FINDING family
DNA TEST HELPS REPORTER CONNECT WITH HIS PAST
Staff Writer mpatterson@oklahoman.com
Standing on the doorstep of an Ada woman I never knew existed wasn’t what I expected when I mailed off a DNA test kit to Ancestry.com this summer.
Interest in my heritage started young, around age seven or eight, when while riding bikes on a summer afternoon with my friend, Marcus, I blurted out a question that had been on my mind.
“Your mom talks kind of funny. Is she American?”
Marcus, no doubt, had been asked before.
“She is American, but she was born in Germany,” he answered, clearly not for the first time.
Then he turned the tables on me. “So what are you?” he asked.
Truth is, I had no idea. I asked my parents. Mutt, dad said. Scotch-Irish, mother told me.
Until now, that’s the answer I’ve lived with.
Then DNA tests became a thing.
In recent years, the number of people using at-home DNA testing has soared. With slick advertising campaigns and a price that has dropped to around $100, it’s a practice that has become more accessible than ever. In April, Ancestry.com, announced it has now tested 4 million Americans, double the number it had tested as of June 2016. Meanwhile, the direct-to-consumer genetic testing market, valued at $70 million in 2015, is expected to reach $340 million by 2022.
But what can you really learn from DNA? In my case, it was more than I ever bargained for.
The old days The results are in
Spitting into a tube isn’t something they show on the commercials, but it’s minimally intrusive and gets the job done. Six weeks after mailing off the sample the results were in.
Turns out, mom was right. Ancestry estimated my ethnicity as 52 percent British and another 19 percent Irish. Tossed in for good measure were 20 percent Western European, making me French, Dutch and German, and another five percent Scandinavian. The only real surprises were the 1 percent each of Asian, Eastern European/Jewish and Iberian Peninsula.
Ancestry also matches your sample with others who’ve submitted DNA to the company to look for possible matches. My closest match was my mother’s brother. My next closest match was a stranger the website said was “most likely” a second cousin.
After some urging I took the plunge and messaged jgentry35. She replied a day later. The match was real. Joyce Gentry, 82, is the niece of my great-grandfather, Frank Carmichael.
“Matt, it’s good to hear from another member of the Carmichael family,” Joyce said in the beginning of her reply. “Frank was my mother’s brother. We used to have family reunions back in the late 60s and early 70s but then everyone started getting old.”
Frank starred in numerous family stories I heard growing up. He owned several auto salvage yards in Oklahoma City along with several other small businesses. My dad told me stories about how Frank spoiled him and my Uncle Jerry. Every summer, for two weeks, he took them down to the family Airstream trailer on Lake Texhoma. There were virtually no rules.
“Give the boys whatever they want,” Frank would tell the man who owned the local gas station and diner.
By the end of the two weeks my dad and uncle, who weren’t yet teenagers, had racked up $300 tabs in the era of 10 cent hamburgers and 25 cent gasoline, which they used to power the boat Frank had bought them.
I never knew Frank. He died in early 1971, four months before I was born. But Joyce knew him, and my great grandmother Hazel, who died in 1999. She visited him in the hospital right before he died. On a gray February day, she attended Frank’s funeral.
“They were mostly quiet, hardworking people,” Joyce told me. “Your great grandfather was a great fisherman. I remember this picture of he and Hazel holding a string of big fish.”
Joyce grew up in Lawton, and would later marry Bill Gentry when they were both 18. They met while Joyce was delivering butter the family sold to a grocery store. Bill was a stock boy who couldn’t keep his eyes off her.
They were married in 1953 and later had two boys.
Bill had grown up without his biological father who was murdered by an intruder when Bill was barely a week old. He never graduated college, but became a vice president at an Oklahoma City bank before an offer to run his own show led him to Ada.
Bill died suddenly in July, just two months shy of their 64th wedding anniversary, and before I had a chance to meet him.
An interest in genealogy
During the couple’s years together Joyce developed an interest in genealogy. This was before the internet, when records had to be obtained in person. Her maiden name is Allison, and she researched the origins of the family farm she grew up on, which was named a Centennial Farm in 2001 for continuously being operated by the same family for 100 years or more.
Joyce also became interested in the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization reserved for those who have at least one ancestor who participated in the Revolutionary War, only to learn later she qualified for admission.
Connecting with Joyce brought answers to questions I’d had since elementary school, including whether any of my ancestors fought in the War for Independence and, if so, on which side?
Turns out, they did. Archibald Carmichael was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland around 1754. Not long after, he crossed the Atlantic with his parents in what must have been a perilous journey. They settled near present day Stokes County, North Carolina.
Archibald grew up to be a soldier in the North Carolina militia fighting against the British. In 1919, his grandson, C.J. Carmichael wrote an autobiography of his own life just before his death in which he mentions some of the stories his grandfather told him about the war.
“Grandfather served seven years in the war of the Revolution,” he wrote. “None but God and the men who walked and fell by his side knew the suffering he endured.”
Archibald died in 1827. Through Ancestry, Joyce obtained a copy of his will.
“First, I bequeath to my beloved wife, Sally Carmichael, two beds, furniture, and all kitchen furniture that belongs to her and three head of cattle. Two milk cows and one steer.”
There are also family connections to the Civil War.
Living in Indiana at the war’s outbreak, C.J. Carmichael was drafted by the Union, but didn’t serve.
“I hired a young man to go in my place,” he wrote in his autobiography. “This cost us over one thousand dollars. We had to sell our home. Then it came into our minds to move to Missouri.”
But another of Archibald’s grandsons, Starling, did fight. Joyce even had a photo of him that appears to show him in a Union uniform.
Joyce leads me through a long hallway in her home lined with photographs. There’s one of Allison farm. And then she stops at a sepia-toned image in an oval frame.
“There’s your great-, great-grandmother,” she said.
The woman, Susan Haskett, photographed more than a century ago, looks amazingly like I did when I was at the same age. To make sure I’m not imagining things, I text the photo to friends and my wife, all of whom see a female version of me dressed in 19th Century garb.
“I can see you in that lady and it’s weird,” my wife texted back.
Joyce also revealed we’re related to Hoagy Carmichael, the big band era composer who wrote “Star dust” and “Georgia on My Mind.” Hoagy grew up in Indiana, and has roots in Caswell County, North Carolina. He descended from Duncan Carmichael’s line. Duncan was the slightly older brother of Archibald, who also emigrated to North America at the same time.
These are finds that make chasing the past interesting.
“It’s like a puzzle,” she said.
Paying it forward
Now in her eighth decade, Joyce is still active in the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Ada chapter. She teaches Sunday school. Like most grandparents, she’s proud of her offspring. She still dabbles in genealogy, which can be tedious. Lately she’s been trying to find out where her grandparents, the Allisons, are buried.
“I can’t work at it all day long,” she said. “I’ll work on it awhile and have to do something else.”
The questions are never-ending, and opportunities have been lost over the years.
“As I was growing up I never ever thought anything about how did my parents get this farm?,” she said. “I wished I had asked more questions. I get mad at myself sometimes for that.”
Still, she’s thankful for what she has learned. Joyce clearly knows her way around a family tree, but is quick to point out others have helped her fill in missing branches.
“I’ve been so blessed,” she said.
When I emailed Joyce about interviewing her for a story on my experience with DNA testing, she was more than accommodating.
“Matt, if you think I can add anything to your story, I will be happy for you to come down for an interview,” she wrote.
As I said goodbye to Joyce, a woman who looks somewhat like my own grandmother, what I didn’t know when I took the test became clear. It’s not about being a certain percentage of this or that, it’s about the connections. Joyce isn’t part of the story, she is the story.