Scientists have identified the historical remains of George Washington’s family with the help of new DNA technologies. As it was found, the bone fragments from the Harewood family cemetery in West Virginia belong to George Washington’s great-nephew Samuel Walter Washington and George Steptoe Washington Jr as well as their mother Lucy Payne Washington.
The scientists are now planning to validate the advanced DNA analysis techniques in their ongoing efforts to identify the remains of members of US troops from World War II. The results were published in the journal iScience.
“The ability to test historical samples such as the remains of the Harewood cemetery allows us to evaluate and improve the methods we apply to our case samples, which are of similar quality to historical remains and often even worse,” said first author Courtney Cavagnino of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’s Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFMES-AFDIL) at Dover Air Base in an official statement.
“This particular case allowed us to test methods for extended kinship prediction that we had developed based on several known, degraded DNA samples whose identity had to be confirmed,” said lead author Charla Marshall, deputy director of DNA operations of the US Department of Defence. “Our laboratory is currently validating these new methods for use in routine casework,” Marshall added.
AFMES-AFDIL is the only DNA laboratory of the US Department of Defence for human remains. It supports the daily operations as well as the mission to establish the identity of troop members from past conflicts back to World War II.
In the latest study, the AFMES-AFDIL team set out to identify remains from unmarked graves at Harewood Cemetery. Scientists carried out a series of DNA tests on the suspected remains of people of interest, including family members of George Washington. They correlated the results with analyses of the DNA of a living descendant, SW Washington.
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