[DNA from enslaved Black workers at a 19th century iron forge
links them to living descendants. But the research swirls with ethical
questions]
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SUNDAY SCIENCE: FORGING CONNECTIONS  
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Andrew Curry
August 3, 2023
Science
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_ DNA from enslaved Black workers at a 19th century iron forge links
them to living descendants. But the research swirls with ethical
questions _

Agnes Jackson, a descendant of an enslaved worker at the Catoctin
Furnace forge, stands in the ruins of the owner’s mansion., Kintsugi
Kelley-Chung

 

Hanson Summers first appears in Maryland archives in 1834, when an
inventory from Catoctin Furnace, an iron smelter in the ore-rich
foothills of Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains, lists an enslaved
17-year-old boy by the name of “Henson.” Fifteen years later, the
furnace’s owners mention in a handwritten ledger that Henson was
being sold for $500 to another iron smelter nearby. Then, in 1899, an
obituary in the Hagerstown, Maryland, newspaper lauds Hanson Summers,
age 82, who “was noted for his great strength and thought nothing of
wheeling half a ton. … He was employed at the Antietam Iron
Works.”

Summers’s story of survival and ironworking skill was uncovered by
genealogists and historians hoping to tell the story of Black workers
at Catoctin Furnace, a hellish place centered on a three-story furnace
kept burning for months at a time. Genealogists from the Catoctin
Furnace Historical Society tracked down Summers’s descendants,
including his 86-year-old great-great-granddaughter, Agnes Jackson. On
Juneteenth this year, Jackson and her daughters drove to Catoctin for
the first time from their homes in nearby Hagerstown.

“We never knew we were connected to people here,” Jackson says,
sitting on a folding chair in a small museum dedicated to the forge
and its history. “[Our ancestors] were enslaved—it wasn’t a
topic people wanted to talk about.”

Last year, Jackson, who identifies as African American, also took a
DNA test: She hoped to learn whether she and her daughters are related
to any furnace workers who were buried in a small cemetery near the
site. For the first time, answering such a question may be possible,
thanks to a new study of DNA of 27 people from that cemetery
[[link removed]] published today
in _Science_ (also see related Perspective
[[link removed]]).

In its early days, enslaved Black laborers worked at the Catoctin
Furnace ironworks, shown here in an 1890 photo. CATOCTIN FURNACE
HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Other analyses of the bones had already offered a glimpse of the harsh
lives of enslaved people in an industrial setting. Now, researchers
have partnered with the consumer DNA testing company 23andMe to
compare the ancient Catoctin Furnace genomes to those of almost 10
million living people in the company’s database. They have
identified 41,799 relatives, including hundreds of potential direct
descendants. But the company hasn’t yet notified any descendants
about their results, as it works through the ethics of contacting
people who agreed to let their data be used in anonymized studies. At
the same time, researchers are wary of traumatizing people unprepared
for links to enslaved ancestors.

Many in the Black community say such information—when collected with
community consent—would have poignant value. “For marginalized
communities whose history has been obscured, this technology can be
leveraged to tell their stories,” says Jada Benn Torres, a Black
biological anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who was not part of
the new study. “There’s a beauty in connecting the past to the
present.”

“Connections to the past were severed because of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade,” explains Carter Clinton, a geneticist at North
Carolina State University who is African American. (When
possible, _Science_ uses sources’ own preferred identification,
such as African American or Black.) “Today there’s a thirst for
knowledge. How do we reconstruct those lives and find out where our
ancestors came from, and what does that mean for how I identify today?
It’s something we want and don’t have in comparison to other
ethnicities in America.”

But rapid advances in genetics and genealogy open up hard questions
about the power dynamics of studying the remains of enslaved people,
such as who speaks for communities with no known genetic descendants.
“This is one of the better executed projects I’ve seen in terms of
the way they included the community and have been thoughtful about
including Black American scholars,” says Alexandra McDougle, a Black
archaeologist at Columbia University. But, she says, “There’s so
much farther to go.” Some think the Catoctin researchers didn’t do
enough to involve today’s Black community, for example.

