How do you figure out Joseph Smith’s DNA profile? It turns out that Dr. Ugo Perego was actually doing a lot of genealogy work in before doing these paternity tests. He has tied these two complex sciences together. Almost everyone has run into a dead end in their genealogy, and it turns out that the Joseph family is stuck in the United States as well! Is Joseph Smith Irish, not English?
Ugo: I was actually looking for his ancestry. We don’t know where the Smith line came from in Europe, in England. The furthest back that the Smith line has been traced is in New England. Around 1620-1630, that’s when the first ancestor of Joseph Smith shows up, and he is 12 years old, and he’s by himself, no mom, no dad, and he comes and he shows up in Boston. He’s an indentured servant. His name is Robert Smith, and where does this kid come from?
Then we have all the Smiths. We have Robert Smith, we have Samuel Smith, Samuel Smith, Asael Smith, Asael Smith (two Samuels, two Asaels), then we have two Josephs.
GT: Joseph Sr.
Ugo nods: Joseph Sr. and Joseph Jr, right. That’s the line, the Smith line. Genealogists have been looking left and right in England to find a connection with Robert Smith and where he came from. No one has been able to do that, so I was reconstructing Joseph Smith’s Y-chromosome with the goal to compare that with a Smith in England and see if I could find a connection.
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there was a genealogist [who] suspected that the Joseph Smith line to Robert Smith came from a particular town in northern England in Lancashire County. The town was Turton, so I looked online in the white pages, how many Smiths live in Turton? There were 1,100.
GT: Oh my.
Ugo: So I wrote to all of them.
GT: No way!
Ugo: I wrote a letter to all of them. I sent 1,100 letters to Smiths in Turton… {chuckles}
GT: That’s unbelievable.
Ugo: …with a swab inside, asking for their DNA, and I had actually a good number, about 5% replying and sending their DNA back. That’s a good sample size of a population, 5%. I found nothing, absolutely no matches whatsoever.
Then I started using some databases and it became very clear as I was exploring this possibility that I was looking in the wrong place. Robert Smith that first showed up in New England was not from England.
Was Joseph Smith Irish or English? Check out our conversation…..
