My mother's people come from Beaver Falls, Penn., a tiny town on the western edge of the Keystone State. Steel country.

My grandmother was a pianist who practiced on a white baby grand in her living room. In her spare time, she wrote songs — lush, old-fashioned tunes with dramatic flourishes that ventured far into the piano's upper and lower registers. I can still hear her fingernails click against the keys as she searched, toward the end of her life, for the precise notes.

When my grandmother died, I said goodbye to a woman I loved but didn't really know. So when I had an opportunity to learn more about my maternal ancestry, I grabbed it.

Or, rather, I swabbed the insides of my cheeks, placed the swabs in an envelope provided by Oxford Ancestors (, and sent them off to England, a country whose general oldness and sense of history gave me confidence.

Oxford Ancestors is a genetic testing company that captures DNA from saliva samples to trace an individual's ancestry. My DNA, the company said, linked me to a clan mother known as Xenia, who lived 25,000 years ago on the border of Europe and Asia.

A long way from Beaver Falls.

"Of all the clans, Xenia's is the most mysterious," a company pamphlet said, to my delight.

"We know that she lived ... on the cold and inhospitable European tundra at the eastern edge of the Black Sea. Although bleak and windy, the tundra was teeming with with good things to eat as massive herds of bison and reindeer moved slowly over the plains, feeding on grass and mosses." (I am a meat lover.)



Bryan Sykes, a professor of human genetics at Oxford University, founded Oxford Ancestors in 2000. The company has analyzed the DNA of nearly 30,000 people, more than half of them Americans. But it wasn't a scientist who first gave Sykes the idea.

In 1994, prompted by a journalist, Sykes linked the DNA of a 5,200-year-old corpse discovered in the Italian Alps — aka "Iceman"— to a living person who also happened to be a close friend.

"I found a match with a friend of mine," Sykes explained, speaking from his flat in Edinburgh. "I thought, well, I don't think she'd mind being named in the Sunday Times. The article came out and the story, which was interesting enough scientifically, took on a new dimension. Here, you had a normal modern person who had a direct genetic link to someone who had died 5,000 years ago and was, indeed, a relative. My friend started thinking about the Iceman as one would other relatives, and that was quite a revelation. I started to appreciate what it is to connect people's roots to DNA."

Geneticists trace paternal ancestry through the DNA of the Y chromosome, which only men have. But maternal ancestry is traced through mitochondrial DNA, which women carry in their eggs and pass on to their male and female children. This MatriLine service, which costs about $300, was what I requested.

"A lot of women want to know about the maternal side of their families," said Sykes, ''and it's far more stable, in a sense. Everyone knows who their mother is. She is always present at the birth. But you can't always be so sure when it comes to legitimacy of the paternal line."


Over the past two decades, Sykes' genetic research has identified 36 women from whom almost everyone on Earth is descended. His best-selling 2001 book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, explains that most people with European ancestry are descendents of seven major clan mothers. Sykes, in turn, has given each of these women her own name and her own story. Xenia, my clan mother, is one of the seven.

But here's the thing: The stories are, to a significant degree, fabrications — a fact Sykes freely admits. After determining where and how and when these women lived, he invented stories to help drive the point home that they were once living, breathing people. Fiction to cement fact, as it were.

''My invention of narratives about women helped underline that these women did exist, that they were real people living with conditions we don't have to put up with," Sykes said. "I got a lot of stick from scientists who would have preferred that that their particular science was restricted to a few hundred people around the world. But it is precisely the stories that appealed to non-scientists."

On the one hand, there is no way to tell where the science and history end and the fabrication begins. On the other hand, I must admit that if Oxford Ancestors had sent back a dull, scientific explanation of my DNA analysis, I probably would have been much less interested in the results.

Like most people, I like stories.

But I was particularly curious about one part of Xenia's narrative. Why, I asked Sykes, did you imagine that Xenia had twins? Why did you decide that one was taken from her and given to a woman in another tribe who had recently lost a baby in childbirth? This point seemed oddly specific.

