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General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: coombs on Monday 22 August 22 22:19 BST (UK)
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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.
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You're right, there's no point to it.
It's an interesting hobby though.
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"simply family history"
That's the fun part. The bloodlines are just glorified animal husbandry. I found a great newspaper article yesterday - how William Stewart escaped from Savannah at the outset of the Civil War and made his way back to Maine while the Confederate Army was trying to apprehend him. And he got his wife and young children out, too. It was a great story even if he wasn't a blood relative but merely the husband of a first cousin three times removed.
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Its a tale I read but fits this thread .
A local 'well to do' snobby woman on the village parish church flower arranging committee, she had been doing her paternal family ancestry that she bragged her father could trace his ancestors back to Kings & Queens of England and trying to prove her issue ! she did the ancestry DNA. To be brief: She got a result! a half brother taxi driver in New York who was of African /West Indian ancestry and in WW2 the USA sent troops over to the UK -one being the taxi drivers father billeted near this woman's village in the mid 1940's before D-Day and the woman's thought real father was fighting overseas.
The woman resigned from the flower arranging committee soon after without giving a reason.
;D ;D ;D
P.S Some mixed race babies are born with white skin - this lady must have been one. ???
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I think the people who bring up a child have a big influence on their lives .
Family trees have room for legal parents and biological parents .
If DNA throws up a non parental event you can add the biological parents to the known tree as alternative.it does not alter years of research .
The trees of royals and peers are well researched but many contain biological impossibilities ( kings away at war when children conceived, etc) .
Many people who have eagerly traced their ancestors to royalty have not taken illegitimacy into account +...may not have the correct biological lineage..
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The trees of the royals may well be researched but I’m given to understand that extra-marital relationships in their lines make them not quite so thoroughbred as they might like us to believe!
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I think the people who bring up a child have a big influence on their lives .
Family trees have room for legal parents and biological parents .
If DNA throws up a non parental event you can add the biological parents to the known tree as alternative.it does not alter years of research .
The trees of royals and peers are well researched but many contain biological impossibilities ( kings away at war when children conceived, etc) .
Many people who have eagerly traced their ancestors to royalty have not taken illegitimacy into account +...may not have the correct biological lineage..
If they shared the same surname as the assumed father, as they would usually do, then that is a great qualification to see the assumed father as family.
Bridal pregnancy in our ancestors days was very common. About a 3rd of all brides in the 1700s were pregnant, and the number increased in the 1800s a bit. I would say 97% of the time the man the women married was the father of the baby, but there will always be a few exceptions. In the case of the woman I mentioned in my first post, well the man she married while pregnant lived in the same neighbourhood, and he was a weaver, like her father was. They married by banns 7 months into her pregnancy, so they may not have been able to afford to marry sooner, or they wanted to get round to it before the baby came. Or they had the famous trial marriage and fertility guarantee. Baby was christened as the daughter of the man she married. 99% certainty. The 1% room for doubt (or 0.01%) is going to be there in any case of parentage, so there is no point worrying. Take it that he was the biological father as records say.
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The 1% room for doubt (or 0.01%) is going to be there in any case of parentage, so there is no point worrying. Take it that he was the biological father as records say.
But you were the one doing the worrying!
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The 1% room for doubt (or 0.01%) is going to be there in any case of parentage, so there is no point worrying. Take it that he was the biological father as records say.
But you were the one doing the worrying!
Yes but I can still decide to stop worrying. :-\
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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.
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.
Likewise, if your ancestor was fathered by an agricultural labourer, but raised by a blacksmith and adopted his trade, that would have a massive ripple effect on all of his descendants.
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For me the point is that I enjoy the research, that is the point, a hobby for me.
If there turns out to be a non paternal event along the way I'd like to know, I'd add that to my research. I see the research as more than just where my genes are from. I see us all as a combination of nature and nurture so someone who raised an ancestor did have an impact on their life.
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I would be more worried if I found out that my 6 x great Grandfather was not related to me in a DNA test as it would potentially mean a complete rehash of the whole tree - not that I can go back that far unfortunately - my GGG grandfather was born in Ireland around 1785 and there are no online records before 1800 in Ireland (or at least the part I would be interested in) - sob!
Mind you I understand the doubt - I must do a DNA test just to see if my parents held anything back from me - or to confirm the Hospital did not mix up babies back in 1959!
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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.
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Yes, very true. Easy to assume the worst with DNA testing, but once you know how it is more and more likely to descend from someone by blood but not inherit any DNA from them the further back you go. Say for instance someone born 1970 and someone born 1755. I say the 1755 person is probably a 5xgreat grandfather of the person born 1970 if the link is autosomal (not either the paternal line or maternal line), so say the 1755 man to the 1970s man is his mothers, mothers, mothers, fathers mothers mothers father's father. Very unlikely you will have shared DNA with an ancestor that far back, on an autosomal line.
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Coombs as someone who has a NPE in my ancestry. Who cares? I knew about it, at grandparent level, and did my dna because I’m a sticky beak and wanted to know who did it.
Let me tell you, the blood line did not know where their beds were. So many people I contacted had an NPE in their line. It becomes a discussion of nature versus nurture. In my case nurture was far more stable.
