once upon a time i was chatting away about my tree that had been traced back to the year 1556 when a soldier was mailed from sweden to finland and eventually rose up in the ranks, or whatever, to become a sheriff.
well, this person laughed and scoffed, saying that considering the frequent wars finland was required to participate in - how was anyone to know exactly whose kids were whose?
i had to reluctantly agree, left it at that.
well, today this same smartass was told that he's not actually related to his "grandfather..."
Actually NO Yogi!
DNA is only accurate for about three generations, and iffy up to five generations, but that's all the further one can go with DNA as far as finding relatives goes.
However, one can follow the Y-Chromosome from self to father, to grandfather, to grandfather, etc. all the way back to Adam.
Something similar is the mtDNA which follows your mother to her mother to her mother, all the way back to Eve. But neither can tell you if you are related to your own brother and sister. Since these tests only work a single direct line.
A few places are pushing DNA tests to tell if you are part Indian or not. It is impossible to tell! Since the same combinations appear on all continents, just a little more heavily in America. Even so, you may show you have Indian Ancestry, but none of your siblings will show they are. That's a clue the tests are not all that accurate. How can you be part Indian, but not your siblings?
Beware of the Snake Oil salesmen out there telling a different story. They want you to believe, for big bucks, they can do the impossible!
the way this came about was that his cousin (i think), contacted him and he was compared to the cousin's DNA. the fake grandfather's brother featured here and so on.
i didn't get all the details, was too busy with my schadenfreude and had he not been so snarky about the issue to me, it'd not have even registered with me. as in 'whatever'.
Picture a large triangle with the point to the bottom. Let me try something here, F is Father, M is Mother.
I'm ignoring all the children, but assume each FM pair has 4 to 8 kids, hi hi...
The Y-Chromosome test only follows the Fathers on the outermost left edge of the triangle, F to F to F, etc.
The mtDNA test only follows the Mothers on the outermost right edge of the triangle, M to M to M to M, etc.
It tells nothing at all about their spouses or any of the children.
As you can see from your Father and Mother, you can learn about each of your paternal grandfathers, but nothing about your maternal grandfather.
The same holds true about your mother, you can learn who her mother was, and her mothers mother, but nothing about their husbands or children.
Even so, these two tests are the only two that have any accuracy at all back through the generations for which they have samples to go by.
The complexities of explaining DNA using a text format is next to impossible. But you can look up how it works on-line.
Then you'll understand how it cannot be used to determine much of anything after the 3rd generation.
About the best use of DNA is to see if something like a blood sample belongs to a particular person, and even then, it is not a perfect test. They consider the results accurate if it matches in something like 12 to 13 points out of several hundred.
Did you just call Pilvikki "Yogi"
If I knew anything about genetic (DNA) testing I'd be the one answering questions here instead of asking them.
I'll make the assumption that you are correct in saying only three generations can be tracked accurately. Also, it's not so hard to understand that only direct descendants can be tracked with any degree of accuracy. It's new to me to learn that only mother or only father DNA can be traced backwards, but I can buy into that for this discussion. So, then, I am asking myself why it would be difficult to ascertain true sibling relationships.
If a brother and his sibling have father genes that match as far back as three generations, could we not say they both have the same father? Knowing about the other parent doesn't seem to matter given that both siblings issued from the same father. Admittedly they could have different mothers and be half-siblings, but that does not exclude them from being related with only half the family tree known.
Sorry about that Yogi and Pil, but it really was for the both of you.
I've been doing genealogy for over 35 years. Was a volunteer in the LDS's Family History Center for over 10 years, mainly so I wouldn't have to pay to get all the microfilm reels I was after, hi hi...
As DNA became more perfected, and the cost started dropping, we also learned more about what it could and couldn't do.
Along with testing the Y-Chromosome (fathers), and mtDNA (mothers), everyone thought Autosomal DNA Testing was the cats meow so to speak. The problem here is, if you have your fathers Autosomal DNA, and a sample from each of his 12 kids, only 5 will show a possible match.
Trying to discover your ethnicity based on Autosomal DNA is only an Estimate.
If you have three different labs run the same test, you will more than likely get three different Estimates that do not agree with each other.
How they come up with saying what your nationality might be, is fairly simple.
They look at certain genetic markers, and compare them with averages taken from certain areas.
Another problem is, some folks not of that nationality at all could carry the same genetic markers.
Naturally, all the snake oil salesmen have their own algorithms they use to produce a paper to mail back to you.
If you pay for such, take it with a grain of salt, because it is only their estimated best guess, with no basis in fact.
From what I have learned about DNA testing, simply trying to see if two known first cousins are related via DNA testing, there is an 80% chance a 68 point (very expensive) DNA test will more than likely show they are not related.
How is this possible? Because not all children receive the same genetic markers from their parents.
If there is only a 20% chance of being correct with first cousins, trying to discover if your are third or fourth cousins is next to impossible at the present time.
The past couple of days I've been updating some of my wife's ancestors.
I honestly am back to her 27th great grandparents on one leg, and over her 12th great grandparents on several other legs.
Mainly because they were all from England where the records were not destroyed.
