See below for comments: From: Norman Kincaide To: kincaid@rootsweb.com Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 9:27 AM Subject: Re: [KINCAID] common ancestor question "Don, I think Family Tree DNA's explanation of this is severely misleading. It is not clear to me when I go to the refinement process what I am actually measuring, i.e. if you have the information, plug that number in. Does that mean you plug in the number of generations you think you might find the common ancestor absent a paper trail?" It means to put in the number of generations you know for sure through paper trails that you do not have a common ancestor with the person you are comparing to at the time. Thus you should not put anything in the box if the paper trails prove you have a common ancestor with the person with whom you are comparing your results. Don " I guess what I am getting at here is, how do we reconcile definite paper trail evidence with a divergence in DNA evidence, that is mutations away from or back to the common ancestor value for the samples I listed." To answer your last question above, I believe you would need to test descendants of those ancestors in between yourself and the person you have a divergence with if you want to find when the mutations occurred. Perhaps Sue will give a fuller answer to your last question. Don

I have never paid much attention to the statistical tools given by FTDNA, etc. They really don't help much as you can't prove anything with them. Simply look to your exact and really close matches and use that as a guide to where to focus your research. Peter ----- Original Message ----- From: Don W. Kincaid To: kincaid@rootsweb.com Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 1:57 PM Subject: Re: [KINCAID] common ancestor question See below for comments: From: Norman Kincaide To: kincaid@rootsweb.com Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 9:27 AM Subject: Re: [KINCAID] common ancestor question "Don, I think Family Tree DNA's explanation of this is severely misleading. It is not clear to me when I go to the refinement process what I am actually measuring, i.e. if you have the information, plug that number in. Does that mean you plug in the number of generations you think you might find the common ancestor absent a paper trail?" It means to put in the number of generations you know for sure through paper trails that you do not have a common ancestor with the person you are comparing to at the time. Thus you should not put anything in the box if the paper trails prove you have a common ancestor with the person with whom you are comparing your results. Don " I guess what I am getting at here is, how do we reconcile definite paper trail evidence with a divergence in DNA evidence, that is mutations away from or back to the common ancestor value for the samples I listed." To answer your last question above, I believe you would need to test descendants of those ancestors in between yourself and the person you have a divergence with if you want to find when the mutations occurred. Perhaps Sue will give a fuller answer to your last question. Don To see the Kincaid of all spellings DNA chart in Excel: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~adgedge/Research/April%202004/Kincaid%20%20DNA.xls ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to KINCAID-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message