Paper trails and decades of research, what is the point?

[andrewalston]

What about a scenario where a non-blood ancestor decides to move his family to a completely different country? In that case, even if one or more of his children are not biologically his, his decision had a profound affect on all of their descendants.

Yes, as in the case of my brother. He married a divorcee with two children. In order to emigrate to Australia, he had to legally adopt them.

In this case, being "modern" times, there is a paper trail, but it is not an obvious one. When divorce was beyond reach of common folk, would arriving in Australia with "the other woman" and her children" have been much different?

To confuse future genealogists, the elder of those two has a child born in Canberra, but baptised in Lancashire, and recently married in France.

[dobfarm]

I think genealogy perhaps is not for me in many ways if DNA testing is revealing family secrets long thought to have been buried forever, and no doubt if I did DNA, it would reveal some many not be my blood ancestors?

I know people will disagree strongly but I always feel if an ancestor is not a blood ancestor, then they are not a real ancestor, as they are not actually responsible for my existence, or anyone else thought to have descended from them.

Shall I just use tracing my ancestry as simply family history instead of hoping I blood descend from ancestors, some of whom I have become attached to for some odd reason. Uncertainty is something I seem hard to accept, even if it is quite small. Since my father died, it has worsened the possibility of my tree having NPE's.

For instance I have a male ancestor who wed a female ancestor when she was 7 months pregnant, and the baby was born 2 months after the wedding (and was christened in the same parish, as the daughter of the man her mother married and the mother herself), in a part of London that was still half rural at the time, and the man came from an area in the country I grew up in but not where my parents are from, so one of my parents has ancestors from the area she moved to, so finding this link made me feel at home, as my family. Going back to the "shotgun" wedding, the baby born during the parents marriage was my direct ancestor, and while it is highly likely the recorded father was the real father, there is always the 1% chance of doubt as with any paternity in a family tree. That 1% doubt is what can niggle away at times, even if the marriage took place over 200 years ago, so the ancestral link is several generations back, so quite a negligible amount of ancestry from the area I grew up in, as it was a 6xgreat grandfather.

I know there are people who take family history very seriously! paying out money to so called experts to find and try to prove their family tree. At the end of the day pre 1837 records can be very iffy, like parish register events to prove and is down to luck if you find things like a good grave head or flat stone epitaph MI's in a graveyard or cemetery. Its all a bit of fun, not to be taken that serious and it can be the enjoyment in researchng archives or searching graveyards. Those early records first names used just a few common names like William, John, Thomas , Joseph or Elizabeth, Mary, Sarah, Ann etc that made alot of parish registers with same name entries.

The female -mother to daughter line is the only true line back as the paternal line even with DNA info can be hard to prove in some cases.. Thus not to be taken too seriously but for fun ! to see how far records of the day (Century) take you back.

There is a member of Rootschat researching George Hood of Selby North Yorkshire -. Basically  George Hood born around 1786 a cooper by trade, turned up in Selby around 1812, married a local girl from Selby in 1815, this member has done a lot of research on George Hood on the Rootschat forum boards but still he's unable to find out where George Hood came from or his parish of birth.

[a chesters]

It is possible to be descended from someone yet share no DNA with them.  The further back the greater the chance that has happened.  It is due to the randomness of inheritance.  Although we get 50% of our DNA from each parent it is random so not necessarily exactly 25% from each grandparent.  If this is multiplied back through multiple generations it leads to the chance of no shared DNA.

For 3x grt grandparents the chance of not inheriting any DNA from them is only 0.01% but by the time you get to 6xgrt grandparent, there is a 17.76% chance, by 10x grt grandparent the chance is 57.53%.  This also means for many ancestors you may inherit less than you'd have thought from a specific ancestor.

That comment brought to mind some work I did as a "young" person studying agriculture in the late 1950's. We were doing some genetics, and followed the Mendel research ideas. Gregor Mendel being a monk who worked in the monastery garden.

