The Phillips DNA Project News

Genetic genealogist CeCe Moore recently posted an interesting entry on her blog at this link:  CeCe's blog.  Here are the first two paragraphs of her entry:

A few months back, spurred on by my interest in genetic genealogy, my sister Erin decided to order a DNA test from 23andMe for my brother-in-law John Huffer. John has never known his father, so we didn't really know what his results would show. His mother's family has a strong oral tradition of Native American ancestry, so we expected some mixed ethnicity. What was not expected was his African maternal line DNA haplogroup L3e4 and the five percent African ancestry that was revealed in his Ancestry Painting. (Ancestry Painting is a 23andMe tool that examines the 22 chromosomes one segment at a time and determines for each stretch whether it was most likely inherited from ancestors in Africa, Europe or Asia.)

I had never investigated John's family tree before, but my curiosity was piqued with this result, inspiring me to begin researching it. Fairly quickly it was obvious that his was no run-of-the-mill genealogy. John's mother's line traces straight back to Madison Hemings. That name may be familiar to many as the son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, our third president and author of the Declaration of Independence. My genealogy research clearly showed that Thomas and Sally are John's fourth great-grandparents!