Margaret is a beautiful 19-year-old American with black hair, a big smile and a bare midriff. Born in Chicago, Illinois, she was adopted and is searching for her biological relatives.
I study the photograph of a striking young woman with the upper arm tattoo and Greek surname, hand on her hip, casually braced, in maroon and black, against a white block wall in the Windy City. Thinking when I last tottered, dizzy, atop the 110-storey Sears Tower in 1994, on a cold, gloomy day, I had gasped in awe at the stunning panoramic views from the then tallest building in the world. Now, I wonder about her story, and whether she too was blown away on her first visit to the landmark sleek skyscraper with its innovative multi-tubular design developed by the Bengali-born visionary structural engineer and architect, Fazlur Rahman Khan.
We share similar high cheekbones, bold brows and more than an uncanny resemblance, including what my late father would have described as a strong sapodilla skin tone. Yet, I do not believe Margaret has ever slurped a single, sweet specimen of Manilkara zapota, among my favourites, derived from the Nahuatl word for the naseberry family of soft, edible fruits, “tzapotl,” the syrupy juices streaming down the sides of the mouth to settle into a sticky mess on the neck and chest.
While she is likely to have enjoyed multi-layered moussaka, creamy fava dip, fresh feta, juicy olives and honey-soaked baklava, Margaret would not know that the hard balls called “sapota” in South Indian languages, ripen best buried in a jute sack of freshly hulled Mahaica, Mahaicony or Abary rice. The heady fragrance wafting through the coarse fibres each passing day, signals the fruit’s moment of readiness in an intense sugary blast to tantalise the nose and salivate the taste buds, far above the competing musky earthiness of the bag material. Jute sacks were saved as tough mats to warm tired bare feet across the wooden and mud floors of many a rural Guyanese home.
Poor Indian villagers once wore hand-loomed clothing made of jute and favoured the tough twines and ropes from ancient times. British barons grew richer in the 18th and 19th centuries through the powerful trading monopoly of the East India Company, with the industry centred in the Bengal Presidency, processing jute with cheap local labour and selling a range of manufactured products. Business proved so good, the Scots would abandon their jute factories in Dundee, emigrating to Bengal to establish mills, from where over a billion sandbags would be later exported to the miserable muddy trenches of World War One, and to the hot American South to store cotton.
The British East India Company would also help organise the mass exportation of different peoples to the far-flung corners of the Empire among them, the colonies of the Caribbean. According to the private genomic testing company 23andMe, Margaret and I, are, undeniably, family, linked through this common ancestry of indentureship starting in British Guiana. Third cousins to be exact.
I look at the genetic evidence, indicating we have, in common, less than one percent of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, the hereditary material in every cell that identifies each of us as a distinct individual. DNA contains the biological instructions that make species unique, being passed on by parents during reproduction.
A chromosome is a DNA molecule with part or all of a person’s genetic material, termed the genome. On chromosomes two, three and four of the so-called autosomes or non-sex chromosomes numbered from one to 22, we share half-identical segments. Most direct-to-consumer DNA tests look primarily at this autosomal DNA (At-DNA) to determine geographic ancestry percentages and in our case, this means Demerara-Mahaica. This DNA is a mix of inherited portions, half or 50 percent from each parent. Because everyone inherits at least one X chromosome from their mother, such tests often include the sex or 23rd chromosome which determines certain genetic traits and whether we are born male (XY) or female (XX).
The experts explain that At-DNA is most useful within five generations spread across about 150 years, with its value diminishing rapidly with each additional generation. Even at five generations, one is likely to only have inherited just over three percent of each ancestor’s genes, and by seven generations, this will account for an average of less than one percent.
23andMe can distinguish between several different types of relationships from identical twins to sixth cousins. These predictions are based on the total percentage of DNA, as well as the length and number of DNA segments among matches. For example, fraternal twins, like other full siblings share approximately 50% of their DNA, whereas identical twins share 100%.
Relatives like father, mother, son, daughter, brother or sister will show up as 50 percent, while half-siblings, grandparents, grandsons and granddaughters, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces will be 25 percent. First cousins, great-grands, great uncles and great aunts will average about 12.5 percent, and so on going back each generation.
What little, Margaret knows of her true recent origins she has added, so there is the lone note of Trinidadian ancestry and now with genetic testing a confirmed miniscule amount of European blood. While our two old maternal lines trace back to the ancient haplogroup R, and a woman who likely lived in southwest Asia, perhaps in the Arabian Peninsula, 57 000 years ago, our subsequent branches diverge. The firm concludes that since our assigned individual haplogroups do not match, we are most likely not recently related through a direct line of female ancestors.
Surprisingly, I discover links to at least 251 new relatives, several close. It seems like the restless likely male ancestors in my family may have roamed a range of foreign lands. One fifth of these far-flung relations lives in the United States, and seems to adore California, another 13 are from Guyana and India respectively, some hail from distant places such as Mexico and Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, Cuba, Germany, Mauritius, Pakistan, Sweden, Norway and even Japan.
With Margaret, I may have a set of common great-great-grandparents. Or we could be removed cousins from different generations or share only one ancestor as half cousins. I also learned that I am related to about eight newfound second and third cousins born in New Jersey, but with a mutual background from Trinidad and Tobago, whose surname is Singh, their father’s parents having been born in Guyana and their mother’s from the twin-islands. We are likely to have shared a set of great grandparents from the Mahaica area. Perhaps, this is how Margaret ended up in Illinois, I surmise, singing the breakthrough disco hit of the Sister Sledge musical group from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, “We Are Family.”
Astonishingly, my closest relative on the 23andMe database is a pretty, curly-haired brunette, Chinadan born in New York, whose genetics indicate is an unknown first cousin of mine, with us probably sharing a set of grandparents and nearly ten percent of their genes. Chinadan sends me a courteous message asking me to explain and seeking to ascertain the linkages and lineages, but I am as curious and baffled as she is. I tell her, “You do look like family, but I do not know the details, am so sorry. I am trying to unravel the family web which is why I did this DNA test. Since we share Guyanese relatives from the same geographical location in Mahaica, let’s start there…”
ID is tickled to learn in her genetic quest that she has more distant cousins in Russia than in Bangladesh or Pakistan, including a Moscow blonde named Olga with whom she shares a sliver of familial DNA.
