by JONATHAN SHAW
8.3.23
AGENETIC ANALYSIS OF AFRICAN Americans who labored at a Revolutionary War-era forge for the first time connects ancient DNA to living people who have shared their data in a genealogical database. Researchers used techniques originally developed for analyzing DNA that is tens of thousands of years old to develop genetic profiles of 27 individuals who had been buried in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century at Catoctin Furnace in Maryland, and then linked them to more than 41,799 living relatives in the United States: customers of personal ancestry and health firm 23andMe who had agreed to share their genetic information. At a time of rising national interest in the legacy of American slavery—including Harvard’s own examination of its past—the research may spark new conversations about these emotional and increasingly politicized subjects.
“Recovering African American individuals’ direct genetic connections to ancestors heretofore buried in the slave past is a giant leap forward both scientifically and genealogically, opening new possibilities for those passionate about the search for their own family roots,” said Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. in a statement released by Harvard Medical School (HMS). Gates, who is director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and a coauthor of the paper, is the host of the popular genealogy and genetics television show Finding Your Roots.
When comparing the retrieved DNA to that in the contemporary anonymized database, the researchers found that the highest concentration of close relatives is in Maryland, suggesting that “descendants of the Catoctin individuals remain in the area.” More than 271 slaves labored at Catoctin Furnace, which supplied munitions to George Washington’s Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. In 1780, for example, the forge delivered 31 tons of 10-inch bombshells, many of which were used in the siege of Yorktown a year later. To produce iron, the slaves and an unknown number of free African Americans mined ore, cut wood, and labored as: colliers, who transformed the wood into charcoal to fuel the furnace; teamsters, who hauled charcoal and ore; and fillers, who dumped charcoal, ore, and limestone (used as flux) into the tunnel that led into the blast furnace. Others may have worked at domestic and agricultural tasks in the furnace owners’ households and plantations.
Tracing African American family lineages to ancestors who died before the 1870 census, in which all black people were listed by name for the first time, is notoriously difficult. At Catoctin Furnace in 1979, planning for a state roadway had unearthed skeletal remains at what was identified as an African American cemetery that had been in use at the Forge prior to 1850. Archaeologists documented the site, and the state of Maryland turned the bones over to the Smithsonian Institution.
More:
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/08/tracing-slaves-to-modern-descendants
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