BLASTS FROM THE PAST

Unlocking this woman's secret Maori heritage changed on Kiwi's life. What's in your genes?

Bernard Philpott thought he knew his family story. By the age of 67, using old-fashioned sleuth work and genealogical websites, he’d mapped out his British ancestry and traced his Irish family back to Limerick and Dublin. But when he took a DNA test in 2016, Philpott discovered the facts of the matter: he was 40% Irish, 37% English and – surprisingly – 2% Māori.

Now, looking at a photograph of his mother when she was young, he says she looks part Māori. “But my mother never said anything about a Māori connection. No one ever did. And I have a suspicion my father didn’t know.”

Documentary evidence to fill out the picture painted by the DNA test results was hard to find, not least because marriage certificates held at the historic Rangiātea Church in Otaki were lost when the building was razed in an arson attack in 1995. But subsequent research has found that, in 1861, his great-great-grandfather Horace Broughton married Maryanne Hamilton, possibly of the Ngāti Hauiti iwi. Philpott’s DNA test could now link him to Ngāti Hauiti lineage, including a potential connection, through another Broughton marriage, to entertainer and Poi E producer Dalvanius Prime. The

Millions are spitting into test tubes in the hope of finding a missing branch in their family tree or an unexpected last chapter in their personal history.

DNA discovery both confirmed a suspicion and opened a new line of inquiry for Philpott, who loves music and sings in a choir.

Now 69, Philpott is one of millions of people spitting into test tubes or swabbing the insides of their cheeks in the hope of finding a missing branch in their family tree or an unexpected last chapter in their personal history.

According to a recent report from Credence Research, the global direct-toconsumer genetic-testing market was valued at US$117 million in 2017 and is expected to hit US$611 million by 2026 as shoppers rush to buy services and testing kits for information on family lineage, disease risks and personal traits.

WHO’S YOUR FATHER?

The results of genetic tests can be life-changing. DNA sleuths have tracked down siblings or half-siblings they never knew they had or found their father was not the man they called Dad. In its latest estimate, US genetictesting business 23andMe says 7000 users of its service have discovered unexpected paternity or previously unknown siblings.

The results of a DNA test, supported by anecdotal evidence, confirmed suspicions for an Auckland woman that she is the daughter of a high-profile Catholic priest in the Auckland Diocese, now deceased. As she told RNZ National this month, “It wasn’t a surprise, but knowing the reality was overwhelming.”

Speaking anonymously, she told the

broadcaster she had made contact with Coping International, a private online group for children of priests growing up with their “guilty secret”. “It is so much better to know the truth. I couldn’t possibly go back to where I was; I am much happier knowing who I am.”

Now, she says, she just wants written acknowledgement from the church that she is the daughter of a Catholic priest. Bishop of Auckland Patrick Dunn told RNZ he has seen the evidence of paternity and accepts that the woman’s father is who she says he is. The woman, now in her fifties, does not want to reveal her father’s identity, but she is thrilled that the church will now formally acknowledge she is the secret child of a supposedly celibate priest.

DNA tests have also solved the problem of mistaken identity. Alice Collins Plebuch, the 69-year-old daughter of an Irish Catholic family in New York, had always wondered why there was so much evidence of European Jewish, Middle Eastern and Eastern European ancestry in her genetic heritage. Last year, she solved the mystery. After months of research and further DNA testing of close relatives, she discovered that her father, Jim Collins, had been sent home with the wrong family just hours after his birth in 1913. Jim was born to Jewish parents but mistakenly given by the hospital to an Irish family, whose own child was sent home with the Jewish family.

THE COST OF CURIOSITY

Most DNA test-takers are simply curious, excited by the science and the technology that give them the tools to unpick their family histories, says Brad Argent, ancestry spokesman for Ancestry.com, the world’s largest for-profit genealogy company. But often, he says, they dive in without preparing themselves for what can be a “very intimate and personal experience”.