Clinton adds that linking DNA from historic remains to known living
relatives “is significant for every African American in this
country, and I’m rooting for a way to figure out how to make this
happen ethically. The question is, who is the ultimate
decision-maker” in making those connections?

TODAY, CATOCTIN FURNACE SITS just off Maryland’s Highway 15, at the
foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains 80 kilometers north of Washington,
D.C. On a muggy but cool June morning, Elizabeth Comer pushes into the
woods, headed for the cemetery. The trees are still dripping from
showers the night before, and the thrum of cars nearby is constant.

Two hundred years ago, the noise around the cemetery would have been
different—the hammering of iron, ringing of picks in an adjacent ore
pit, and roar of a bellows-fired blast furnace—but just as
oppressive. “It was never quiet,” says Comer, a white
archaeologist and president of the Catoctin Furnace Historical
Society. “It still isn’t.”

Sharon Green, Vicki Winston, and Barbara Hart (left to right), at the
ruins of the Catoctin Furnace site, are the
great-great-great-granddaughters of one of its enslaved workers,
Hanson Summers. KINTSUGI KELLEY-CHUNG

As she picks her way through thick undergrowth, Comer, who grew up
nearby, describes the furnace’s history starting in the 1760s, when
it was founded to supply metal for the fast-growing American colonies.
Catoctin churned out shells, cannonballs, and kettles for the
Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. After the war ended,
production shifted to peacetime products such as stoves, pots and
pans, and raw “pig iron.”

When the furnace ran, a waterwheel turned a massive bellows, heating
charcoal in a stone chimney, or “stack,” 10 meters high. Fires
blazing for months at a time, the stack’s hunger for fuel stripped
nearby slopes bare of trees. Dozens of workers and families lived and
toiled under a constant pall of smoke.

From its first days, the furnace’s white owners likely used Black
labor for the hardest jobs, Comer says. Black workers were responsible
for everything from keeping the massive furnace fires burning to
channeling molten iron into sand molds. Work was constant. A
German-speaking Moravian pastor, Frederick Schlegel, described
conditions at the forge as “lamentable” in his diary after
visiting in 1799. He recalled that enslaved workers crowded up to him
and “complained how hard they work every day, including Sundays, to
keep the iron flowing.”

In the 1830s and ’40s, many of the forge’s enslaved workers were
sold, like Summers, or leased to other iron works, then gradually
replaced by immigrants from Ireland, England, and Germany, who had to
pay furnace owners for food and lodging. “There’s this sudden
replacement by free European labor, and it’s not clear where the
Black community went,” McDougle says. Twentieth century historians
lauded the immigrants’ contributions but skipped over the pivotal
role of Black workers.

The cemetery was forgotten, too, until an archaeological survey ahead
of highway construction revealed human remains. In 1979 and 1980, a
rescue excavation uncovered 35 graves, 32 of which contained human
remains. Some of the simple, uncarved white and gray stones used as
grave markers still sit today in the woods where archaeologists set
them aside more than 40 years ago. The graves were dated to about
1800, and features of the bones showed they belonged to people of
African ancestry. Maryland officials later transferred them to the
Smithsonian Institution, where they sat in storage for decades.

In 2014, Comer started to search for local families with ties to the
cemetery to help tell the site’s story. She was stymied by the lack
of records: Dozens of people who lived at the forge in the early 1800s
are remembered only as fleeting, first-name entries in inventories and
diaries: Milly, Hercules, Bob, Clowy, Lusinda, Elizabeth, Andrew.
Their stories and connections to living individuals were lost; Comer
was able to reconstruct Summers’s story only because his first name
was unusual.

