Tracing roots with DNA

Jim Wells, a longtime University of Kentucky mathematics professor, went to bed one night pondering a maddening and fruitless decades-long search for the origins of an ancestor. He woke up the next day to have his history handed to him in an e-mail.

"It's astonishing," says the 70-year-old Wells of the recent revelations regarding his fifth great-grandfather, John Wells, who turned out, as Jim Wells had suspected but could never prove, to be a Pennsylvania Quaker with British roots.

"It just didn't seem possible we would ever learn his origins."

Jim Wells, of suburban Lexington, Ky., was part of something called the Wells Family DNA Project, organized by a determined armchair genealogist named Orin Wells. It enlists an intriguing new tool called surname DNA testing.

The technology, built on advances in the science of DNA over the past 15 years, rests upon research showing that the Y-chromosome element of DNA passes from father to son basically unchanged over the generations. Hence it serves as a highly accurate marker of paternity. In Jim Wells' case, by volunteering a blood sample to a testing lab, he threw his DNA into a test pool of scores of other Wellses, many of them from 24 American Wells branches that have kept meticulous genealogies going back to the 1600s.

The idea: "Orphans" such as Wells might make a genetic match with one of these families and, by comparing what he knows of his genealogy with the new data, fill in missing pieces. By doing that, Jim Wells not only verified his theories about John Wells but found out his roots actually go all the way back to one Henry Wells, an English Quaker who immigrated to Pennsylvania around 1684.

Until a few years ago, surname DNA testing was the province of universities and research laboratories but not commercially available. Now, three for-profit labs, Relative Genetics Inc. of Salt Lake City, Family Tree DNA of Houston and Oxford Ancestors of Oxfordshire, England, have sprung up to serve a growing consumer interest. Though the Wells project, with more than 250 participants, is the largest to date, about 550 other surname DNA projects are under way in the United States and abroad, says Kevin Duerinck, a Rochester, N.Y., genealogy enthusiast who tracks such things on his Web site.

He organized his own surname DNA project about two years ago to answer a question unanswerable by conventional means because ancient records that might have shed light had been destroyed in fires: Was his family related to one or more of some 28 ancient Germanic clans with surnames spelled similarly to his? He rounded up a dozen volunteers representing a range of those names.