Tuesday, June 23, 2015

DNA Doesn't Lie

After  I  signed-on  with  Ancestry.com,  and  started  developing  a  pretty  good  Pedigree  Chart  showing  the  ancestors  of  my  family  many  generations  back,   I  took  the  DNA  test.  
So  far,   about  1,950   other  people  who  took  the  Ancestry.com  DNA  test  have  turned  out  to  be  8th  cousins  or  closer.  That  includes  several  African  Americans  resulting  from  sex  between   slaves  and  their  owners,  in  the  Old  South.

The  more  closely-related  to  you  someone  is,  in  the  results,  the  more  unambiguous  the  results  are,  within  the  computer  program  employed  by  the  lab  testing  us.

In  about  1.5%  of  the  cases  --  for  me  that currently  comes  out  to  30  people  --  the  results  are  dramatically  clear  --  in  effect,  "The  DNA  makes  it  very,  very  clear  that  these  folks  are  pretty  darn  closely  related  to  you."  I  refer  to  those  people  as  "98%ers."

A  respectable  proportion  of  the  98%ers  have  worked-out  their  ancestry  the  same  way  I  did  --  they  pulled  together  mountains  of  evidence  from  a  variety  of  sources  to  verify  their  ancestry  many  generations  back.

The  problem  with  those  98%ers  is  that,  except  for  3  Ancestry.com  members,  none  of  the  surnames  in  my  ancestry  appear  in  the  surname  chains  in  their  pedigree  charts.

I  thought  about  this  for  a  year  or  so.

And  then  it  dawned  on  me.

Adultery.

Some  of  the  ladies  among  my  ancestors  [at  least  on  the  Eitelman  side,  right,  Eitelman  family  members? ;-)],  or  among  the  98%ers'  ancestors,  were  fibbing  when  they  told  their  hubbies   that  the  Fuller  Brush  man  only  left  a  few  new  brooms  behind.     And  their  hubbies  weren't  quite  as  prolific  as  they  thought.



2 comments:

  1. Hey Uncle Pete. I've always thought those DNA tests looked interesting and have wanted to take one myself. As for the issue of unfamiliar surnames, I would think that the more likely explanation would be that they are missing branches of our family tree.since the farther you go back, the more missing relatives there are, it makes sense that there would be many surnames in our history whom we are unaware of.
    --Phil

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  2. Well, first some of the non-98%ers were African Americans whose ancestors had been slaves who had engaged in sex with their owner, either Mr. or Mrs. Johannes Snapp -- more likely the former. So, adultery did occur. This we know for sure. You probably have several thousand African American distant cousins walking around in the United States, as a consequence. The African American cousin who proved this was the last of a male line which took the name "Snapp'" as the family surname to memorialize the relationship. The DNA connection to him verified by our mutual DNA tests makes that one a "lock."

    The thing which shakes you up about the 98%ers is that several of them have gone way, way past where I went, and there's still no surname matrixing. There's enough of them in my 98%er list so that you would have thought ONE of them would name a shared ancestor.

    In fact, three of the 98%ers contacted me, despite very minimal pedigree charting, because the common ancestor was so close in on my pedigree chart -- as the common ancestor should be, for a 98%er -- that they could explain the relationship to me in e-mail or the telephone.

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