On Fri, May 8, 2009 8:52 am, D.L. MacLaughlan-Dumes wrote: > > On May 7, 2009, at 6:42 PM, [email protected] wrote: > >> With a surname of Urspruch or Kuhnhenn do you really need a DNA >> test? I >> mean really, what's the probability of anyone else on the planet >> having >> that surname who isn't related in some way? Unless you're looking to >> exclude adoptees. > > If an uncommon surname is derived from a place name, for instance, you > could have unrelated descendants of that region who share it. Not from I didn't say you couldn't be unrelated, just that the probability is very low with such rare surnames. > Hesse but it's an illustrative example: my husband's surname was > Dumesh in the Russian Empire (now Dumes). He discovered a Dumesh > individual whose great-grandfather lived next door to his own great- > grandfather in the same tiny village, shared the same surname, both > enumerated in the 1897 census. He and the supposed cousin took a DNA > test via FTDNA. The results showed that they were from completely > different haplogroups, or genetic groups, and their lines couldn't Unusual, but perhaps there was an adoption somewhere in there. I would expect people with surnames from a tiny hamlet to be in different haplogroups. Patronymic societies being the exception. Many Scandinavian areas would add a farmname to the name and this would change if you changed farms. Perhaps this was done in Russia also. Not so much in Hesse. Although not unknown in Hesse. Husbands have been known to take a wife's surname to claim the inheritance of a wife. > A little closer to home, my Jatho ancestors lived in both Hesse and > Hannover. Jatho is a rare surname. There are at least two families > with this surname in the same small farming town who can't be > connected by paperwork going back nearly 400 years. They appear to be > separate, though if we could find a descendant from the other family I would probably not make that conclusion. If you had six hundred years then I would agree, but four hundred just isn't long enough to exclude them as family. Not without proof. > it might be revealing to see whether our DNA connects us further back > in time. I'm not one hundred percent behind the idea of linking via DNA. I think it has more limits than what people suppose. I'm not entirely sure we're at that point where we can be so certain of our skill at interpreting DNA. It certainly has it's uses. DNA tests do not analyze the entire string, only the portions that are "believed" to be the most relevant. There are likely mechanisms in DNA that we still don't understand. The fact that cloning is so hard is a testimonial to that lack of understanding. Not to mention the whole tin-foil hat, creepy government possible abuses, and just plain creepiness of having your DNA fingerprint stored in some massive worldwide database aspect. But then I get a creepy feeling driving past those traffic cameras. It's got 1984 written all over it. Brian