In that sense, Catoctin Furnace is far from unique. Until the census
of 1870, U.S. records only rarely referred to enslaved Black people by
full name. Enslaved families were often broken apart on purpose,
splintering family trees. For Black people seeking their ancestors,
that created “a brick wall of slavery prior to 1870,” says
historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, a co-author on
the new study, who is African American. To see beyond that wall,
Comer, also a co-author, applied for a grant to reanalyze the
cemetery’s bones. She hoped new methods, including ancient DNA
analysis, would tell a more complete story about Catoctin’s Black
workers.

DNA SAMPLING PRESENTED a chicken-or-egg ethical problem: Until
scientists had DNA results from the unnamed individuals in the
cemetery, they couldn’t get consent from genetic descendants to
sample remains. So they applied a broader definition of
“descendant,” expanding it to local Black community members, whom
they asked about the study.

This expansive concept of kinship, which originated with work in the
1990s at the New York African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, has
been applied in the handful of other studies of the DNA of enslaved
people. “It could be a community that’s not related but is
residing in the region, who share a story and feel a responsibility
for that enslaved community,” explains Clinton, who did his Ph.D.
work on the African Burial Ground, now a national monument. “Because
of these broken lineages, you can define descendant in different
ways—not just ‘am I genetically related to you,’ but ‘are you
invited to the cookout?’”

Comer and Smithsonian curators sought support from the African
American Resources Cultural and Heritage (AARCH) Society, a nonprofit
in Frederick, Maryland, focused on documenting the county’s African
American history. AARCH Society members visited the Smithsonian lab in
2016, and the group’s then-president supported the studies,
including drilling into the bones for DNA. “When this started I
didn’t have a direct descendant community,” Comer says. “Now,
thank God, we’re getting one.”

Members of the Summers family look at a photo of their
great-great-grandfather Emory, the son of Hanson Summers, who once
labored at the Catoctin Furnace.AMERICA’S HIDDEN STORIES: FORGED IN
SLAVERY/SMITHSONIAN CHANNEL

Before geneticists began to extract DNA, biological anthropologists at
the Smithsonian studied the human remains in an attempt to reconstruct
life at the furnace. The bones offer testimony to conditions different
from those at plantations, and at least as harsh. Nearly half of the
32 graves contained the remains of children under age 4, some of whom
had bowed lower legs—a classic symptom of vitamin D deficiency known
as rickets. A smoky haze so thick it blocked the Maryland sun, much
like a wildfire, likely reduced vitamin D production in skin.

By analyzing heavy metals in the bones, the researchers were able to
document individual exposure to toxins. Some people had high levels of
lead and zinc; one man in his late 40s had zinc levels nearly triple
that of most enslaved people in the region. He might have worked as a
“filler,” shoveling charcoal and zinc-rich iron ore into the
blazing furnace, Comer says.

Other results set Catoctin apart, too. In the 19th century, death
usually claimed the very young or very old, or women in childbirth.
But the 32 people excavated at Catoctin include five teenage boys.
“Jobs that were considered menial labor were pretty dangerous, and
if you weren’t skilled you were at risk from dying,” says
co-author Kari Bruwelheide, a white biological anthropologist at the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). “They were
doing jobs they weren’t physically ready for.” One boy who died at
age 12 or 13 had a dislocated shoulder; a 15-year-old had herniated
discs.

One elderly man Bruwelheide examined had such severe spinal damage, he
would have been bent nearly double when he died. An 1804 entry in
Schlegel’s diary offers an uncanny reference that might be a match.
“I then visited a cripple who walked all bent over,” Schlegel
wrote. “He lives in great need.” (Even the missionaries
perpetuated identity loss for enslaved people: Schlegel and his
brethren omitted the names of the Black forge workers they baptized
and buried, while dutifully recording white identities.)