The basic Mendelian theory was that if one has a black parent, and a white parent, of what did not matter, the resultant offspring was: one black,one white and two khaki. Thus there would be a complete mix up of the genetics.

[Mike in Cumbria]

It is possible to be descended from someone yet share no DNA with them.  The further back the greater the chance that has happened.  It is due to the randomness of inheritance.  Although we get 50% of our DNA from each parent it is random so not necessarily exactly 25% from each grandparent.  If this is multiplied back through multiple generations it leads to the chance of no shared DNA.

For 3x grt grandparents the chance of not inheriting any DNA from them is only 0.01% but by the time you get to 6xgrt grandparent, there is a 17.76% chance, by 10x grt grandparent the chance is 57.53%.  This also means for many ancestors you may inherit less than you'd have thought from a specific ancestor.

That comment brought to mind some work I did as a "young" person studying agriculture in the late 1950's. We were doing some genetics, and followed the Mendel research ideas. Gregor Mendel being a monk who worked in the monastery garden.

The basic Mendelian theory was that if one has a black parent, and a white parent, of what did not matter, the resultant offspring was: one black,one white and two khaki. Thus there would be a complete mix up of the genetics.

You might be mis-remembering. Mendelian genetics wouldn't give that result, even if skin colour was regulated by a single gene (which it isn't anyway).

[Guy Etchells]

DNA is simply another tool in the toolbox of family history, but it shouls be remembered that we do not carry the DNA of all our ancestors in our DNA (or perhaps I should write we do not carry, at this time, traceable amounts of DNA of all of our ancestors in our DNA).
Who knows what the future may hold and my view is we owe it to our descendants to take a DNA test because it will be too late for them after we have died. Others may of course disagree, but this is how I feel.
As to how much of our ancestors DNA we have I suggest reading this :- http://www.rootschat.com/links/01ru1/
Cheers
Guy

[jbml]

If the person a child grows up with turns out not to be their biological father ... he's still the man who provided for them, devoted years of his life to them, and shaped and influenced who they are in many ways. I think it's fair to say that he, rather than the true biological father, did far more to shape "who they are" ... and the question of "where he got it from" still bears on them and their life ... and therefore through the children whom they in turn brought up down to yourself it has a bearing, however indirect, on you and your life.

I agree this is not really helpful if your motive for family history research is to prove that you, like me, are a 47th generation descendant of Odin (actually, I don't believe a word of it ... but there was for many years an online family tree from someone with whom I share some common ancestors who traced them back to Norse royalty, which inplies the descent from Odin. However, his 13th - 15th century research was woeful. To describe it as fanciful would be a kindness!) On the other hand if, like me, you are wanting to tell the stories of your forebears and THEIR forebears before them ... then I think you need to avoid thinking in terms of neat nucleated families which are "marred" by NPEs. You ask the question "who are the people who shaped my life?" ... and then "who shaped THEIR lives?" ... and so on back through the generations.

[coombs]

If the person a child grows up with turns out not to be their biological father ... he's still the man who provided for them, devoted years of his life to them, and shaped and influenced who they are in many ways. I think it's fair to say that he, rather than the true biological father, did far more to shape "who they are" ... and the question of "where he got it from" still bears on them and their life ... and therefore through the children whom they in turn brought up down to yourself it has a bearing, however indirect, on you and your life.

Also if they had the same surname as the man who raised them, such as Merrick for example. From birth, they still inherited the surname of the man that bought them up.

[Biggles50]

DNA is a double edged sword.

It can and does help solve missing parentage, unknown xGrandparent etc.

But it can also present a mystery as to how am I linked to my highish cM match.

Without DNA I would not have 86 Cousins in our Family Tree.

[coombs]

The actual percentage of NPE's in our family trees is estimated at about 1 to 3%, that sounds a good figure. Any estimations of 10% is too high a percentage. There was more of a boom in NPE's during war times.