History – Into the Woods

What we can learn from our DNA

From the island of Gometra in Scotland. Photo from a trip in 2018. My DNA shows that my ancestors lived in places like this for 4,000 years. Click for high-resolution version.

The most important thing to know before choosing a DNA test is that there are three types of tests. They vary in cost, and each provides different information.

1. Autosomal DNA. About $100. This type of test looks at an individual’s DNA from both parents. It’s most effective for the past 300 to 400 years of ancestry. It estimates ancestry components, such as how much Germanic, Scandinavian, or African ancestry an individual has.

2. mtDNA. About $200. This is maternal DNA. Mothers pass it to all their children, but only daughters pass it on. It helps trace the path of maternal migration and contains information that can be traced thousands of years into the past. It does not provide ancestry percentages.

3. Y-DNA. Up to $500, depending on how many steps you want to sequence. This is paternal DNA. It is passed almost unchanged from fathers to sons. Mutations occur at a statistically predictable rate. It can show migration paths for thousands of years. It does not provide ancestry percentages.

Brick walls

When people research their ancestry through written records, things often get murky a few generations back. In the U.S., courthouse fires burned a lot of birth records and wills. Information on ship arrivals is incomplete. Amateur genealogists make a lot of mistakes. People often hit “brick walls” and can’t reliably trace a line any further.

My surname is Dalton. Records show pretty reliably that the first male Dalton arrived in Tidewater Virginia around 1699. His first name is not known for certain, but he’s known as “Timothy 1.” No one has ever been able to find records about exactly where he came from. For me, that’s a brick wall. We do know that his descendants migrated up the river valleys to the Charlottesville area, and then southward down into the Blue Ridge Mountains, where my father was born.

I recently bought an upgrade at FamilyTreeDNA to do the maximum possible sequencing on my Y-DNA. I waited more than two months for the results. The raw data is complicated, but now we have AI tools to help us interpret it. I use ChatGPT.

Because I have a great many genetic connections with Ireland, for some years I though that Timothy 1 might have come from Ireland. The new information from more detailed sequencing changes the story. Timothy 1 almost certainly came from northern England, probably Lancashire or Yorkshire. There are still a good many Daltons there.

Celtic to the bone

But here things get really interesting. I will never know their names or anything about their lives (other than what can be surmised from where they lived). But because Y-DNA is particularly useful for studying migration paths, we know where they lived for more than 10,000 years.

My paternal ancestors, then, were Celts. They arrived in Britain long before the Romans — around 2,000 BC.

Where were they when the wheel was invented, around 3,500 BC? They were almost certainly in the grassy steppes of Russia north of the Black Sea — maybe Ukraine. Much earlier, they migrated out of Africa and gradually spread across Eurasia. It was about 4,000 BC when they migrated through Turkey.

Thank you, wheel

It was the wheel that helped enable their migration westward into Europe. By 2,500 BC they had reached Germany and Poland. They probably crossed into Britain around 2,200 BC. Until Timothy 1 left for the American colonies, they lived in Britain for 4,000 years, most of that time in northern England. They were in Britain for the final stages of the building of Stonehenge.

Because of my love of languages and the history of language, the migration data allows some pretty accurate guesses about the languages they spoke. Working backward: English → (Early Modern English) → Middle English → Old English (Anglo-Saxon) → Brittonic Celtic (Cumbric/Common Brittonic; closest living cousin is Welsh) → Proto-Celtic → Proto-Indo-European.

Curse you, Iona

When were the poor souls Christianized? They probably were Christianized around 650 AD (or CE, as we now say). There were monasteries (such as Lindisfarne) that spread Christianity into northern England. It was in 635 AD when Saint Aidan came from the island of Iona (in Scotland) to found a monastery. I visited Iona in 2019, and I hated the place for the atmosphere of smug righteousness that clings to it. It was almost as though I realized, from somewhere deep in my genes, that the monastery at Iona had something to do with beating Christianity into my contentedly pagan ancestors.

