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.  All individuals who are knowledgeable about DNA genealogy know that there is a statistical aspect to this that make absolute certainty impossible.  One can always concoct scenarios in which some series of unlikely events has caused evidence to lead to incorrect conclusions, and most of us try to follow a sort of "let's not be ridiculous" principle.  After all, how do we know that one of your parents wasn't formerly a foreign spy with a falsified identity, and that foreign agents didn't also use their contacts at the DNA companies to falsify your DNA report to keep you from finding out? (Don't worry, I won't report you.)  If two individuals with the same surname have closely matching DNA suggesting a common ancestry after the surname forming period, then it is much more likely than not that their common ancestor also had that surname.  If they have strong paper trails identifying a common ancestor (and I mean genuinely strong, not just what an amateur might think is strong), then it is much more likely than not that their genetic ancestry matches their paper trail ancestry.  If their are many such individuals descended in a wide variety of ways from the common ancestor, then the evidence is nearly certain (with the possible, but still unlikely, exception of the most recent common ancestor's wife having an affair with another man).  Your insistence on autosomal DNA makes me wonder why you are even concerned about medieval genealogy, for which autosomal DNA currently has virtually no use (a situation that will continue unless we start digging up mass quantities of medieval corpses and testing them, and even then would be largely hit or miss). Stewart Baldwin