One problem in going back, you start to hit complex names, because they didn't have surnames at the time, or I guess I should say, the surname was the name of the town where you were born. So each of the kids could have a different last name if they moved around a bit. Or in the case of some, they may have a birth town, but moved and became popular or even royalty in another town, so this was appended to their name as well.
Willem Prince of Beaufort, Lord of Valois, of Avesnes. So in most genealogy work, he is shown as Willem Avesnes.
But because he was royalty in later years, his surname may be forgotten and the records show him as Willem Valois.
Women's records are always based on their current name at the time of the event.
So if Mary Smith, married John Jones first, when she married Abe Walker, the marriage certificate shows her name as Mary Jones, and if she did not remarry again, her death certificate would show her as Mary Walker.
Sometimes we never find a woman's maiden name with any certainty. Too many born in the same town on the same day!
i noticed the name discrepancy on my branches as well; 12 kids and assorted surnames. or 12 kids, all with same names. heart-breaking how many died so young....
as for girls, they didn't even record their names before the 1600's, so if you don't know that, you think there were only boys. as it was, the church records were a bit unreliable, as wooden churches had a bad habit of burning a lot, so a lot of my lot was pieced together via court records. rowdy bunch they were.
The courthouse that held all of my mom's records burned also. But she was able to get a few of them restored while her parents were still living.
I can't get very far back on my family tree, but was surprised when doing my current wife's family tree. On several legs I'm back past her 12th great grandparents, and on one leg have reached her 26th great grandparents. I have the 27th great grandparents but without solid verification on them.
If you mean 26th great grandparents, those are in the mid-1200's to early 1300's.
You can only get back that far if your ancestors have ties in England.
For many you can get all the original records, birthdates down to the day, what cemetery they are buried in, etc.
After the mid-1200's, surnames were rare, so if one was added, it was often the city in which the child was born. So if the parents moved around a lot, each child could have a different surname. Sometimes also they changed surnames as they gained titles.
The Earl of Windsor may also be the Duke of Lancaster, and the Prince of Westmoreland.
Then to complicate the matter even further. He could be Edward the 5th Earl of Windsor, Edward the 23rd Duke of Lancaster, and Edward the 34th Prince of Westmoreland, not to be confused with King Edward the 3rd, or Edward the 7th Earl of Windsor, hi hi...
Nevertheless, the English maintained excellent records and cross-references through many different sources, and ironically most of them agree with each other too.
Doing genealogy is almost like working a crossword puzzle going by the clues.
You may pick up someones wife's first name from one document, her surname from another document, and her nickname or common use name from yet another document. Cemetery records often only give the wife's married name.
Now if you really want to add a twist. Many changed or shortened their names when they moved from one area to another, and almost always when they move across an ocean. Aleavinea may become Alicea and later Alice. Willem almost always become William, and often the spelling of surnames is altered when a new language is encountered to make them easier to pronounce.
Gottliebsdotter, my take her fathers name of Johannson, which may become Johnson, or simply John.
In my own family, one of my ancestors named Gottliebe Andreas Schaumberger totally changed his name first to Franz Berg when he boarded the ship to America, then to Francis Berg when he moved further west, then to Frank Berg when he finally settled in Missouri. I know this because of our family records.
I run across genealogy files by others that show this person as three or four different individuals, and use kids that belong to someone else by the same name as their kids. This is the reason I ignore most of what people have put together when doing research. Sometimes their records may give me a possible name to search when I'm at a dead end, but I never go by what they say unless I can find verification that also cross-verifies to other records considered accurate or close to accurate.
One thing really sad I discovered when I placed my files on Ancestry dot com, is folks simply copy and paste anything and everything they can find creating hundreds of fake trees, I assume just because they are bored and want to mess people up.
You have no idea how many I've run across that have tons of children born to parents 50 to 100 years before their parents were born, hi hi... Or children born to parents that have been dead for 50 to 100 years or more.
If they find a name, let's say John Smith as an example. Any time they find someone named John Smith, they say YES that is our John Smith and add ALL the data for each John Smith as the data for their John Smith, no matter how far off base it is.
Poor John Smith! He is Black, White, Aztec, Croatian, been married 46 times, and has 215 children, and he only lived to be 30 years old, during a time span which spreads from 1326 to 1985, hi hi... And oh, his fathers, all 87 of them, were all over 400 years old when John Smith was born...
I'm not perfect either, and have found more mistakes in my files than I care to admit, but many of them came due to merges of family members that looked right, and once merged, they are almost impossible to undo.
Ironically, I found a few of my merges I thought were wrong turned out to be correct. He really did have four different wives. Or vice versa, she really did have four different husbands and reused her favorite children's names with each husband.
Genealogy makes people go bald, hi hi...
crazy relatives seem to help, people pay attention to those. still peculiar that although my very strange great aunt was married 5 X and soon remarried when one died, nobody else thought of asking how she was so unlucky as to get widowed so often...?
Not a relative but a close friend of the family, who was married 5 times also.
Interesting because only #1 and #3 died. She divorced #2.
Only about a year after marrying #4 she divorced him.
Then she remarried #2 making him husband #2 and #5, hi hi...
She had kids with him during both marriages too!