A memorial honors the enslaved people buried at the Catoctin Furnace
cemetery, many of whom are still unnamed or known only by first name.
KINTSUGI KELLEY-CHUNG

In 2017, geneticist David Reich of Harvard, who is white, and his
colleagues joined the team. They sampled DNA from the remains and
sequenced the whole genomes of 27 people, identifying five family
groups of mothers and children within the cemetery. None included any
adult male relatives, possibly a sign men and women were buried
separately, in keeping with the Moravian missionaries’ traditions.
Comparing the DNA in the Catoctin samples with databases of modern
populations revealed that more people in the cemetery had European
ancestry through the male than the female line, consistent with
historic evidence of owners fathering children with enslaved Black
women.

Comer wondered whether scientists could link the unnamed bodies at
Catoctin Furnace to living people. “By 2020, ancient DNA technology
was close to being able to find connections between people who lived
in the past few hundred years and people today,” says co-author
Éadaoin Harney, then a Ph.D. student in Reich’s lab and now a
researcher at 23andMe. “We wanted to develop this technology and
apply it to historic populations where it would have the most
impact.”

Deploying modified versions of the tools 23andMe and other
direct-to-consumer companies use to find genetic relatives, Harney
identified stretches of DNA shared between people in company’s
database and people in the cemetery, segments called “identical by
descent” (IBD). “The more and longer segments you share, the
closer your relationship,” Harney, who is white, explains.

Most of the 41,799 people who matched had just a few, short IBD
segments in common with people from Catoctin Furnace. That suggests
distant connections dating back centuries, to shared ancestors in
Africa or Europe who lived generations before the cemetery was in use.

Harney also identified 2975 living people in the 23andMe database who
shared significantly higher amounts of DNA with the people from
Catoctin Furnace. Some were estimated to be as little as five degrees
removed—the equivalent of a great-great-great-grandparent, about
right for a direct descendant 225 years later. Because 23andMe’s
database includes geographic data, Harney could even suggest where the
cemetery’s descendants ended up. Many families didn’t go
far—dozens of very close relatives still live in Maryland, and many
more are spread across the southeastern United States (see map,
below). To protect participants’ privacy, only employees of 23andMe
know the exact locations.

Catoctin’s living legacy

Researchers used 23andMe’s massive genetic database to trace living
people who share significant DNA with enslaved people buried in the
19th century at Catoctin Furnace. Many descendants still live near
Catoctin, with another cluster in California. (To preserve privacy,
the company blurred the precise locations of participants, bumping
some data outside U.S. borders.)

But for now, those descendants remain unaware of the connection.
People in the 23andMe database whose sequences were matched to those
of the Catoctin workers signed a consent form with the company
allowing use of their DNA for “a wide variety of research topics.”
But the agreement promised their data would be anonymized and results
would not be returned to them directly. The company is still working
out how to ethically offer most people the possibility of being
directly connected to their forebears.

SUMMERS IS NOT buried in the Catoctin cemetery: He died more than
half a century after it fell into disuse. On Juneteenth, sitting on a
folding chair in the museum, his great-great-granddaughter Jackson
pondered the mystery of her family’s link to the site.

Jackson is old enough to remember drinking from segregated water
fountains and watching movies from the Black-only balcony of the local
theater. But she doesn’t remember hearing her parents, farmers who
lived on the outskirts of Sharpsburg, Maryland, ever talking about
Catoctin as part of the family’s history. “We never knew we were
connected to people here. This has taught me we didn’t know
everything about our family.”

For Jackson’s daughter Sharon Green and her sisters, the lack of
documentation as well as the horrors of slavery discouraged deep
genealogical research. “We only knew to go back to our grandparents.
We didn’t know there was anything beyond that to be found,” Green
says.

Connecting the furnace workers to living descendants, as the new study
aims to do, could be a way to address past injustices, says Fatimah
Jackson, an African American geneticist at Howard University. If
Catoctin descendants can be made aware of their DNA results, she says,
people could “make connections that were intentionally severed to
prevent uprisings and community-building. It’s a way to say, ‘you
didn’t win, we’re winning.’”

