Linda, I agree with Rita. Thank you for all of your knowledge that you have shared with all of us these past few years. I have a question for you about using DNA testing to prove relationships. I have spent years trying to prove who my maternal grandfather's father was. I found a man that I suspect was his father and need to prove it. This man never married my grandfather's mother (not unusual I guess), but he later married two other women. One of whom had a son with him. This son had two daughters who are still living, as is my mother (age 96). Can I use DNA testing, such as "23andme" to prove that they are related? Thanks so much for all of your help to others. Pat Robinson -----Original Message----- From: Rita Holmes <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, May 31, 2010 9:29 pm Subject: Re: [S-I] DNA Lessons Learned -- Brown & Knox Thank you, Linda. You have so much knowledge on every subject. We are ucky to have you in our corner. Rita -----Original Message----- ------------------------------ o unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the uotes in the subject and the body of the message ------------------------------- o unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the uotes in the subject and the body of the message ------------------------------ o unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the uotes in the subject and the body of the message ------------------------------ o unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] ith the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of he message

Hi Pat, I agree with Joan -- that you can try autosomal testing. Because he is your maternal paternal ancestry, you don't have his Y chromo. If you have a brother or uncle that is his direct male descendent and you can find one from one of his other relationships to compare, that could work. Ditto if it was all female line, but it's not. Everytime an egg is fertilized, half the future person's genes come from the father and half from the mother. So your mother has a lot more of his genes than you do. So I'd try to have her tested and compared with another descendent. If you have a sibling, he/she probably inherited different DNA from him than you did. So he/she would have strands that match the man's other descendents that you don't have. There's a chance that they inherited different genes altogether or that it recombined. We inherit segments of genes and it is these segments that 23andme compares, as I understand it. So there is an If factor here. But you should have some segments in common this close in, I would think. Of course you'd also want to do some genealogy, if you haven't, so you can eliminate a 'false positive' -- if finding out that another generation or so back, there is another relationship that could account for matching segments. My personal opinion is that this is all rather 'fuzzy'. My ancestors were living in the same areas of Scotland, for example, with everyone else's ancestors for probably thousands of years. We are ALL related, multiple times, but of course we cannot prove that with genealogy. But I gather the closer in relationships are where the longer segments are matching.....Or I am completely wrong and someone will correct me. I am still learning and the people involved with this would be horrified to hear that I dared to open my mouth on the subject as their opinions of me are correct: I don't know what I'm talking about. I would also suggest if you pursue this, trying to find an expert to help in the analysis. www.isogg.org has some, or troll on the various lists: dna-newbie and dna-genealogy to see if you can get some help. I'm lucky since I got a match with a knowledgable person, so I am just going to relax on this one. The other problem with the DNA genealogy thing is that we are so near the 'bleeding edge' of research that new discoveries make everything obsolete very quickly, so like me, giving the 'old' name for Thomas Jefferson's haplogroup -- you obsolete fast unless you put a lot of effort into keeping up. There's the joke about it: "Poof! You're Irish!" where based on your Y chromosome you get a new ethnicity. The poofs keep happening over and over, it seems <grin>. We used to believe that humans and Neanderthals never interbred. Now they say they did. That explains some of the guys I used to date in high school and college. Not that you can't make a discovery that turns your redwood sized family tree into a small bush.... Linda Merle ----- Original Message ----- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, June 1, 2010 8:16:52 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [S-I] DNA Lessons Learned -- Linda, I agree with Rita. Thank you for all of your knowledge that you have shared with all of us these past few years. I have a question for you about using DNA testing to prove relationships. I have spent years trying to prove who my maternal grandfather's father was. I found a man that I suspect was his father and need to prove it. This man never married my grandfather's mother (not unusual I guess), but he later married two other women. One of whom had a son with him. This son had two daughters who are still living, as is my mother (age 96). Can I use DNA testing, such as "23andme" to prove that they are related? Thanks so much for all of your help to others. Pat Robinson -----Original Message----- From: Rita Holmes <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, May 31, 2010 9:29 pm Subject: Re: [S-I] DNA Lessons Learned -- Brown & Knox Thank you, Linda. You have so much knowledge on every subject. We are ucky to have you in our corner. Rita -----Original Message----- ------------------------------ o unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the uotes in the subject and the body of the message ------------------------------- o unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the uotes in the subject and the body of the message ------------------------------ o unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the uotes in the subject and the body of the message ------------------------------ o unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] ith the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of he message ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message