Unearthing a mystery

A chance e-mail from the South American coast may help identify African remains found half a world away, in Portsmouth, N.H.

Hot on the trail is Bruce Jackson, a relentless Boston scientist who already has conducted preliminary DNA tests that show a connection between the Portsmouth remains and genetic patterns found in the Congo region of Africa.

But civil unrest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has thwarted scientists' attempts to collect DNA samples to more precisely identify the ethnic or tribal origin of the 13 Portsmouth skeletons, which were unearthed in 2003 during routine sewer repairs. Crews found wooden coffins in an area marked as a ''Negro Burying Ground" on a 1705 map.

Then came the e-mail from a sociologist in Ecuador, who did not even know about the Portsmouth mystery but was studying the roots of blacks in Ecuador. He said he had traced the origin of thousands of black Ecuadorans to the Congo region, through historical and birth records. Those records, he said, detailed a remarkable 1553 ship mutiny by 23 slaves who killed their Spanish captors, ran aground in Ecuador, and settled there.

That raised an intriguing possibility, because records identify Portsmouth's earliest black residents as slaves captured in Africa in 1645. Perhaps, investigators theorized, the DNA of the Ecuadoran descendants could help figure out the identities of the Portsmouth remains.

This latest clue is so promising that Jackson will travel to Ecuador in June to search for more answers.

''We really believe, since the [shipwreck] time frame is similar, that the people in Portsmouth may have come from the same region as the people in Ecuador," Jackson said.

''We think the slave ship that ran aground in 1553 was coming from a region in Africa which was a rich source of slaves for at least 100 years after that," he said.

The Portsmouth puzzle hits close to home for Jackson, a Boston University biochemist who also is the descendant of slaves. He cofounded the African-American DNA Roots Project in 2001. The project uses DNA analysis to identify unique chemical sequences among African-Americans that might help them trace their roots to West Africa -- a major shipping area during the slave trade.

''We can differentiate between ethnic groups of the world based on these very tiny differences in the DNA," Jackson said.

His DNA testing of teeth from eight of the 13 Portsmouth skeletons indicates that their unique chemical sequence, known as a haplotype, most closely resembles haplotypes found among people in northern Nigeria and the western Congo region, which includes the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

But large gaps in historical records about slaves in Portsmouth -- and murky records about the lives of millions of Africans captured during two centuries of slave trading -- make it difficult to further narrow the origin of the unearthed bones.

''Most of us don't know what country we came from," said Valerie Cunningham, a black historian in Portsmouth who has spent four decades tracing the city's African roots.

''Even though this is a burial site in New Hampshire, there are African-Americans all over the country who are curious about this," said Cunningham.

So Jackson offered to help, starting with DNA. He asked Jean Kapenda, the Ecuadoran e-mailer, to take DNA samples from people with the family name of Congo or Chala, a common last name in the Congo region's Luba tribe.

Under Jackson's long-distance guidance, Kapenda -- himself a descendant of the Luba -- swabbed the inside cheeks of 17 black Ecuadorans.

The next piece of the Portsmouth DNA puzzle fell into place recently, when Jackson's analysis revealed that the haplotypes from the Ecuador samples -- like the haplotypes from Portsmouth -- suggested ancestry from Nigeria and the Congo region.

''Excited is not the word," said an elated Jackson.

Now he is finalizing plans for a June trip to Ecuador to take DNA samples from ''as many people who were descendants from that shipwreck as possible."

His ultimate goal is to build a database with thousands of DNA samples, similar to the FBI's fingerprint database, to speed work for people worldwide tracing African genealogy.

Jackson will be collaborating with Fatimah Jackson, an anthropology and biology professor at the University of Maryland. Fatimah Jackson, no relation to Bruce, is tracing the origin of more than 400 remains of slaves whose graves were unearthed during construction in New York City in 1991.

Fatimah Jackson said it's an uphill battle, in part because some of the countries that exist today did not exist 400 years ago.

''We find in Africa there is a lot of movement of people back and forth," she said. ''Under conditions of war, people are always changing their identities, ethnic groups get merged, new groups form."

Fatimah Jackson and her collaborators started the first human DNA database in Africa in 2002 in Cameroon, which borders the Republic of the Congo. The two Jacksons plan to merge their databases, searching for common links.

But, as Bruce Jackson is fond of saying, DNA is not the magic bullet portrayed on TV crime series. DNA alone will not identify the Portsmouth remains, he said. But it can lead investigators to the right path. And then a lot of hard digging with other tools must follow.

''If we can link these remains to the region, the Congo, we can look at [slave] ship records which are copious and precise," he said.

''It was a business. They kept records of pickup time, how many people as cargo, the many who died, what they died of, and where they were thrown overboard," Jackson said. ''It's incredible."

Even the bone structure of the Portsmouth skeletons -- suggesting people who were very tall for that era -- may hold a key clue. The women appear to have been about 5 feet 10 inches tall and the men near 6 feet, Jackson said. So investigators might be able to narrow their focus to Congolese groups that were known for their height.

But Jackson is a realist. Uncovering the identity of each of the remains, much less finding descendants in Portsmouth, is an extreme long shot, he said. Researchers tracing the roots of the New York City remains have been at it more than a decade.

''Sometimes you run into a stroke of luck, like this guy from Ecuador," Jackson said.

''Because of the emotions involved with African-Americans, with slavery and false hope for finding roots, you never play with emotions," he said. ''We have no idea when we will make a connection. But you always keep going till you come upon an answer."

Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com.