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.
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.
ReplyDelete--Phil
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."
ReplyDeleteThe 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.