On Friday, September 1, 2017 at 6:53:15 PM UTC+2, Stewart Baldwin wrote: > On 8/30/2017 11:36 AM, wjhonson wrote: > > > Like I said, relying on Y matches *with* a "strong paper trail" is the > > quest of fools and old sponges. > > If you have not used Autosomal DNA to even show that you are related to your own "relatives", than you need to start from scratch. > > Repeating such statements over and over again does not make them true.  > You seem to offer no justification for these statements beyond some > general concerns that maybe some combination of unlikely events has > caused the evidence to be misinterpreted.  Indeed, and to point to another problem with this logic, you can be a perfectly good genealogist without actually knowing even your own parents, so you can also be a perfectly good medieval genealogist without knowing any medieval ancestors that you have. When we work on the family tree of a spouse, or a famous person or whoever, it is not worthless genealogy just because we know we will not match the people we are studying in an autosomal test. It is also not value-less because we know it might contain mistakes. >From that perspective any family tree that POTENTIALLY contains a mistake somewhere is still a real family tree with real genealogical value. You should assume every family tree has mistakes, even after thorough autosomal testing, which is very occasionally helpful in a limited number of relationships it can help check. The aim is to find and correct them when new information including DNA is available, but you will never complete this task perfectly. Judging things as value-less unless they attain an impossible level of perfection leads to impractical logical absurdity.