Imagine you are standing in a line. Your father is behind you, his
father behind him, his father behind him, his father behind him and so
on back 1000 generations.... This group of people wouldn't fill the
average pop concert venue, yet the last man in the line would have lived
in around 30,000BC. What would each man in the line look like? Where
would he live? Who else would he be the ancestor of? Discovery of this
lineage cannot be found in church records, census documents, ancient
histories or hieroglyphics. This knowledge is found within your own DNA.
It is encrypted into the genetic code that each of us carry. In
unlocking that code, we can go on a journey through time back to the
very beginning of human history. This book begins with one such line. An
old Irish family (Keegan or Clann MacAodhagain) with a Celtic pedigree.
In it we discover kings, shamans, sorcerers, fathers of entire nations -
and the first King of the Celts. For the first time, a single family's
origins is traced back to our most distant ancestors. This is the story
of a DNA journey that began with looking for information on a simple
stone mason, and ended up with the discovery of the first king of the
Celts and a bloodline back to the start of human history. Simon Keegan
(author of Pennine Dragon and The Lost Book of King Arthur) was
researching his family history but he reached an obstacle that could not
be negotiated through the usual Family Tree Detective methods - of
tracking down census documents and marriage certificates. So instead he
took a series of DNA tests and working with other Keegans around the
world, he demonstrated how a family can trace its family history not
just back to their clan founder about a thousand years ago, but to the
very beginning of human history - and he shows how you might be able to
do the same.
