The living descendants of enslaved people are revealed through ancient DNA

The Descendants of the Catoctin-Furnace Workers: Their Fates, Legacy, and Where Does Their DNA Come From?

While the genetic work was under way, Comer, who is white, continued to scour historical and genealogical records and identified two families descended from the Catoctin Furnace workers, one connected to an enslaved African American and the other to a free worker. She hopes to someday connect these families to descendants identified in the 23andMe database.

None of the Catoctin Furnace descendants identified in the study — customers of the personal genetics company 23andMe who had consented to the use of their data in research — have yet been informed of their connections. Providing this information raises important ethical questions, say scientists.

A for-profit corporation will be holding answers, and data about the larger descendant community will be unavailable to community stakeholders, which increases equity gaps. Descendants and the community must lead the research and not be put in a bad position by scientists.

But the analysis offers hints at the workers’ varied fates and legacies. People with Catoctin Furnace ancestry live across the United States. But those with especially high levels are concentrated in Maryland, suggesting that some former workers might have stayed put. There are people who have high levels of Catoctin in the southern United States, which could be a sign that enslaved people were sold there.

The 23andMe customers with some of the highest levels of shared ancestry — descendants of a woman who died in her early 30s — live in southern California. Harney says there is no one answer. There are a few different stories of what happened to these people.

Relatives of slave workers and their descendants at the Catoctin Furnace: A consumer genetics database based on a population genetics approach

The workforce at the Catoctin Furnace became mainly white after 1850, and historical records offer few details about what happened to the enslaved and free African American workers and their families.

The data from more than two dozen people who were buried at the Catoctin Furnace was analysed and used to identify tens of thousands of living descendants whose data was in a consumer genetics database.

Reich’s team collaborated with 23andMe to create a database of more than 9 million customers who have agreed to their data being used in research.

To identify the workers’ living descendants, the researchers used an approach that pinpoints relatives on the basis of shared stretches of DNA scattered about their genomes. 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. It’s difficult to trace the ancestors of the enslaved people from the site because their records were treated as property. “They’re not telling the human story of these individuals. And I think that’s something we can do with ancient DNA,” says Éadaoin Harney, a population geneticist at 23andMe who worked on the study.

Crystal never knew 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. These experiences, she says, helped instill a need to find out more about her history.

Emory, a retired IT worker, always wanted to know more about himself and his family. “I just started doing genealogy.”

It wasn’t until the Smithsonian Institution and a historical society in Frederick County, Md. came calling that Emory was able to trace her history to the Catoctin Furnace, a small ironworking village that made utensils and ammunition for the U.S. from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. 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 a lot about the life he led.

Black Americans in the U.S. are missing significant portions of their ancestry. Writing records connecting them to their past is rare for many of them. The first count of the U.S. population that included all black people was in the 1870 census. But beyond that, those threads typically end – severed by centuries of slavery, during which families were split by slave owners and traders who did not record familial connections.

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.

Investigating the lives of the Catoctin individuals: 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. “We highlight the family members that they have who are also buried in the cemetery. We’re able to discuss some of the health issues they may have had such as leukemia and asthma, and also discuss their ancestral origins.

“We have no idea who these people are, because they’re anonymous within the cemetery,” said Elizabeth Comer, president of the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society. “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. But we are unable, at this point, to connect those names to an individual in the cemetery.”

The research gives anthropologists a great idea of where the residents’ ancestors were taken from, because of the data that is gathered.

“You can tie people to specific regions in Africa such as Senegambia and west central Africa,” says Douglas Owsley, a curator at the division of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and one of the study authors. “And then in Europe, some individuals have a considerable amount of European ancestry.”

The work was ground-breaking in many respects, according to Fatimah L. C. Jackson, a bioethicist and anthropologist who was not involved in the study.

“What makes the work of Harney et al. The research was started by a community of African Americans and the results were designed to meet their needs, priorities, and sensibilities, according to her perspective article in Science. The way this type of research should be conducted provides a plan for future studies.

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

The Furnace legacy: a descendant community for the people buried at the furnace without any trace of the past or the present

Nearly 3,000 people out in the world who are closer relatives of the people buried at the Furnace haven’t been contacted by any of the three historical societies.

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