Family Histories

Having over-indulged at the breakfast buffet, I am sitting in a comfortable chair along the railing on the cliff above the sea. Before me spreads a vista that has drawn people here for centuries. I am in Sorrento. The dramatic beauty of the views and the wind-kissed weather drew the Emperors and Popes and their followers from Rome and nowadays tourists from all over flock here for the same reasons. 

The centerpiece of the horizon is the sprawl of Naples, flanked on the right by Mount Vesuvius, with Herculaneum and Pompeii at its feet. The skies are very clear today revealing to my left the profiles of Ischia and neighboring Procida.

We are waiting for Zoe and Eli, who are coming from Rome by way of the ferry from Naples. They will join us for a short week’s exploration of the Amalfi coast. It will be a family vacation that each of us is very excited about.

Checking my email, I am delighted by the fortuitous timing of one announcing the results of a DNA genetics test I had ordered before we left for Europe. Allie got the same email about her results at the same time. We each eagerly clicked through and logged-in to see just what stuff we were actually made of.

Both of our results proved anti-climactic, Allie’s all the more so since her mother was adopted and she knows nothing of her family background.  The news is plain vanilla: we are all-white: no African, no Asian, no Native American. No trace of Jewish. Essentially all Western Europe with a hint of Scandinavian. I guess we were hoping for a little spice and intrigue. A big shock was discovering something unexpected that we had in common: the largest component of both of our genetic material can be traced to Ireland. 

This was certainly a surprise for me. It seems that I have nearly 40% Irish genetic material vs. slightly less than 10% from Britain. Our family has been traced back for centuries to Yarborough in Lincolnshire. The Yarborough Hotel [in truth a modern-day pub] pictured below stands today in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, close by the family’s Brockelsby Park Estate.  We know that the earliest American Yarboroughs arrived in Virginia, from England, in the 1700’s. It has been an article faith as long as I can remember that we were English. Our relatives-in-law in Edinburgh and their Scottish friends always presume we are English.

I will share the little about our family that I know and still believe to be reasonably accurate. There are at least a half dozen surnames in American that are similar to Yarborough: Yarboro, Yarbrough, Yarber, etc. As best we can tell, we are all part of the same family, obviously a family of very bad spellers. My paternal grandfather, Ira David Yarborough, for whom I was named, had an identical twin, Ora, whose surname is spelled Yarbrough on his military records. Hopefully poor spelling was more a consequence of poor education than a genetic flaw.

The Yarborough family in the US today is concentrated along the crescent formed by the Shenandoah Valley, the Appalachian Mountains and the Deep South. This is the path traced by those early Virginia settlers as their numbers outgrew the lands they farmed. There is a subset of our family that is black, evidence that at some point in this migration, the Yarborough’s were slave owners. One hopes my ancestors gave the poor souls enslaved by them only their name and not their own genetic material.

Yarborough is not a name found often in history books. There was a US Senator from Texas named Ralph Yarborough. The one place where the name has endured is in the game of bridge. A Yarborough is not a good thing in bridge. It refers to a hand that has zero points—in other words, the worst hand possible. The story goes that the second Earl of Yarborough, Charles Anderson Worsley Anderson-Pelham, fancied himself a math whiz and went about the English countryside taking bets at odds of a 1000 to 1 against any dealing of four hands would yield such an outcome. Since the true probability of such a hand being dealt can be calculated as 1827 to I, he clearly had the odds on his side. No accounting remains of how well the Earl came off in this endeavor.

Zoe and Eli will be interested to see our results since their genetic heritage will be the same.  Allie learned little new about her heritage from her mother’s birth parents. She knows that she comes from the same stock as I do. There seems to be no exotic elements in our history, no intriguing plot for a future story. I’m left to ponder what great attraction Irish women must have had for all those generations of Yarborough men. We’ve visited Ireland twice in the past year. I thought we were simply enjoying the beautiful country and its warm people. I had no idea we were tracing our roots.