Where We All Came From

The first leg of our trip is to Ireland, the home of our ancestors: John's and mine and maybe even Luke's. The possibility that Luke could have Irish blood in him was brought home to me through a class my mom and I took at Bradley's OLLI program almost four year ago called Deep Ancestry.

I took this class in part because I thought it would be good to get some genetic information on Luke (we swabbed our cheeks and sent the material to National Geographic). Because of the chromosomes in the human body, males are able to trace their maternal and paternal lineages, while females are only able to trace the maternal. We had to choose, so I had Luke trace his maternal lineage.

Through the testing, we learned that his mother's ancestors made a very short trip from our common maternal ancestor in east Africa to west Africa where they lived for thousands of years before one of his relatives was kidnapped and put on a slave ship for Haiti.

In retrospect, I wish I would have had Luke's paternal lineage tested because this may have revealed his European ancestry. It could be Irish--as Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an African-American who hosted "Finding Your Roots" on PBS discovered--or he may have some other lineage. Luke is who he is, but those of us who have this ethnic information about ourselves know how it shapes our identity.

A graph of my maternal lineage, Haplogroup K, is above. One of the interesting facts about this haplogroup is that many of the Ashkenazi Jews (Jews from central and eastern European ancestry) are also part of this haplogroup.

As you can see from the above graph, the genetic testing also showed us the route our ancestors took out of Africa to the places where we now think of ourselves as from. We learned a lot in this class. Perhaps the most mind-blowing fact of all was this: we are all, every one of us on this planet, descended from one woman who lived in east Africa, between 100,000-200,000 years ago. She is called Mitochondrial Eve. We are all carrying some of her DNA in us.

We really are one human family.