Ancient DNA from forgotten colonial graveyard just linked 1.3 million living Americans to Maryland's earliest settlers

Imagine crossing an ocean with almost nothing. No promise of survival, no guarantee that anyone would even remember that you ever existed: that was the reality for hundreds of English and Irish settlers who arrived in Maryland in 1634 and founded a colony named St. Mary’s City. The vast majority lived, fought and died without anyone writing a line about their lives. For almost four hundred years their names rested with them in the grave.

This is beginning to change.

In a new study, researchers at Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution and 23andMe have done what would have been impossible just a decade ago: using ancient DNA, they have connected more than 1.3 million living Americans to those forgotten colonial settlers with no prior clues about who those settlers were.


The cemetery that history forgot
St. Mary's City was Maryland's first capital and among the earliest permanent English settlements in North America. Over 400 colonists who were buried there in the Brick Chapel cemetery died in unmarked graves. Archaeologists had spent decades carefully digging the site, but without names or documents, the remains were anonymous.

“Most people, as you can imagine, came over, lived and died without a single word being written about their life,” said Douglas Owsley, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and co-senior author of the study.

How your DNA can go back 400 years
The team collected DNA samples from 49 skeletons and compared them to genetic data shared by more than 11.5 million 23andMe users. This is the first time that ancient DNA has been used to identify unknown individuals without any historical hypothesis to start from, no names, no documents, no guesses, according to Harney et al. in Current Biology.

This approach detects identical-by-descent (IBD) segments, long stretches of DNA shared between two individuals due to a common ancestor. According to Ringbauer et al. in Nature Genetics, longer IBD segments suggest more recent connections, while shorter ones indicate more distant ancestry, allowing for the mapping of a full range of family relationships across centuries.

The results: more than 1.3 million living Americans have identifiable genetic links to these 17th-century colonists, with approximately 9,000 presumed to be very likely direct descendants or close relatives.

A governor, a family, and a surprise buried in the same plot
The researchers mapped out the genetic relationships between the 49 individuals and found they fell into six distinct family groups. One of them spanned multiple generations, which the team hadn’t anticipated.

Life in early colonial Maryland was harsh. There was sickness, there was death, and even survival was not certain. No one expected to find grandfather, son and granddaughter buried in the same tiny cemetery.

But the DNA was not wrong.

Three closely related individuals drew particular attention. Cross-referencing the genetic data with family trees submitted by living participants, researchers tentatively identified one skeleton as Maryland’s second governor, Thomas Greene. The other two could be his wife, Anne, and their son, Leonard. The team is quick to call it a tentative identification, but the historical and archaeological records fit remarkably well.

What the bones revealed
Beyond all the big names, some of the most meaningful findings are people history never paid attention to at all.

A boy of around 8 years of age, with a predominantly African background, likely buried between 1666 and 1705, was interred in a carefully designed coffin with people of predominantly European background. Two young men, probably Irish immigrants in their 20s, were buried without coffins, with skeletal evidence of intense physical labor consistent with indentured servitude.

These are not mere archaeological footnotes. They were real people whose lives reflected the layered hierarchies and the brutal realities of early colonial America.

Why this is important to you now
Here’s the part that should really make you pause: there’s a real chance you’re one of the 1.3 million. The closest genetic matches were people from western England, Wales and Ireland, populations that were a huge part of the founding gene pool of the American East Coast.

And as the US approaches its 250th anniversary, this study is a reminder of something easy to forget: American history did not start in 1776. It started with ordinary people crossing a dangerous ocean, making lives for themselves in a new land, and then vanishing almost completely from the record.

Science is at last giving some of them their names back.