But others think the team behind the study could have done more to put
descendants and their questions at the forefront. Indeed, spurred by
the Black Lives Matter movement, a group of researchers in 2021
published a call to pause research on African American remains
entirely until laws are passed to address consent and access to data.

That appeal came well after the Catoctin research was underway, Still,
the current AARCH Society leaders feel the consent given more than a
decade ago is no substitute for broad community engagement.
“[Scientists] need to build a relationship with the community, and
it’s going to take more than a nod from AARCH to do that,” says
the group’s current president, Protean Gibril.

Rachel Watkins, a Black biocultural anthropologist at American
University who has worked with AARCH Society members and families in
western Maryland, says securing support from the society to take
samples was the bare minimum. More engagement should have followed the
decision to restudy the bones, Watkins argues, but AARCH Society
members were sidelined. “Based on current engagement models, merely
showing results to communities isn’t adequate,” Watkins says. The
collaboration with 23andMe, for example, could have drawn on the AARCH
Society’s genealogical knowledge about the local Black community to
guide study design.

Watkins also thinks the project could have worked harder to let
descendants’ questions steer the study. Some African Americans in
Maryland have in fact been able to break through the “brick wall”
and trace their ancestry back well before the 1870s, she says. The
project could have asked those descendants what they’d like to know
about the Catoctin people, Watkins says. “What they’ve discovered
doesn’t necessarily address questions people who have broken through
the wall might have.”

The manor house at Catoctin Furnace stands in ruins.KINTSUGI
KELLEY-CHUNG/AAAS

But Gates vigorously defends the project’s ethics and approach.
“Rather than this being an example of exploitation of a vulnerable
population, it is an example of the opposite: of deploying scientific
tools to address questions of long-standing interest to African
Americans, and at the community’s request,” Gates says. “The
study is a tool for empowerment of African Americans. I would not have
joined the study or been so enthusiastic if that was not the case.”

Another point of tension is publication of the raw genetic data, which
is typical in ancient DNA studies. Some historically marginalized
communities, however, fear the loss of control and privacy that comes
with such publication. For example, when researchers obtained DNA from
36 people at the Anson Street African Burial Ground in Charleston,
South Carolina, the research was published, but the DNA sequences were
not deposited in open databases and any future research requires the
local community’s permission.

NMNH, where the Catoctin remains are housed, requires open access to
data generated from sampling its specimens. The data in
the _Science_ study were posted on the European Nucleotide Archive
last year, allowing anyone to access it. Reich argues that in this
case, open publication of data was important to help prevent
commercial exploitation. “We didn’t want 23andMe to have exclusive
access,” he says. “The only ethical approach is to make the
historical data fully publicly available, so that the for-profit
company cannot have proprietary ownership over data. This is
particularly important for DNA from enslaved individuals who did not
have agency over their remains.”

But open data can lead to exploitation, too. In a development Reich
calls “negative,” some companies are using the genes of enslaved
people to tout genetic ancestry analyses, often without clear
explanations of their methodology. History sells: Customers are lured
by the chance of finding genetic links to Viking shield maidens, Roman
gladiators—and, since their 27 genomes were posted on a preprint
server last summer, enslaved Black people from Catoctin Furnace.
“Historical evidence shows African slaves were chosen with
backgrounds in iron manufacturing,” the website of Switzerland-based
MyTrueAncestry reads. “You can find out if they are part of your
ancestry. FIND OUT HOW.”

Comer keeps a spreadsheet tracking nearly 200 hopeful inquiries
she’s received since the company incorporated Catoctin Furnace into
its marketing last summer. Based on what MyTrueAncestry has released
about its methods, she thinks most inquirers are about as related to
Catoctin as anyone with some African ancestry—very, very distantly.
“Is that exploiting the desire within the African American community
to have more information about their ancestry? Yes,” she says.
“It’s given a lot of people false hope.”

