LYNNWOOD — A simple twist of fate is taking local genealogists back in time further than they have gone before.
Much further.
The genealogists are taking part in a lab through an Edmonds Community College “On Being Human” course that combines the studies of anthropology and biology.
Samples of their DNA taken last week are on their way to a New York lab with results expected back in a month.
EdCC students and members of the Sno-Isle Genealogical Society will then tap into a database from the National Center for Biotechnology Information to compare DNA.
Their genetic journey on their maternal side could cross surprising ethnic and racial lines around the world.
“It’s just intriguing,” said Dave Ault, 64, a genealogist and retired computer science professor who lives in Edmonds.
His family paper trail has led him to 1725-era Rochester, Mass., to find Deliverance Bowls, an ancestor on his mother’s side, but he doesn’t know where his DNA will take him.
For instance, a student completing the lab last year found a segment of his DNA matched the same segment of a Neanderthal, a prehistoric race of early human beings who inhabited Europe, the Near East, Central Asia and probably western Siberia during the Upper Pleistocene Era.
The possibilities pique the curiosities of local genealogists.
“DNA research is a very new field opening for genealogists,” said Margaret Summitt, 49, an Everett genealogist. “Our society members are using it as a complement to our regular research in libraries and archives and so forth.
“It’s valuable in the sense it gives me a connection to a common ancestress way, way back there who myself and a lot of other people have in common,” she said. “It tells us about our remote ancestry.”
Summitt not only marvels at the technology but also at the way the genealogists found their way into the EdCC lab in the first place.
In October, Summitt and several fellow genealogists were sitting around a table at the Lynnwood Olive Garden restaurant, discussing the potential value of DNA in genealogy. A gentleman at a nearby table overheard and introduced himself. Thomas Murphy, an EdCC anthropology instructor, invited them to investigate their genetic genealogy in a lab he teaches with biology instructor Hans Landel.
“It’s one of those coincidences that was not a coincidence,” Summitt said. “It was meant to be.”
Eleven members accepted the invitation and joined science students at the lab last week, swishing a saline solution in their mouths to capture and prepare their DNA to send to the Cold Spring Harbor Lab in New York.
The field trip was a homecoming of sorts for Carole Thul, 70, of Bothell.
Thul took a beginning genealogy class at EdCC 19 years ago. The next year, she became a founding member of the Sno-Isle Genealogical Society.
Fellow genealogist Miji Ryan of Everett said the DNA exercise marked the first time she was in a college chemistry lab since the late 1940s.
“I’m having a ball just being back in a lab,” she said.
Eric Stevick is a writer with The Herald in Everett.
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