''A lot comes from archeological research," Sykes replied. ''If you consider the mechanics of having a child at that time, you can only carry one at a time. So I imagined that the standard practice would have been to make sure only one of the twins survived."

In the case of Xenia, though, he imagined that both children survived because of a significant mutation in my clan's DNA sequence. ''In your clan," Sykes explained, "there is a split. And I think the split happened not long after Xenia herself was alive. It's a split that happened quite a long time ago, ending up with the colonization of North America."

Only 7 percent of Western Europeans tested are linked to Xenia's clan, he said, and a very small portion — less than 1 percent — are Native American.

Only Connect

Houston is home to the Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research. Susan Kaufman, the manager, explained that it's quite easy for most people with American ancestors to trace their families back to 1850, because of the federal census. But some paper trails go farther.

"It's always very nice when we can get people back to the American Revolution," Kaufman said. "There are some people who have Mayflower descendants. People in Texas are proud when they can get back to the Alamo."

Females, she added, are usually more challenging to find. "You're looking a lot at male-generated documents hoping there's a maiden name listed," she said. "A female didn't have land rights. You're not running into wills or land records."

Before 1922, wives were naturalized under their husbands' names, becoming U.S. citizens along with their children in a family group. "You can lose a lot of females in that way," Kaufman said.

Kaufman believes DNA analysis is a great complement to the kind of research people do at the Clayton Library. "Genealogy is geographically driven," she explained. "DNA will not give you a specific family name, but it will give you a family group. It may help you to know, for example, that you are from Western Europe."


More Questions

Houston resident Eugenia Rossi McNeilly has traced her family history on paper, online and through DNA. None of these avenues excludes or trumps any other, she said.

''It all just reframes the way you think about so many things," McNeilly said.

Both of McNeilly's parents grew up in in a small town in northern Italy, near Parma. McNeilly has visited the town many times and, recently, drank water from the same well that her father and her father's parents drank from when they were growing up. That water, she said, was a tactile connection to her past.

But the DNA analysis she had done by Oxford Ancestors, though less tactile and infinitely more general, was no less important.

McNeilly's clan mother, like mine, is one of Sykes' "Seven Daughters of Eve." Her name is Jasmine and she lived 10,000 years ago in what is now Syria. According to Oxford Ancestors, Jasmine's clan were farmers who established semi-permanent camps that were the precursors to the cities and towns of today.

McNeilly finds it interesting that her more recent ancestors — the folks in Italy — were also farmers. She was also pleasantly surprised to learn that her clan mother hailed from a hot climate. McNeilly grew up in California and has always fared better in warmer weather.

The more you find out about your past, McNeilly said, the more questions you have.

I certainly had one big question for Sykes.

How many people in his database, I asked him, share my DNA? In other words, who are my closest living genetic matches, other than the relatives I already know?

He checked his computer. Out of 30,000 people in his database, he said, 19 have my precise DNA sequence. Twelve are from England, one from Sweden, one from Finland, one from Ireland, and the rest live in the States. This, I realized, was far more interesting to me than Xenia's story. These were real people traipsing around the planet at this very moment. What do they look like? How do they take their coffee? Do they play the piano, like my grandmother?

I may be able to find out, if someone else with my DNA sequence is willing to share his or her identity.

"One of the things I notice a lot is that when people do find out they're descended from the same woman, they have a very special link between them," Sykes said. "They do feel different. They feel they're part of a family."

Sykes has experienced the feeling himself.

"The top man at Oxford University, Dr. John Hood, I tested his DNA and it's exactly the same as mine," Sykes said. "And after that I kind of felt that if he was going to haul me over the coals for a misdemeanor, well, I just wouldn't take it seriously."

And recently, Sykes added, he had a close brush with celebrity when he analyzed the DNA of Sting. Yes, that Sting — the music legend formerly known as Gordon Sumner.

"His DNA is very much the same as mine, as well," Sykes said. "So here I was on the phone saying 'Hi, Sting.' I wasn't nervous at all. It was like talking to my brother. I'm sure if I ever met him, I'd feel totally relaxed."