But Comer defends her project’s overall impact, saying it has helped
build a Black descendant community at Catoctin Furnace that otherwise
wouldn’t exist. “I can’t say the project started with the
community of descendants, because it didn’t,” Comer says. “And
it could have, had they been in a position to know the cemetery
existed and these advances in archaeology existed.”

ALTHOUGH MANY PEOPLE are eager to learn the stories of their enslaved
ancestors, others might find the information traumatic, Comer and
Reich say. They and their collaborators note this concern in a
commentary published this week in _The American Journal of Human
Genetics_. “A huge part of this research is the responsibility to
disseminate information in a sensitive way and be prepared for the
psychological impact it might have,” Clinton says.

Some descendants may be unaware of their links to slavery or even to
the Black community. For example, at the moment there’s just one
other Catoctin worker whose descendants have been identified. In 1979,
around the same time researchers were excavating the Catoctin Furnace
cemetery, Steven Pilgrim, a materials scientist at Alfred University
who identifies as white, made an unexpected discovery in Pennsylvania
state archives. “The 1910 census shows my great-grandmother was
Black,” Pilgrim says. According to family lore, Manzella Grace
Patterson died in childbirth in 1914, at age 38. Her husband remarried
soon thereafter.

Distant cousins Crystal Claggett (left) and Steven Pilgrim both count
a freed Black worker at Catoctin Furnace among their ancestors.
KINTSUGI KELLEY-CHUNG/AAAS

Pilgrim kept digging, eventually tracing his great-grandmother’s
ancestry back to a free Black ironworker named Robert Patterson, who
lived near and labored at Catoctin Furnace in the mid-1800s. Pilgrim
and other family members have since compiled a list of more than 1000
living Patterson relatives. Many have become part of the Catoctin
Furnace community, participating in events on-site and getting briefed
on the genetic research at the cemetery. However, the family may not
be genetically related to anyone buried in the cemetery, which was no
longer in use by the time Pattersons crop up in Catoctin records.

Comer recognizes that not every family might welcome news of
connection to the cemetery. “When I look at the 23andMe results and
see Maryland light up, I have a feeling I know some of these
people—and they may not know, or want to know, they’re related to
skilled African American ironworkers,” she says. “That’s the
American story, and that’s the story here.”

As researchers think through the ethics of contacting descendants,
medical research can provide a model for consent, suggests Alondra
Nelson, a sociologist of science at the Institute for Advanced Study,
who is African American. “If you’re doing genome-wide analysis and
find someone has a disease, some people want to know, others
don’t,” she says. The key is to ask before doing the study. If
people didn’t agree to learn about genetic connections with historic
individuals when they submitted their DNA to 23andMe, it might not be
ethical to contact them now, she says.

Clinton agrees, and also thinks 23andMe’s clients should have been
able to specifically consent—or decline—to have their DNA used in
work on historic people. “People should be fully aware of how their
data is being used, especially if it’s being used downstream in
other ways that are not directly beneficial to them,” he says.

Agnes Jackson and her daughters, the known descendants of Summers,
with Pilgrim and other Patterson family members, were briefed on the
overall DNA results in a video call with Comer, Harney, and Reich in
early June. For them, more answers are on the way: 23andMe said in a
statement that it plans to return results to the two documented
descendant families, with the help of the Catoctin Furnace Historical
Society and the Smithsonian.

As the afternoon of Juneteenth shaded into dusk, Jackson’s daughter
Green looked around the Catoctin Furnace museum. For now, she says,
the realization that their ancestor was a metalworker has changed the
way she views her past. “They always made it out that we were so
uneducated and insignificant, that our past began with cotton and
ended with cotton,” she says. “When I look at the price they paid
for him, that skill set—it blows me away. We were educated people,
with valuable skill sets.”

_ANDREW CURRY is a journalist in Berlin._

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Quantum Complexity Shows How to Escape Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox
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Charlie Wood

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August 2, 2023

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