THE BIRTH OF THE EASTMAN DNA PROJECT

By Katherine Hope Borges,
SCGS Member and Director of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG)

"Well for years I've had this mystery. I have a great-great-grandfather who was deposited by a Martian spaceship ... ", said Dick Eastman in an interview with Chris Pomery on Roots Television on March 1, 2009.

How often have you thought the same thing about one of your ancestors? In 2003, Richard "Dick" Eastman, author of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, www.eogn.com, tried y­chromosome DNA testing in an attempt to solve the mystery.

The results were that he had no matches at all. That is the way things stayed for five more years until the 2008 Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree.

This is where I first met Dick Eastman. I have read his newsletter over the years and noticed that while he reported on DNA happen­ings, there was not anything that pertained directly to him. So after an excellent presentation he gave on tech gadgets for genealogy, I went up and introduced myself and asked him if he had ever DNA tested. He replied that he had, but that he had no matches. This struck me as odd. So after our conversation, I asked Max Blankfeld, Vice-President of Family Tree DNA (FTDNA), who had a booth at Jamboree to check and see if Dick had any matches. Max could see that Dick did indeed have a match, but because of an unusual marker value in Dick's DNA results, the match was not showing up on his match list.

I asked Dick to join me at the FTDNA booth so Max could give him the information about the match. Max stated that another reason that Dick had been unable to see the match was because there was no Eastman DNA Project established. This was when Dick said the magic words, "I guess I really ought to set one up". But he hesitated, probably due to being extremely busy with his newsletter and other genealogical events to have the time to devote to administering a DNA project.

The next evening, Dick was the keynote dinner speaker and his topic was "Putting the Gene in Genealogy". As you can guess by the title, the topic did cover using DNA in genealogy. I waited to speak to him after dinner and made my proposal. I said I would be willing to administer an Eastman DNA Project for him, which he could take over when he was ready. He agreed and the Eastman DNA Project was born on July 1, 2008.

I began by asking the other Eastmans who had tested to join the project. This can be accomplished either by contacting those who have uploaded to www.ysearch.org or by requesting FTDNA to contact them and ask them to join. We hit the jackpot with an Eastman who tested through the National Geographic Genographic Project and who had transferred his results into Family Tree DNA's database. Not only did this gentleman have his paper trail back to Roger Eastman born in Downton, England, in 1539; but he also had the line showing how George Eastman of Eastman Kodak fame connects.

Dick is brick walled with his non-Martian Eastman ancestor in 1810. As each new Eastman joins the DNA project, I study their lines to see if I can find a possible link to his ancestor. The more Eastmans that test, the more his chances increase, especially if one shares the unusual marker value that Dick has.

Dick continued in the interview with Chris Pomery saying, "Now I've got proof, he's really in the same family as all these other people I've been corresponding with over the years. So I'm a big fan of DNA now."

Mr. Eastman's comments upon review of this article were as follows:

"I spent my life in technology, dealing with circuit boards, electronic components, software, and other items used in computers. However, the world of biology has always been as foreign to me as the back side of the moon. Now, thanks to Katherine Hope Borges, Family Tree DNA, and a number of other knowledgeable speakers and authors, I have found that biology isn't as foreign as I had thought. Indeed, like any other topic, anyone can understand the information by first breaking the topic into smaller-sized bites and study the information one bite at a time.

"I am thrilled to have a mystery solved. After 25+ years of poring over records and microfilms, I now have proof of my family connections. Today I know which branch of the family I am descended from, even if I do not know the name of every ancestor along the way. I still continue the search, of course, but I have been able to eliminate other possibilities and am now focused on a smaller subset of records."

© Katherine Hope Borges. Used with permission.