Why would knowing that all Davenports stem from a single male ancestor take ANY of the fun out of genealogy? I think that would add tremendously to it. We still won't know who that ancestor is, and so we still have to trace each line back to the first male Davenport. More than likely, there will be clusters, but they won't all be the same. I'd be surprised if the southern Davenports and the New England descendants of Rev. John Davenport are from the same male progenitor. After all, Davenport (Devenport) is a large city in England, and so I suspect that many from that city, when surnames came into style, adopted that surname. It wouldn't be surprising if there were only 2 or 3 different Ys, though. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 7:16 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [DAVENPORT] Y DNA Testing In a message dated 1/16/2003 9:46:29 AM Eastern Standard Time, [email protected] writes: > But, wouldn't it take away all the fun of > genealogy? > > Terri and others, As I mentioned before, yes, IF all Davenports in the U.S. are perfect matches for each other the fun, challenge, rewards of research would be taken away. But IF they are NOT matches, then it will provide guidance on which lines it is "probably" not likely you will see a return for your genealogy efforts. If you are stuck at a brickwall in the 1700s and spend a great deal of time searching for all records for a particular line "X" of Davenports, and as a result of DNA testing of several representatives of that "X" line and several representatives of your "Y" line, it is determined that you probably have no common ancestor after 1400, then for my money.... All your research efforts on "X" Davenport lines might just have well been spent on a Jones family, in my view. And that is not my definition of "fun" and I would not be "LOL", but "COL" (been there on my Wallers, done that). As I mentioned, that is what happened to one particular Hill family. With respect to Virginia Davenports I think the efforts would be extremely beneficial. Doc and others have neatly separated individual family lines, and (if memory serves) speculated that there may not be/probably isn't a relationship in the U.S. at least. Again, DNA could be used to either prove or disprove this theory. I must confess that I have a strong bias towards everyone being related on surnames with relatively low frequency of occurance. However, our Shelton DNA project would completely support Doc's position on the likely separateness of the early colonial Virginia Davenports, and he has looked at them as closely as the long-time Shelton researchers have studied our lines. We have I think four separate Shelton families in early colonial Virginia. They, like the Davenports, are living in fairly close proximity on the Chesapeake. Then, of all things, branches of three of these lines move into what is now Pittsylvania Co., though again living in their own enclaves. The DNA studies show that they really weren't all the issue of the proverbial "three brothers" (in fact the Shelton DNA study suggests alot of "nonpaternal" events :-). Janet ______________________________