DNA Surprises, or how we found out we sit on a throne of lies.

In June of 2009, my oldest brother took a Y-DNA test from Family Tree DNA. After years of battling some pretty hefty genealogical brick walls, we figured it couldn't hurt to get the paternal test done to see if it could shed any light on our family's history.

We just couldn't seem to connect the dots on my father's father's side. We knew that my Great Great Grandfather, Henry Gleason Ward, was the son of one William C. Ward and Mary Wallace Ward. We had no marriage record for the parents, but we had a record for William C. Ward, a non-resident sailor, from the Savannah Poor House and Hospital stating he was buried on September 3, 1841, that he was born in Massachusetts 36 years prior, and had died of fever.

 We had some scattered records for Mary Wallace Ward in Savannah, but not much. We knew Mary Wallace had been born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1816 and that she had died in Savannah in 1859.

Photo: Courtesy of the late, great Jane Beacham. Thanks for everything, Jane.

We knew she was a nurse, and died of Intermittent Fever after a six day illness.

Other than these few things, we really didn't know much about Mary Wallace and William Ward. We didn't even know for certain where William was buried. We did know that sometime after Henry Gleason Ward was born in Charleston on 30 October 1836, the family had moved to Savannah, where his only sibling Julia Ward was born on 4 June 1841. Just three months later, William Ward would die in the Poor House/Sailors' Hospital. Mary would live 18 more years, long enough to marry Nicholas Handle in 1849. In the 1850 Census, Nicholas, Mary, Henry and Julia Ward are living in Savannah. So far we are unable to find a divorce record for Mary and Nicholas, but three months before Mary died in 1859, Nicholas married a Lucy Bennett.

What happened to Mary Wallace's Charleston family is unknown. The true birthplace of William C Ward is unknown. Julia's 1923 death certificate records her father's birthplace as England. The 1910 Census records it as Connecticut. The marriage record of Mary and William cannot be found.

This leads us to August of 2009. My brother's Y-DNA test results had come back, and just like we'd hoped, the brick walls started to fall. Just not in the way we could have ever imagined.

A little bit about Y-DNA.

In males, the Y chromosome is one half of his 23rd chromosome pair. Females inherit an X chromosome from their mother and an X chromosome from their father, but males inherit an X from their mother and a Y from their father. Having a Y chromosome is what makes a person genetically male. Naturally, only males can take a Y-DNA test.

The Y chromosome is unique in that it is passed down the paternal line from father to son to son to son to son virtually unchanged over thousands of years. Very infrequently, changes do happen. These changes are called mutations. Once a son's Y is passed down with a mutation which his father's Y did not have, the mutated version will be passed down son to son to son to son. Because of this, we can see with incredible accuracy when and where mutations occur.

A Y-DNA test is sometimes called a "Surname Test." Typically, males do not change their surnames as women do, so if your Y-DNA test shows that most of your matches are named "Springsteen", then that's the surname almost every man who passed your Y chromosome down the line would have used since the start of passed-down surnames.

Almost every man.

Adoptions happen. Affairs happen. Kidnappings happen. Daddy-haters who change their names happen. But by and large, surnames generally remain the same or very similar for generations.

When my brother's Y-DNA results came in, the results were immediate and unquestionable. The Y chromosome which my brother had gotten from our father and he'd gotten from his father and he'd gotten from his father belonged to the line of men who for hundreds and hundreds of years had been using the surname Gleason, not Ward. We had 32 Y-DNA matches for the basic 37-marker test we initially bought.  Only 4 had names which were not Gleason or a close variant. When we upgraded and had 67 markers tested, only 2 of 11 matches had surnames that were not Gleason.

Of course, having gotten this earth-shattering new information, we immediately turned our attention to finding our mysterious Gleason ancestor and figuring out how Henry Gleason Ward ended up in the care of Mary Wallace Ward. We ordered more tests for more siblings and breathlessly awaited the results.

Not.

DNA results can be confusing. Let's face it, none of us is begging to go back to 10th Grade Biology class. Sure, most of us remember something about a double helix and that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but frankly, it's been more than a few years since most of us have had to think about Deoxyribonucleic Acid. (Spelling it correctly was once a bonus question on one of my high school biology quizzes. I think you'll agree my Fernandina Beach High School education has paid off in spades.)

When you're expecting to see Ward all over a match page and see Gleason instead, you think you know what it means and you're pretty sure you should do something with that information, but you're not exactly sure what. By an extremely fortunate coincidence, the Gleason Surname Project on Family Tree DNA is the surname project to which all others aspire. The admins actively recruit anyone with the surname Gleason to test their DNA and add it to the database.

Almost immediately after our results showed we belonged to the Gleason Y DNA line, Judith Claasen, one of the admins, sent an email in which she very diplomatically noted that although our surname didn't match, it appeared we were Gleason descendants. She asked if we'd like to join the project, which we did. Emails were exchanged, and Judith's knowledge and willingness to help allowed us to make sense of our results. Another genealogist, Maud Gleason, went out of her way to help us, exchanging emails with Judith on our behalf, asking questions we didn't even know how to ask.

We Gleasons are not just devastatingly attractive. We're also incredibly helpful.