is not research but a serendipitous accident that leads you to another parish, another county. This would be particularly invaluable in instances like myself with William Johnson, were there is otherwise little to no hope of discovering paternity. I know that William Johnson, somewhere, probably had a whole slew of paternal semi-siblings to match his maternal half-brothers and sisters who came after his mother married fellow Eckington native James Wood circa in 1882, but without DNA, my chances of discovering these are practically non-existent. So do I think it was worth it to pay for mitochondrial DNA test to find out which of Eve's great-granddaughters I'm descended from? I had my direct maternal ancestry back to Abigail Eldred of Sturmer, Essex, born 1804, so I put this on my form and sent back the swab, and waited.