They survived, obviously

Plagues and wars brought an end to many family lines. Between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death killed roughly 30–50% of England’s population. In some regions, mortality was even higher. My ancestors would have witnessed and survived the Norman Conquest — 1066. They probably took the Dalton surname between 1,200 and 1,400.

I can’t go home again

My first trip to Ireland was in 1996. As I explored the country lanes of County Kerry, drove over the mountain of Carrauntoohil, and looked out over the Atlantic toward Skellig Michael, again and again I had the feeling — this is home. It was some years later before I explored and thoroughly hiked similar terrain in Scotland. I’ve been all over England and much of Wales. As much as I love the Appalachian Highlands, it’s Ireland and the British Isles that feel most like home to me. Cows, the scent of the cool springs where milk is stored, cows in green pasture, heaths and bogs, the Atlantic crashing against rocky cliffs, potatoes, cabbages, oats, barley, hot soup, warm bread — I do believe these things are somehow implanted in our genes.

I’d move back there in a flash, if I could. But the realities of the modern world make that impossible. Timothy 1 could get on a ship and sail to America with no legal niceties to stop him. I can go back and visit, but the legal niceties are such that visas are good for only six months of a year.

If I could go back in time, I’d go find Timothy 1. He probably was a carpenter and small farmer. He probably didn’t inherit much. He probably heard that Virginia was a wide open land of opportunity (which it was). But I’d say to him: Please don’t do it, Timothy.

Note: ChatGPT 5.2 analyzed my DNA data and helped with the research for this post.

The unenchanted travel of the here and now

A medieval inn. Source: ChatGPT 5.1. Click here for high-resolution version.

It’s an odd paradox — to very much want to know what’s happening in the world, but very much not to want to be in that world. When you’re both introverted and old, like me, then all the more does one want to be away from the world. It’s why I live in the woods now. This almost certainly has something to do with why I no longer read stories set in the here and now.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the 1970s, Armistead Maupin’s series of Tales of the City novels changed my life. They were very much set in the here and now, in San Francisco. Those novels were a big factor in my deciding to move to San Francisco back in the late 1980s. And by the way, by an unplanned stroke of fortune, I ended up at the San Francisco Chronicle, where Maupin wrote those novels in serial form in the Chronicle. I even, at last, met Maupin at an office Christmas party. By that time Maupin was rich enough from the novels that he no longer had to work at the Chronicle.

Still, the urge to travel has never completely left me, and I hope it never does. I’ve seen most of the places that I ever wanted to see, so it’s Scotland now that best suits my anything-but-the-here-and-now attitude. In Scotland, especially in certain places, the realities of today’s world can easily be imagined away — pubs, little villages, farmland that probably looked very little different 400 years ago, moors and bogs, castles, and the sea crashing against rocky cliffs. San Francisco suited me well when I was younger, but not anymore.

But: one has to get there from here. From where I am in the Appalachian foothills, that’s 24 hours or more of the most miserable sort of immersion in the here and now — the noise and discomforts of airports, being packed into airplanes, paying through the nose for a taxi or Uber ride, and sometimes an ugly and time-wasting layover in an airport hotel. No doubt this is inevitable in an era when people travel by the millions, requiring great efficiency. The economics of travel today, it seems, have been fine-tuned to keep the level of misery just short of the level at which people will refuse to bear it. The misery is twice as great on the way home, because everything that one was looking forward to is now behind rather than ahead. Though, to be sure, being home at last is awfully nice, too.

I was unable to find any new fiction that interests me, so once again I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings. My favorite parts, really, are the traveling parts, especially in Book 1 when Frodo and friends set out from Hobbiton and travel cross-country to Bree and to the inn named the Prancing Pony.

