Are Your Family Tree Roots in Exotic Soil?

Like many Tex-Czechs, I have a long-standing interest in genealogy. With the help of many relatives (especially newly discovered ones), family histories, church and government records were forthcoming enough to document the family history in Texas. I also knew the towns in Moravia from which my ancestors had come, namely Hovezi and Frenstat. I knew these towns were in the province of Vlassko, but I had not paid particular attention to this fact. I soon learned that most Tex-Czechs also descended from folks who had come from Vlassko. It did not take much genealogical networking to realize that these Moravian settlers were a close-knit group of people who came from one small province, settled largely in southeastern Texas, and frequently continued to marry one another. The latter aspect was manifested in that third- and fourth-generation “genetic” Moravians, like me, are relatively common.

All this led naturally enough to hiring a professional archivist in Moravia to search out old records, and several visits to the ancestral homeland. The Moravia paper trail was forthcoming enough also, until it abruptly ended in the middle 17th century when Catholic Church records stop. Farmers in Texas had come from farmers in Moravia, who had come from serfs in Moravia, and generations of my ancestors had lived in a village as tiny as Hovezi for over 200 years. Well, this is exciting! I had hoped for some lost nobility or something more spicy than “the salt of the Earth” that I had found.

With the paper trail at an end, there was nothing left but general historic reading about the region. Thumbing through a common guidebook for Vlassko, I came across the passage “the Vlassko region was largely settled in the late 16th century by Vlachs migrating from the East.” Say what? What is a Vlach? Where exactly is the East?

A lot more reading both clarified and confused. Indeed, there were Vlachs (and still are) all along the Carpathian Mountains from Moravia into the Balkans. There were (are) Serbian Vlachs, Moravians Vlachs, Ukrainian Vlachs and so forth. The original Vlachs were shepherds with a shared life style, threads of a common language, but otherwise a people who had adopted the marvelous survival technique of assimilation -that is blending into whatever population they happened to find themselves.

What characterized all “true” Vlachs, however, was that they had been a “Latinized” people with an origin in the Roman Empire occupation of the Balkans and Romania. Walachia, the province in modern Romania, is largely regarded as the Vlach homeland, as it is to the modern Romanian. During the 16th century, there had been a dramatic westward migration of Vlachs and other peoples in response to the westward expansion of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Vlachs migrated along the Carpathian Mountains with their herds and some migrated as far west as the mountains of eastern Moravia, where they were welcomed by the Hapsburg Empire and essentially formed a buffer colony against the Ottoman Empire. I learned that the reason there had been such a massive migration from Vlassko into Texas during the second half of the 19th century was that the region had been brutally oppressed by the Hapsburgs. The Protestant Vlachs, originally welcomed by the Catholic Hapsburgs, had become their most strident enemies during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Hapsburg victory over the Moravian Vlachs in 1644 was followed by two centuries of some of the most oppressive conditions seen then in Europe.

Suddenly, genealogy was a lot more exciting in this historical context! But then the confusion came. “Vlach” had come to be a sloppy term. There were “Moravians”, mostly in the lowlands, and a people called “Vlachs” in the hills and mountains, but it was not clear if these Vlachs were indeed a separate ethnic group or simply anyone who had taken on a semi-nomadic lifestyle associated with sheep herding. In other words, were the Vlachs of Vlassko descended from more Eastern peoples, largely Romanians (Latins), who had fled along the Carpathian Mountains to ultimately reach Moravia, or were they simply Moravians and Slovaks (Slavs) who had adopted a shepherd lifestyle? Here was something to discuss, but impossible to settle with historical data.

Enter DNA. A group of population geneticists at Oxford University in England had been doing fascinating research with mitochondrial DNA, which is the DNA sequence that is very conservative over time and passed from mother to daughter, and so forth. They had been able to demonstrate that nearly all European (about 95%) are descended from only seven women who entered Europe 10,000 to 45,000 years ago. In short, nearly all Europeans belong to one of seven clans who had been in Europe for ten or more thousands of years. Although these clans are widely distributed across all of Europe, I thought that perhaps some clustering might help distinguish a Latin from a Slav and shed some light on the Moravian Vlach question.

I scraped some cheek cells, wrote a check and sent the package off to Oxford. A few weeks later, my results arrived. I read through most of these before it really dawned on me that they were talking about my DNA. Oxford said that I was NOT European at all; that my DNA sequence was very rare in Europe, and my genotype was Black African, occurring mostly in sub-Saharan Black Africa and in the Sudan and Egypt. Oh, my! This had never occurred to me at all.

Explaining a Black African in Vlassko in Moravia is difficult indeed. However, explaining a Black African among “true” Vlachs of the Roman Empire is not difficult at all. Vlachs were Roman subjects, and throughout the Empire in Romania and the Balkans, Black African slaves had been imported from across the Mediterranean Sea via Cairo and Carthage. It was not hard to imagine that it was probably the lower classes that took refuge in the Carpathian Mountains after the Roman Legions withdrew from Walachia during the 2nd century.

So here is the bottom line. The origin of the Vlachs of Vlassko cannot be solved from paper and history alone. Given the rarity of African DNA in Europe, a “significant” percentage of African DNA in the Vlach population would essentially prove a Roman origin for these people. There would be no reasonable explanation for such a clustering in Moravian Slavs.

One individual, however, is a very small sample, and there are enough flukes in the migration of individuals over time so that one set of African DNA in Vlassko proves nothing about the group. What is needed is a much larger sample. Hence, the launching of “The Vlach DNA Project” and the quest for volunteers. Individuals who are qualified are those whose maternal line (your mother, your mother’s mother, her mother, etc.) goes back to Vlassko. This is essentially the area of Moravia bounded by Frenstat and Novy Jicin to the north, Valasske Mezirici to the west, and Slovakia to the east. The method is simple, quick and painless, but it does cost around $150. If a group of interested persons can be identified, there is the potential of expanding our knowledge about our common ancestors into a time and realm that has never been possible before. Interested?

Contact Dr. Gary Kocurek via E-Mail

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