Are You Genetically Connected to Early Colonial Americans?

An update to our 23andMe Ancestry Service adds new granularity for people with British and Irish ancestry in the United States, allowing them to see if they are genetically connected to some of the earliest colonial settlements in the US, including Plymouth Colony and the settlers who arrived on the Mayflower.

This update includes hundreds of early British & Irish American Genetic Groups, helping customers connect back many generations to communities within the United States. Genetic Groups are groups of people with significant genetic similarity who may share ethnic identities, languages, or other similar characteristics.

Discovering a genetic link to one of these early colonial communities might help some people connect to history. Our scientists will continue to add additional “European Diaspora” Genetic Groups in the United States and around the world, studying communities of people with ancestry from other parts of Europe.

Mayflower Descendants

About four percent of 23andMe customers will see close matches to the “Mayflower Descendants” Genetic Group, while around 15 percent of 23andMe+ Premium members will see Distant Genetic Group matches to this group. Astonishingly, it’s estimated that there are 10 million people in the United States and up to 35 million worldwide who are directly descended from passengers of the Mayflower, according to the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.

This update follows closely on other updates looking at early migration patterns within the United States as well as other genetic groups around the world. We will continue to add more of these groups to improve results for our customers. Among those updates was a recent update looking at African American Genetic Groups. That update helped connect customers with African American ancestry to one or more of 213 genetic communities, primarily in the Southern United States—particularly to where their ancestors may have lived before the mass movement of southern Blacks known as the Great Migration.

Of the hundreds of genetic groups that are part of this update, 18 are linked to some of the earliest European colonial settlements in what was to become the United States. Although people of various backgrounds—Dutch, German, Swedish, and African, for example—inhabited those early settlements, this particular update looks at shared genetic connections to people with predominantly British & Irish ancestry.

Below we highlight two of the 18 Colonial American Genetic Groups included in this update. Learning more about these early settlements offer an opportunity to see beyond some of the idealized versions of early colonial America, and examine what colonization meant not just for those early settlers but for the indigenous people and cultures devastated by it.

In this post, we highlight two of the 18 Colonial American Genetic Groups included in this update.

The Mayflower and the First Thanksgiving

Ill-prepared for the arduous task of establishing a “new Jerusalem” on the shores of a protected bay at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, the settlers who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 might not have survived if not for the Indigenous Wampanoag people.

Indeed, within a year of their arrival, as they prepared for what was to become known as the first Thanksgiving, only about 50 of the original 102 remained. The event aligns with traditional harvest celebrations that were part of European tradition and some point to other harvest gatherings celebrated by Spanish explorers in the 1500s in Florida and in Texas as the first Thanksgiving gatherings in North America. During that first Thanksgiving, which lasted three days, the 50 or so settlers gathered with about 90 tribal members.

The myth of that first Thanksgiving — a narrative created much later — often obscures the devastation brought by disease and war to the Indigenous peoples who had lived and thrived in North America for millennia. For many Indigenous Americans, Thanksgiving represents a vastly different perspective; rather than a moment of promise, it marks the beginning of centuries of displacement, disease, and violence. 

But the ethos of that first Thanksgiving—where people gathered communally and with gratitude for the harvest—is still worth celebrating as we work to understand all that was wrought in the complicated history of colonization in North America. The first settlers also signed the Mayflower Compact, establishing a framework for communal governing of the colony. Another not-well-known fact is that the settlers did not have any written permission to settle the area around Plymouth. They were meant to land further south. Some of the passengers questioned their right to the land, objecting that there was no legal authority to establish a colony and hence no guarantee of retaining ownership of the land they’d improved. In response to this, a group of colonists drafted and signed the Mayflower Compact.

Genetic Connections to the Mayflower

This latest 23andMe Ancestry Service update allows customers to determine if they are connected through shared ancestors to people who trace their genealogy back to the Mayflower. Customers linked to this group report ancestors primarily from the Massachusetts communities of Boston, Providence, New Bedford, Lynn, Springfield, Worcester, Hartford, Brockton, Weymouth, New London, Fall River, and Quincy.

The Virginia Colony and Jamestown

Before the settlers landed at Plymouth, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas was established at Jamestown in what was to become the Virginia Colony.

Unlike the settlers on the Mayflower, who were escaping religious persecution, the 100 or so men who settled at Jamestown in 1607 came to make money for the investors in the Virginia Company. Like at Plymouth, the survival of the colonists at Jamestown was tenuous at first.

The colonists and their indigenous neighbors, the Powhatan Confederacy, skirmished, and there were years of warfare; after the wedding in 1614 of Pocahontas, the daughter of a Powhatan chief, and John Rolfe, a tobacco grower, there were several years of peace between the colonists and the Powhatan until the early 1620s.

In 1619, the first 20 enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, beginning more than 200 years of slavery in what would become the United States.

Genetic Connections to the Virginia Colony

This update allows members with British & Irish ancestry to determine if they are connected through shared ancestors to people who trace their genealogy back to the Virginia Colony and possibly Jamestown. Many in this Genetic Group report ancestors from communities in what are now the states of Virginia and West Virginia Richmond, Lynchburg, Nashville, Danville, Petersburg, Amherst, Bedford, Halifax, Gretna, Charlottesville, Buena Vista, and Roanoke.

Jamestown was the initial capital of the Colony of Virginia until 1699 when it was moved to Williamsburg. While the earliest settlers were British, Poles and Slovak craftsmen arrived early in the colony’s history. Over the years, people of other nationalities—French Huguenots, Germans, Scottish, and Irish immigrants—eventually settled there.

Find out more

23andMe customers on the latest genotyping chip, V5, can see their Ancestry Composition here. 

Curious if you’re connected? Discover23andMe’s  Ancestry Service and more.

---

List of the 18 Colonial British & Irish Genetic Groups in the United States

1. Mayflower Descendants
2. Virginia Colonial Americans
3. St. Mary’s Descendants in Maryland and Kentucky
4. Northern Georgia and Alabama Colonial Americans
5. Coastal South Carolina Colonial Americans
6. Coastal Georgia Colonial Americans
7. Southern Mississippi and Alabama Colonial Americans
8. Coastal North Carolina Colonial Americans
9. North Carolina Piedmont Colonial Americans
10.  Northern Alabama Colonial Americans
11.  North Carolina Mountains Colonial Americans
12.  Western South Carolina Colonial Americans
13.  Blue Ridge Mountains Colonial Americans
14.  Central Appalachian Mountains Colonial Americans
15.  Central Alabama and Georgia Colonial Americans
16.  Southern Coastal Plain Colonial Americans
17.  New England Colonial Americans
18.  Northeast Colonial Americans