Donald Yates

Donald N. Yates (1950-) is an American genealogist, author, and genetic testing investigator, who was born in Cedartown, Georgia, of Choctaw-Cherokee and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. He has a doctorate in classical studies with a major in Medieval Latin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote a dissertation on the literary and historical analysis of the twelfth-century Latin satiric masterpiece Ysengrimus. He has published articles and books in Native American studies and genealogy research, as well as manuscript studies, paleography, archives administration, cataloguing science and library history. After working in corporate communications for the pharmaceutical company Miles Laboratories (now Bayer Corporation), he taught public relations and communications at Georgia Southern University and several other schools.
In 2003, he founded the direct-to-consumer genetic testing and DNA profiling company DNA Consultants , where he is owner and principal scientific investigator in American Indian Culture and Research Journal remarked that it "provides the definitive evidence of relations between Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and the Cherokee...engaging and useful," while two reviews by James L. Guthrie and Stephen C. Jett in Pre-Columbiana. A Journal of Long-Distance Contacts 5/2-4 and 6/1 (2014), pp. 242-44 paid special attention to the convergence of historical and genetic research. Yates's Cherokee monograph is notable for having an audiobook version, narrated Jack Chekijian in 2013, with correct pronunciations of Cherokee and other American Indian language-derived historical figures, exotic words and place-names.

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Donald N. Yates, American genealogist

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