https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230803141708.htm

"This study required us to consider several ethical issues that had not been explicitly addressed in the existing literature on ethics in ancient DNA," say the authors, led by Éadaoin Harney, a population geneticist at 23andMe. "This work has contributed to community and national conversations about the role that scientific approaches can play in restoring information about the lives of enslaved people that would otherwise be lost to history."

The team's genetic analysis hoped to further the goals of community stakeholders who wish to "identify and foster a Catoctin descendent community" by identifying previously unknown connections to living descendants. They analyzed human remains from an undocumented African American cemetery under stewardship of the Smithsonian and in coordination with The Catoctin Furnace Historical Society and self-identified descendants of the Catoctin Furnace community.