I’ve often been curious about what travel was like in medieval times. There were Roman roads, of course, going in all directions from Italy into the heart of Europe as well as into Britain. There were a good many people on those roads, which means that there had to be a support system for travelers. For what reasons did people travel? How safe was it? Were there a great many inns, or too few? Who walked, and who rode? What kind of wagons and other conveyances did they use? Did they travel much during the winter?

It seemed very likely to me that scholars have a great deal of information about medieval travel, so I asked ChatGPT for suggestions. I’ve ordered a 1997 reprint of Norbert Ohler’s The Medieval Traveller. It’s an English translation of the original German, Reisen im Mittelalter.

I’m hoping the book will provide some fuel for my imagination — staying right here in the woods while traveling in my imagination, and not in the here and now.

Vietnam: Quo Vadis? — the full text

Wallace Carroll interviewing young Royal Air Force pilots during the Battle of Britain. Source: Wake Forest Magazine, Wake Forest University.

Histories of the Vietnam War always refer to an editorial in the Winston-Salem Journal published on March 17, 1968, arguing for an end to the war. The editorial was written by Wallace Carroll, then editor and publisher of the Journal. In Wallace Carroll’s obituary, published July 30, 2002, the New York Times wrote:

“On March 17, 1968, he published a signed editorial in Winston-Salem under the headline “Vietnam — Quo Vadis?” that argued that United States policy in Southeast Asia was misguided and irrelevant to the goal of thwarting Soviet expansion.

“Dean Acheson, the former secretary of state and an adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, showed the editorial to Johnson and stood by while the president read it. Later that month, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election and would begin peace negotiations with North Vietnam. In an article about events leading to Johnson’s announcement, the Washington Post reported that Mr. Carroll’s editorial had influenced his thinking.”

Who was Wallace Carroll?

In 1939, Carroll became editor of the United Press International Bureau in London. He covered both the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain. From Wikipedia: “From 1942 to 1945 he headed the European division of the United States Office of War Information, charged with all propaganda efforts aimed at Nazi-conquered Europe during World War II.” In 1955, he became head of the Washington Bureau of the New York Times. In 1963, he moved to Winston-Salem to become editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal, which, under Carroll, won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1971.

Mary Llewellyn McNeil, who was in one of Carroll’s classes at Wake Forest University and who later published a biography of Carroll, wrote for Wake Forest Magazine:

“Wallace Carroll was not just the editor and publisher of the local newspaper. He was present and reported on most of the major events of the 20th century. He knew, befriended or advised nearly all the mid-century’s key decision-makers — from Winston Churchill to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. As a correspondent for United Press he covered the League of Nations in the mid-1930s, sent dispatches on the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, interviewed Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery following the British army’s narrow escape from Dunkirk and reported nightly from his office rooftop on the bombs falling on London during The Blitz. He was on the first convoy into the Soviet Union following the Nazi invasion in 1941 and remained to cover the Nazi’s initial assault on Moscow. Barely making it out, on his way home via Persia (now known as Iran), Singapore and the Philippines, he landed in Hawaii seven days after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack and filed among the first reports from the field. He eventually became the first director of the U.S. Office of War Information in London, specializing in psychological warfare operations during World War II.”

Carroll wrote a book about his work for the U.S. Office of War Information, Persuade or Perish.

I was too young then to really appreciate someone of Carroll’s stature, but I knew Carroll when I was only a whipper-snapper summer intern at the Winston-Salem Journal, and, later, a rookie copy editor.

Online at last

Until now, the text of this editorial existed only on microfilm. A few years ago, I had facsimile made from microfilm with the intention of keying in the editorial so that it would at last exist in digital form. I never quite finished that job until recently. I uploaded the page image to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT helped me with the transcription. Update: May Llewellyn McNeil includes the text of “Vietnam: Quo Vadis” in her 2022 biography of Carroll, Century’s Witness.

Here is the link to the full text of Vietnam: Quo Vadis

Carroll introduces Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State. I believe this photo is from Shirley Auditorium at Salem College in Winston-Salem. Source: Wake Forest Magazine, Wake Forest University.