For those from a small family and those who were adopted or the result of a sperm donor, “suddenly, they take this DNA test and they get matched with cousins. For the first time in their life, they have this notion of family. I have watched people become someone else when they get those results. It can be quite transformative.”

But not everyone wants the past barging into the present: a birth father with no inkling his one-night stand 20 years before resulted in a pregnancy, the sperm donor assuming his decades-old contribution to humanity was done and dusted, and the parties to a brief affair hidden from censorious eyes may not welcome that reconnection.

Others just don’t want to know. When Japan-based English-language teacher Antony Brett Shaw claimed that former Cabinet minister and Auckland mayor John Banks was his birth father, Banks refused to have a DNA test. Last year, the High Court ruled in favour of Shaw’s paternity claim. Justice Patricia Courtney said Banks’s refusal to undergo a DNA test was an admissible fact “from which an adverse inference could be drawn”.

The dead, in contrast, have no such right of refusal. In 2012, mitochondrial DNA – DNA passed down the maternal line – was used to identify a skeleton buried under a car park in Leicester as that of King Richard III. Interest piqued when researchers at Leicester University compared the body’s Y (male) chromosomes with those of living descendants of Edward III, a great-greatgrandfather of Richard III. There was no match. Somewhere in the family history at least one man had been cuckolded. Media speculated on the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty, but researchers were nonplussed: according to the university, the false paternity rate is about 1-2% in any generation.

“Suddenly, they take this DNA test and they get matched with cousins. For the first time in their life, they have this notion of family.” US genetic tester 23andMe says 7000 users of its service have discovered unexpected paternity or previously unknown siblings.

FILLING A GAP

Most people forking out $100-500 for a DNA test will not have the OMG moment of learning of an unknown parent, a secret sibling or a cuckolded ancestor. But for many, the process fills a nagging gap in their family story.

Coral Shearer, who lives in Paeroa, had never been able to identify the family of her great-grandmother Mary Ann George (later Vickery), who arrived from London in 1870. One of her children’s birth certificates said she was born in Scaldwell, Northamptonshire, but after trawling through censuses and church records, even visiting the cemetery, the ancestry case remained cold.

Then, 18 months ago, she had a DNA test and was able to contact suspected relatives in the US (some DNA testing companies provide space on their websites for clients to upload documents, photographs and entire family trees). As a result of the relatives’ research, she was able to unlock the story of her great-grandmother (she was the

daughter of barge gypsies, whose horses pulled barges along canal towpaths) and extend her family tree from the mid-19th century all the way back to 16th-century England.

“It does mean a lot. I knew all about [my great-grandfather’s] family, but it stopped at her. I wanted to know what her family was like and why she came out here. I’m slowly building up a profile of her, putting meat on the bones on what their lives were like.”

THE SCIENCE SIMPLIFIED

The search for surprise, for completion or for Māori or Viking or Salem-witch uniqueness is driving the private genetic-testing industry, but how much can we actually take from these selected snips from the complex helix of our DNA?

There are three genetic clues to your ancestry. Your mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) contains your maternal ancestry passed down unchanged in orderly fashion from mother to daughter through the centuries – although sons receive their mother’s mitochondrial DNA, they cannot pass it on to their children. The Y chromosome or Y-DNA provides information about your paternal ancestry passed down from father to son.

Slight genetic changes or mutations in mtDNA or Y-DNA can become traceable markers of descent passed down through family lines and whole populations moving through time and place. These inherited markers identify different haplogroups – genetically related populations that share a common ancestor – from a particular geographic region up to tens of millennia ago. These ancient bio-geographic female and male lineages track genetic continuity back to just a few sets of divergent populations, famously described by University of Oxford geneticist Bill Sykes as the Daughters of Eve and the Sons of Adam.

Ancient DNA from a 166 cm tall, lactoseintolerant Mesolithic hunter and gatherer who died in Somerset, England, some 10,000 years ago has forced a dramatic change in modern Britons’ ancestry and knocked a whopping hole in white supremacist ideologies. First unearthed in 1903, the so-called Cheddar Man – his skeleton was found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge – has the genetic markers for blue or green eyes, brown hair and “dark to black” skin pigmentation usually associated with sub-Saharan Africa.

