Haven't got a clue? Maybe DNA will do
Regular folks and history buffs play detective

BY NANCY SHUTE

Brent Kennedy is a man with a past, and he doesn't think it lies in the misty green hills conjured by his Celtic surname. Kennedy believes he's a Melungeon, one of a dark-skinned clan of enigmatic origin that has long been reviled by their Appalachian neighbors. The Wise, Va., college administrator is so intent on finding his roots that he's having his DNA analyzed for clues.

"I grew up learning in school that we're all Scots-Irish," says black-haired, blue-eyed Kennedy, born and raised in this tiny town perched high in the coal-mining country of Southwest Virginia. He thinks the genes will reveal a different lesson-one of Turks, Portuguese, and Sephardic Jews, who sailed to the New World in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, stayed, and assimilated, and whose history was expunged by the burgeoning Anglo-Saxon majority.

Kennedy's quest is intensely personal. But around the world, the remarkable technology that allows for DNA fingerprinting is being deployed to answer some of history's legendary conundrums. Indeed, DNA analysis has become so sensitive that it's possible to identify an individual from the cellular spoor left on a discarded cocktail napkin.

That level of specificity has made the urge to exhume the past so overwhelming it seems no corpse can rest in peace. In 1995, George Washington University law professor James E. Starrs used DNA to show that the body in a Kearney, Mo., grave could be outlaw Jesse James. It could also be a James family member, so Bud Hardcastle, an amateur historian and used car dealer in Purcell, Okla., got a court order to dig up the Granbury, Texas, grave of J. Frank Dalton, who he thinks is the real Jesse. But when he unearthed the body last month, the grave held not Dalton but Henry Holland, a solid Granbury citizen. A chagrined Hardcastle blames erroneous grave markers. He's going back for another court order to dig again. "We're not done. I'm not gonna quit."

Fortunately, not all DNA quests require a corpse. Brent Kennedy's search employs the genetic material of living relatives to reconstruct a lost past. The 49-year-old fundraiser started his search after he fell ill in 1988. Doctors had a hard time determining the cause of debilitating muscle aches and fever. The eventual diagnosis, sarcoidosis, is most common among people of black or Middle Eastern heritage. That spurred Kennedy to delve into his roots. The quest wasn't always welcomed–one aunt torched a stack of family photos, and threatening messages were left on his answering machine. Indeed, for many people, Melungeon is a past best forgotten. Melungeons were the untouchables of Appalachian society, described in an 1891 article as "rogues, natural born rogues, close, suspicious, inhospitable, untruthful, cowardly, and, to use their own word, sneaky." Appalachian children were warned the Melungeons would get them if they didn't behave.

Turkish Presley? Historians have traditionally labeled the Melungeons a "tri-racial isolate," a pocket of people of mixed black, Indian, and Caucasian blood. The origins of the word itself are obscure. But oral histories and early records describe "Portyghee" in the hills, and a 1990 analysis of Melungeon blood types suggested Mediterranean roots. Kennedy is convinced; his office wall sports framed articles from Turkish newspapers headlined "Were Lincoln and Elvis Turks?"–fruits of his work with the Melungeon Heritage Association and Turkish cultural organizations. Some historians say Kennedy is trying to ignore the Melungeons' black and Indian past. Not so, Kennedy says. "We feel like we're a mix of everything, but that the Mediterranean component was undoubtedly there."

So Kennedy and about 100 other people have given hair samples for mitochondrial DNA analysis. Mitochondrial DNA has proved a marvelous tool for tracing human history. Mothers pass it down to offspring almost intact-unlike nuclear DNA, the genetic material commonly used in criminal investigations. "We can see how many maternal lines there are in the population," says Kevin Jones, the Wise College biology professor who is analyzing the samples and comparing them to mtDNA databases from around the world.

But DNA has its limits. Mitochondrial DNA reflects only the maternal line, so if the Turkish adventurers that Kennedy seeks were all men, there would be no trace of them in the mitochondrial record. And all DNA is perishable. "A bloodstain that's 200 years old stored dry may be just fine, where one two weeks old that's been wet and warm may be useless," says Charlotte Word, deputy forensic laboratory director for Cellmark Diagnostics, a DNA lab in Germantown, Md. Contamination is also a problem; one sneeze can ruin a sample.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to laying history bare with DNA is not the limits of laboratory analysis, but the vagaries of human nature. More than a few people still believe Anna Anderson was the Russian princess Anastasia, despite evidence to the contrary from three of the world's best mitochondrial DNA labs. Bud Hardcastle doesn't believe the Jesse James teeth tested in 1995 necessarily came from the right corpse. And many people would rather not offer up their genes for the history books, fearful that the findings could be used to deny them medical coverage.

Indeed, when it comes to history, human belief still trumps genes. Brent Kennedy says even if DNA evidence fails to support his Mediterranean hypothesis, he will continue his mission to rehabilitate Melungeon identity. He and a dozen others, including fellow Melungeons and college officials, are heading to Turkey later this month on a research trip.

Kennedy's not the only one tempted to take a genetic peek into the past. At Mitotyping Technologies of State College, Pa., President and CEO Terry Melton, who helped analyze Anderson's hair, still gets calls from people asking for a DNA test. They're convinced they are exiled Romanovs. "I try to talk people out of it, but they will not be dissuaded," Melton says. She takes a blood sample, charges $1,500, and runs the sequence. She has yet to find any lost royals. But even in an era when the human genome is posted on the Internet, there's room amid the molecules for a good romantic fantasy.