I think AncestryDNA people need to read up on Acadian genetics. They have to consider the strong intermarriage (including cousin marriages) between Acadians and their genetic bottleneck that happened as the result of the Acadian Expulsion. This would make it hard for them to dismiss DNA cousin matches as meaningless pile-ups which lead to being read as false negatives which result in missing out on cousins that could help them understand their ancestral roots. This is my concern as a person who has Acadian roots on both parents side but have yet to know who my Acadian ancestors were. INTRODUCTION The cultural identity developed by the Acadians over the hundred years they inhabited settlements in historic maritime Canada (Acadia) has persisted through their expulsion and dispersal by decree of the British occupants in the mid-eighteenth century and into the lives of their Louisiana descendants on the brink of the twenty-first. (For modern treatments of Acadian history, see Brasseaux 1987, 1991, and 1992) Despite initial refuges in France, Saint-Domingue, and along the eastern seaboard of the United States, the remaining members of many exiled Acadian families found final refuge in Louisiana, where territorial governments beginning in 1765 settled them on the southern Louisiana prairies west of the Atchafalaya River, along the Mississippi River roughly between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and finally along the banks of Bayou Lafourche as late as 1785. The identity of this Catholic, French-speaking, agrarian population established in Acadia between 1676 and 1755 was perpetuated in these initial Louisiana settlements, and it is this identity that forms the basis of what we today recognize as Cajun culture. The economic, religious, and linguistic identity of the Acadians is also the basis of the populations cultural cohesiveness, which was intensified geographically by their eventual settlement in such remote areas as the uninhabited prairies of southwestern Louisiana. Having been derived from a small population of about 100 fur trappers and fishermen in Canada in 1604, Acadian descendants spent much of the next 250 years in cultural isolation, until the arrival of railroads across southern Louisiana in the latter half of the nineteenth century forced their integration. The reality of this isolation served as common justification for a large number of dispensations granted by the Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to allow intermarriage between familial relatives (Bourquard 1980). In addition to maintaining cultural cohesiveness, intermarriage among early Acadians had consequently maintained and incidentally perpetuated a degree of biological homogeneity as well, a phenomenon that causes a population to exhibit common genetic traits, including disease traits. In an effort to explain the incidence of genetic disorders in contemporary Acadian families, Thurman and DeFraites (1974) statistically show a nonrandom propensity for marriage among individuals with Acadian surnames living in St. Martinville at the time of the 1840 census. This result, which approximates the statistical propensity for second-cousin marriages, is a result that cannot be demonstrated in population data from 1960-1965. Therefore, although the cultural isolation resulting in dispensatory intermarriages has disappeared in the twentieth century, the genetic results of such historical unions remain. CONCLUSIONS The bottleneck effect caused by the Acadian expulsion is a major contributing factor in the exclusivity of the mutation that causes Type IC disease to southwestern Louisiana ancestry. The increased incidence of the disease in the Acadian population is also the product of the populations cultural and geographical isolation in the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. For these reasons, we can expect the genetic homogeneity of the Acadian people to reveal other unique traits upon investigation. The mutation that causes Acadian Usher syndrome identifies the first example of a genetic trait that is purely Acadian. thefreelibrary/Acadian+usher+syndrome.-a079744313
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 06:31:09 +0000
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