Northern Writes 2011

Page 8

Blood from a Stone (Extract) Euan Martin and Dave Smith First performed in Inverness in November 2011.

Garry, inspired by an article in the local paper, forms his plan. "Ruined cottages on remote Highland hillsides are the new frontier of the latest travel boom... ancestral tourism. New DNA techniques called New Generation Sequencing - NGS - mean that amateur genealogists can now pinpoint the exact croft from where their ancestors came." Garry ...miss out all that rooting about in libraries, trawling through fusty old documents? Hey! I was sold! DNA in the actual rocks? It's official - you can get blood from a stone! And I thought to myself, a short cut! That's for me! I know what you're thinking - taxi driver. Always taking the long way round... He mimes casual taxi driving, arm out the window, one hand on the wheel. Garry …when you can go straight there? But we're not really like that. We do like to go as quickly as possible from A to B. That's what appealed to me about this. So I had to get a sample of DNA, but as I wanted to track down the adopted ancestors, I had to get some adopted parental DNA. Apparently swabbing the inside of a cheek is the standard method. Which is easy enough if the subject is willing, but not so easy if they're not so keen.

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