ISOGG Newsletter - December 2009

Vol. 2 No. 11 Dec 2009

From the Director - DNA: The Gift That Keeps on Giving
     My birthday is coming up so my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I replied that all I wanted for my birthday was a DNA test. His response to that was, "You're nuts! Why would you want a gift which just consists of paper with numbers on them?"
     What my dear husband does not realize is that DNA is a gift which keeps on giving. The first DNA test that I have results for is from 2003 on my father. Now I doubt that I have any article of clothing in my bedroom closet from 2003.
So why would I want something that goes out-of-style when I could have something that never becomes obsolete?
     And DNA just keeps on giving. Year after year, I receive new DNA match contacts and refined haplogroup predictions. What may just be "paper with numbers" to my husband could be what solves a genealogical mystery on a branch of our family. Some mysteries have been solved quickly through DNA testing and others, I'm still waiting for someone to come along and test who will be the match I need. DNA results are not a gift I will ever lose in a fire, or give to a thrift store, or ever tire of. These simple "paper with numbers" give me a peak into the past of those who came before me and that constitutes an invaluable gift.
     And for those of us with the "thrifty gene", December is the best month of the year to purchase DNA tests. Family Tree DNA has a holiday sale which ends on December 31.

-Katherine Borges
ISOGG Director

MORE DNA testing on "Lopez Tonight"
As mentioned in the last newsletter, Jessica Alba was DNA tested for comedian George Lopez's TBS show, "Lopez Tonight". Jessica's autosomal DNA results:

0% East Asian

0% Sub-Saharan African

13% Native American

87% European

Her mother is of European origins and her father is Mexican which is usually a mixture of Spaniard and Indigenous Indian so her results look to be spot on. George Lopez also tested himself on a recent episode with guest, Mariah Carey. Megan Smolenyak-Smolenyak wrote a commentary on Larry David's DNA results for the Huffington Post. If you have a Twitter or Facebook account, be sure to Re-Tweet the article or share it on Facebook.

Unravelling the Code
by Dr Joe Flood, Coordinator, Coad-Coode one-name and DNA study
Melbourne Australia

     As a child in Perth Western Australia I lived much of the time with my grandmother, whose maiden name was Rene Coade. I used to cycle down Coode Street to school every day – named for Britain’s most famous colonial marine engineer Sir John, who had designed many of the harbour works near the mouth of the Swan River.
     After the death of my mother, my aunt asked me to investigate the Coades, who were an old mining family of Cornwall. Working backwards I soon hit a brickwall with Samuel Cood or Coad or Code who had a family in the 1690s in Praze-an-Beeble near Truro, where the family remained until the mines played out in the 1850s. Only a few miles away at that time had lived the Coodes, subsequently one of the most eminent and wealthy families in Cornwall, and I was not the first to conclude that somehow we must be related. I began to collect everything I could find on the families, and the Coad-Coode one-name study was born.
     It turned out there were at least a dozen apparently unrelated families of Coad from Cornwall and Devon, many of whom had emigrated to SE Australia or the USA in the 1850s. The first recorded use of the name in the West Country was Richard Code, mayor and MP for Liskeard around 1360. Because the paper records were solid in most cases from 1600, it appeared any branching had occurred extremely early – at a time when only a few families in Cornwall actually had hereditary surnames. This was a situation in which DNA might reveal the answers.
     It was very difficult and slow to get people to take the test – and first results were not encouraging, no-one seemed to match. My two co-researchers Nigel and Ed Coad were 4th cousins from the small port of Looe near Liskeard – and they matched 37/37 as expected, but did not match anyone else. Finally through a bulk mailing exercise I tracked down my own cousin Russell Coade who lived only a few suburbs away, and after a year he took a test which matched Nigel and Ed 33/37, indicated an ancestor probably around 1600. I thought at long last I had discovered the ancient Codes of Cornwall.
     In the meantime I had managed to contact the wealthy Coodes of St Austell, who were initially reluctant to communicate. They were a very private family who had kept their own family records since 1580, and they were extremely sceptical about whether DNA would show anything useful. Their main interest was finding out whether there were surviving Coodes in the United States who were descended from their cousin Reverend Colonel John Coode, colourful governor of Maryland in the 1680s.
     With the aid of a highly skilled group of researchers in Maryland, we tracked down a family of Coodes in Nashville who appeared to be the lone descendants of Col John. We were encouraged to find that both families pronounced their name Code while spelling it Coode – a tradition dating back to the 1400s. After some considerable coaxing, a member of both families agreed to test – and the results exceeded even my expectations. Not only did the two Coode families match, but they provided a missing link between two apparently unmatched (26/37) Coad families – miners of Truro and farmers of North Hill. We had found four 8th to 11th cousins from the 16th century with surviving intact male lines – and this was clearly the ancient Code family of Cornwall!
     So who were my own Looe/Crowan Coads? Well – my family were a DNA match for a branch of another ancient family, the Callaways, who also have a very active one-name and DNA study. And sure enough, in the early Tudor tax records of 1524, Codes and Callaways were neighbours in both Liskeard and Lansallos – so an illegitimate birth is the probable source of the relationship.
     There are still a number of large Coad families who have not tested and we have plenty of work ahead convincing them to get involved – but at least we have laid out the framework. After much detective work, we found the DNA of the ancient Codes, from whom most of the modern Cornish Coads and Coodes are related – and we found that my own family were a very early illegitimate line.

For more DNA success stories or to submit yours, visit:
http://www.isogg.org/successstories.htm

DNA in the News

Playing with DNA: Is Larry David Really 37 Percent Native American? - Huffington Post - 24 Dec 2009
UWE launches largest ever study of UK family names - Bristol UWE - 14 Dec 2009

For more articles:
http://www.isogg.org/newsarchives.htm

NEW ISOGG pages for the X-chromosome

Katie and Julie's journey thru the X

http://isogg.org/xjourney1.html

Utilizing the X Chromosome for Deep Ancestry

http://isogg.org/x.html

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