Remains of George Washington’s Relatives Identified

WASHINGTON, D.C.—CNN reports that DNA analysis has identified skeletal remains of George Washington’s grandnephews, Samuel Walter Washington and George Steptoe Washington, Jr., and their mother, Lucy Payne Washington. George Washington’s younger brother Samuel and several generations of his kin were first buried in a cemetery at Harewood, his estate in Charles Town, West Virginia. But some of the bodies were later moved, leaving a few bones behind in unmarked graves. Courtney L. Cavagnino of the U.S. Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and her colleagues compared samples taken from degraded skeletal remains in the Harewood cemetery with DNA from a known living descendant of Samuel Washington. They used several types of analysis, including Y chromosome DNA analysis to investigate the paternal line; mitochondrial DNA analysis to investigate the maternal line; and a new technique developed to analyze thousands of data points on a single nucleotide, or building block of DNA, to assess more distant relationships. Cavagnino said that the comparison between the living descendant and the three buried relatives predicted relationships one degree closer than had been anticipated, but she and her colleagues determined that this was due to cross-cousin marriages among the Washingtons. The technique could eventually be used to identify the remains of service members lost around the world. Read the original scholarly article about this research in iScience. To read about artifacts recovered from the site of a 1754 battle in which a young Washington led British troops, go to "Around the World: Pennsylvania."