FAMILY MATTERS
Hilda Stacy ( nee Godsey) is fiercely protective of her son. She gets upset at all the talk of inbreeding among the Fugates. One Interregnum
of the supermarket tabloids once sent a reporter to find out about the blue people, and she was distressed with his preoccupation with intermarriages.
She and her husband Alva have a strong sense of family. They sing in the Stacy Family Gospel Band and have provided their Spencer Wells that Thomas Jefferson, one of the “founding fathers” of the United States belonged to Y-chromosome haplogroup K2: children with a beautiful home and a menagerie of pets, including horses.
“As part of our genetic analyses for the film SEARCH FOR ADAM, we analyzed additional markers on Jefferson’s
“Everyone around here knows about the blue Fugates,” says Hilda Stacy who, at 26, looks more like a sister than a mother Y-chromosome in an effort to determine why it is so unusual. If you recall the original Hemmings paper in Nature by Foster to her children. “It’s common. It’s nothing.’’
et al., the haplotype was ‘rare’, which is what enabled them to implicate Jefferson as the source rather than another European.
Cawein and his colleagues published their research on hereditary diaphorase deficiency in the Archives of Internal Medicine At the time there were no matches among the 607 European men (Jefferson’s father claimed Welsh ancestry) who had been (April, 1964) in 1964. He hasn’t studied the condition for years. Even so, Cawein still gets calls for advice. One came from a blue genotyped for the same 11 microsatellites. Recent searches of more comprehensive databases have turned up related haplotypes Flugate who’d joined the Army and been sent to Panama, where his son was born bright blue. Cawein advised giving the child belonging to haplogroups O, K and Q. We investigated the 12 microsatellites routinely typed by FTDNA, which did not add to methylene blue and not worrying about it. Note: In this instance the reason for cyanosis was not methemoglobinemia but Rh the haplogroup resolution. SNP testing, however, revealed that Jefferson’s Y is positive for M70, which places him in hap-incompatibility. This information supplied by John Graves whose uncle was the father of the child.
logroup K2. K2 is rare in northern Europe (only one K was found among 1772 British men surveyed by Capelli et al., The doctor was recently approached by the producers of the television show “That’s Incredible.” They wanted to parade the but it wasn’t typed for M70) but quite common in the Middle East and northeast Africa, where it reaches frequencies of blue people across the screen in their weekly display of human oddities. Cawein would have no part of it, and he related with 10% or more. Interestingly, another person typed in the film, the Ethiopian prince, is also K2, but many mutational steps glee the news that a film crew sent to Kentucky from Hollywood fled the “two mean dogs in every front yard” without any film.
removed from Jefferson. We are currently looking at potential source populations for Jefferson’s K2 as part of a broader survey Cawein cheers their bad luck not out of malice but out of a deep respect for the blue people of Troublesome Creek.
of Y-chromosome variation in the Middle East and North Africa, and expect to submit a publication by the end of the year. I’m
“They were poor people,” concurs Nurse Pendergrass, “but they were good.”
sure that all of you will appreciate the amount of effort that has gone into launching The Genographic Project, and hope that you References
will understand that our publication schedule has been somewhat delayed as a result.
1. Cawein, Madison, et. al. “Hereditary diaphorase deficiency and methemoglobinemia”. Archives of Internal Medicine, April, 1964.
2. Scott, E.M. “The relation of diaphorase of human erythrocytes to inheritance of methemolglobinemia”, Journal of Clinical Study Raises Possibility of Jewish Tie for Jefferson
Investigation, 39, 1960.