Scientists Mapped New England's Yankee DNA — A Few Puritan Families Still Shape It!

Between 1620 and 1640, a few thousand English Puritans crossed the Atlantic, settled New England, then largely stopped coming. Four centuries later, scientists used identity-by-descent and 770,000 genomes to map what that founder population left in the DNA of millions of Americans. We trace the Great Migration families, the founder effect, the meticulous town and church records, and the 2017 study behind the Yankee signature, asking how much of who Yankees are today was shaped by a handful of 1630s families. *SOURCES* Han et al. (2017), Nature Communications — "Clustering of 770,000 genomes reveals post-colonial population structure of North America": https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomm... Full open-access text (PMC): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... The Great Migration Study Project (Robert Charles Anderson / NEHGS, American Ancestors): https://www.americanancestors.org/pro... Puritan migration to New England, 1620–1640 (Winthrop Fleet, the Arbella, East Anglia & Lincolnshire origins): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan...) Laberge et al. (2005), Clinical Genetics — "Population history and its impact on medical genetics in Quebec" (the founder-effect contrast): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1... Mayflower Descendants collection (FamilySearch / GSMD, for the descendant figures and pedigree collapse): https://www.familysearch.org/en/colle...