Dean Lerat poses with his mother, Joanne Lerat, and grandmother, Marian Morningstar.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Dean Lerat poses with his mother Joanne Lerat, and grandmother Marian Morningstar. By day, Dean Lerat is an RCMP staff sergeant in Fort Qu'Appelle, Sask. But in his free time, the member of Cowessess First Nation is a DNA detective.
He was stationed in Nova Scotia at the time. Over a pint in an Antigonish pub on St. Patrick's Day, he and his wife — who both had some distant Irish ancestry — bet on who was the most Irish. "My grandmother is still alive. She's 92 years old and I love her to death and she's a true survivor." "And then from those, they branched off into other Treaty 4 nations. So I've created a tree with all of these kits … I think we have over 11,000 in there now."Along with DNA testing, Lerat also uses obituaries, band lists, censuses and old documents from the Northwest Mounted Police to inform his work. He also uses online databases offered by companies such as Ancestry, 23 and Me, My Heritage and Family Tree DNA.
"I'm super proud of Dean doing what he does.… He's been connecting daughters with mothers and fathers with sons and sisters with brothers that they never knew existed, or they knew but they didn't know," she said.
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