FROM ICE AGE MOTHERS TO ME: A 13,000-YEAR JOURNEY

My maternal line tells a story that begins not just centuries ago, but deep in the Ice Age.

Through the magic of mtDNA testing, the kind that traces a direct line from mother to mother across thousands of years, I’ve learned that I belong to haplogroup U4a2. This lineage reaches back roughly 13,000 years to the hunter-gatherer women of northern Europe, who lived in a harsh, glacial landscape at the end of the last Ice Age. Over time, their descendants adapted, settled, and became part of the early populations of central Europe, eventually finding roots in what is now Switzerland.

By the 1700s, my maternal lineage could be documented.

ROSE JONELY

The story begins in Bern, Switzerland, with Christina Hoffman, born in 1724. From her, the line continues through generations of Swiss daughters, Anna Wyttenbach, Barbara Streit, Elisabeth Hadorn, Elizabeth Trubel, and Rose Marguerite Jonely, women who lived their lives in the heart of the Swiss Alps.

With Rose Marguerite Jonely, my second great-grandmother, the story takes a dramatic turn. Around 1880, Mormon missionaries persuaded her family to leave Switzerland and begin a new life in Idaho. That journey across the Atlantic marked a turning point, but not a break in the chain.

In Idaho, the next generations, Rose Vaterlaus and Laura Louise Burnside, carried the lineage forward. Laura, my grandmother, lived in many places, but one constant remained: the passing of that ancient maternal thread. She gave birth to my mother, Margaret Josephine Kelley, who in turn passed it on to me.

So my maternal story is an epic journey: from Ice‑Age Europe, to the Swiss Alps, to American life, an unbroken chain of mothers and daughters stretching across centuries.

AN UNEXPECTED ANCESTRAL PATH

I recently read a story about a woman who took a deep dive into her ancestry, going back thousands of years. Her experience got me thinking about my own family history and wondering what I might find if I looked a little further back than the usual records and family stories.

While researching, I uncovered a genetic term called haplogroups, which are large genetic groups that link people to a shared ancient ancestor. Some are paternal, passed from father to son, while others are maternal, which are passed from the mother to all her children. They don’t tell the whole story of who we are, but they can offer some interesting clues about where our ancestors came from and how they moved across the world long ago.

A while back, I took a DNA test through Ancestry.com. Later, I discovered those results could be used to identify my paternal haplogroup, which allowed me to trace my direct father-to-son line. (I’ll need to conduct a different DNA test, to discover my maternal haplogroup, which is on my to do list for later.)

So, I uploaded my Ancestry DNA file to another site that identifies paternal haplogroups. It came up with R1b-L421. At first, I thought, “So what?” But after doing some reading, though, I was floored to learn that this line likely traces back to Eastern Europe, around present-day Bulgaria or Romania, well before the rise of the Roman Empire.

That discovery made me pause, since our genealogical research places the Wells family in England and Scotland for many generations. One possible explanation, suggested by Google’s new AI feature, is that this Eastern European DNA entered my English ancestral line through a Roman-era mercenary. The Romans recruited soldiers from across their empire and stationed some of them in Britain along Hadrian’s Wall. It seems likely that this soldier, if he did indeed exist, had children with a native woman and assimilated into British culture. Amazingly, it seems, his DNA may have simply carried on, generation after generation, eventually reaching me.