According to postdoctoral researcher Tom Booth working at the Natural History Museum, “Cheddar Man subverts people’s expectations of what kinds of genetic traits go together. It seems that pale eyes entered Europe long before pale skin or blond hair, which didn’t come along until after the arrival of farming.”

Today, about 10% of British ancestry can be linked to this population of hunter-gatherers who migrated to Europe about 14,000 years ago, including that of local history teacher Adrian Targett, found to be related to Cheddar Man on his mother’s side.

The other main DNA-deciphering approach, autosomal DNA testing, looks at genetic material inherited from both parents. This material identifies individuals with whom you share one or more common ancestors up to about 500 years ago. Autosomal tests also provide information about an individual’s “ethnicity” by identifying sections of the DNA that match reference databases of modern populations. Some gene-tracking companies, including 23andMe, follow these threads back to Europe 20,000 years ago and Africa a couple of hundred thousand years ago, giving clients a tantalising quotient of Neanderthal DNA.

It makes for an interesting pub chat, says Argent (Ancestry.com does not go that far back), but from a genealogical perspective it is not particularly informative, he says.

“DNA COUSINS”

Most companies supply some form of map or pie chart describing your quotient of

“It is so much better to know the truth. I couldn’t possibly go back to where I was; I am much happier knowing who I am.”

sub-Saharan African, European, East Asian, Oceanian or Native American genetic makeup. This information can be used to draw up lists of what Ancestry.com describes as “DNA cousins” – other clients on the company database with a similar DNA reading in a kind of genealogical Facebook.

As a way to find people who share your DNA, these tests are useful, but there are limitations. The information provided by autosomal testing is limited to a process called genotyping, whereby scientists select parts of your DNA that tend to be different. Single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs (pronounced “snips”) are the most common type of genetic variation among people. A genealogical DNA test will sample several hundred thousand of these, then compare or match them with others on a company database. But this is only a fraction of the 10 million SNPs estimated to be in the human genome, leaving a lot of information untested.

And the reliability of ancestry DNA results is restricted by the size of the database each company uses. The 23andMe DNA database, for example, has more than three million customers; Ancestry.com has more than six million. But these tend to be dominated by test-takers in the US and UK respectively.

“If you are from a small region of Southeast Asia or Africa, where not many people have done the Ancestry or 23andMe test, you are not going to get a great result,” says Nic Rawlence, lecturer in ancient DNA at the University of Otago. “On the other hand, if you are from Europe, you should get fairly good results because lots of Europeans are doing the test.”

In any case, ancestral DNA tests represent only very small chips off the ancestral block. A mitochondrial DNA test will undoubtedly tell you something about your mother’s and your mother’s mother’s line, says Rawlence, “but follow that line back 10 generations and you are learning about one of more than a thousand ancestors in that line alone”.

Similarly, Y-chromosome testing traces

“Go back 600 years and everybody living today with western European ancestry would have shared ancestry somewhere there.”

The wrong family: Alice Collins Plebuch, pictured above and left with a second cousin, solved the mystery surrounding evidence of European Jewish, Middle Eastern and Eastern European ancestry after months of research and further DNA testing of relatives.

Brad Argent of Ancestry.com: people dive in without preparing themselves for what can be a “very intimate and personal experience”.

Bernard Philpott, right, thought his 2% Māori blood came through his mother, above, whose marriage certificate was lost after Rangiātea Church, below, burnt down. Philpott’s DNA test could now link him to entertainer Dalvanius Prime, below right.

Finest Cheddar: a reconstruction made from the skull of 10,000-yearold “Cheddar Man”, Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, “subverts people’s expectations of what kinds of genetic traits go together”. Retired history teacher Adrian Targett believes he...

Legitimacy questioned: a model made from the recently discovered skull of British king Richard III. A comparison of the body’s Y chromosomes with those of descendants of Edward III, one of Richard’s great-great-grandfathers, has revealed that somewhere...