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Yes, Nanna52, who cares? I would like to know who my great grandfather was, but my grandfather's mother did not want us to know, or the info would have come out somewhere I feel sure! I trust that she knew!
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You're right, there's no point to it.
It's an interesting hobby though.
I wouldn't go to that extreme...
It's a bit like doing a jigsaw you want to frame & finding a crucial bit is missing, except, there's more chance of finding that missing piece of your family history via DNA than finding the missing jigsaw piece :P
It's a hobby as well as an interest but always 'expect to find the unexpected' & finding unexpected things makes it more enjoyable & interesting...well...as long as it doesn't affect the 'here & now'!
My most enjoyable part of research & DNA matches is finding 'putative' fathers' names on marriage certs. etc. of illegitimate children in my tree & finding 'unknowns' with DNA matches which I eagerly await correspondence from but I don't worry or lose sleep wondering, I get frustrated they don't reply ;D
Annie
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I initially started my research because I wanted to discover who in my family had died in a war zone during the Great War. I discovered it had been my maternal grandmother's oldest brother.
Once I had made the discovery I didn't stop there because I found some lines passed down ailments, such as cancer, diabetes and seemingly arthritis, thus I wanted to confirm my suspicions and delved further back looking for death certs.
I think I probably fit into both categories of :-
(a) the hobby of family history, and
(b) genealogy = studying and tracing lines of descent.
I am not planning to have my DNA tested
P.S. there is no better thrill than obtaining a hard to find document, that causes you to dance around the room with glee.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Well, this is not actually the case though. If a father knowingly or unknowingly brought up a child as their own, going out to work and bringing back money to cloth and feed, perhaps educate or pay for apprenticeship or more, then surely that parenting, could have made the difference between that person even living to adulthood and whether that person prospered in the future. Whereas the supposed biological father never did anything to that person's continuing existence or future prosperity.
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.
In the end, when you go back to your great great great great grandparents, you will entirely have lost some DNA of some people in that generation. And as you back into further generations, the number of genealogical ancestors you have no DNA connection to increases dramatically. So I think we need to accept that the concept of genealogy includes the likelyhood that a certain percentage of your ancestors will be NPEs. But from what I posted above, that doesn't invalidate their connection to you.
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I am entirely with melba here ... a person's identity isn't merely the product of the sperm and egg that fused to create them in embryo form. It derives from their whole life experience; and the people who they identified as "mummy" and "daddy" (or "uncle John", or whoever) in the formative years of their childhood, who provided them with a home environment (whether stable or otherwise) and were always (or sometimes) there for them when needed play an immensely important part in turning them into who they were.
To ignore them is to miss out on a large part of the story.
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I have just messaged a distant match on one family line who is descended from my mother's great aunt
All our research matches til we get to her great great grandfather ( his 5th great grandfather ) we have same name but I have 1789 as birth year he has 1791
The tree is closed but he says he's traced back to edward III
I have come to a dead end mine was a base born son of a single lady only have 1 more generation .
I expect they won't share their tree if there is a chance my facts are more accurate and they will lose royal collection
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I expect they won't share their tree if there is a chance my facts are more accurate and they will lose royal collection
Isn't that always the way?
I really can't understand why people are so keen to find royalty in their tree, though. Where's the fun in that? All the research has been done ages ago by someone else, and there's nothing to do except copy their results.
I'm having FAR more fun chasing elusive ancestors around the gutters of Victorian London ... and learning some amazing things along the way!
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I agree JB
Far more interesting to know that a base born son of a single mother became a master mariner without the help of a royal sponsor !
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Generally there are more records to be found related to royalty as they left more of a paper trail. Think that’s the main reason it can be quite fruitful to be able to tap into those sorts of families.
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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.
Well, this is not actually the case though. If a father knowingly or unknowingly brought up a child as their own, going out to work and bringing back money to cloth and feed, perhaps educate or pay for apprenticeship or more, then surely that parenting, could have made the difference between that person even living to adulthood and whether that person prospered in the future. Whereas the supposed biological father never did anything to that person's continuing existence or future prosperity.
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.
In the end, when you go back to your great great great great grandparents, you will entirely have lost some DNA of some people in that generation. And as you back into further generations, the number of genealogical ancestors you have no DNA connection to increases dramatically. So I think we need to accept that the concept of genealogy includes the likelyhood that a certain percentage of your ancestors will be NPEs. But from what I posted above, that doesn't invalidate their connection to you.
NPE's are not evenly spread I don't think, it can depend on several factors. If the husband was in a job which involved him working away a lot, or was in the army, then the NPE rate can increase. It is averaged about 2 to 3% of your ancestors will be NPE's so that sounds about right. So it is still exceptional. 2 to 3% out of 100%.
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I feel this thread has been viewed as a bit controversial owing to the lack of replies in it's existence of over 6 months.
Posted 22 Aug 2022
Views (when I last looked) 14,570
Replies 33 (including 6 of your own) by 19 posters
This is a 'Genealogy' site where most of us are very interested in our Family History/Genealogy regardless whether there are NPEs/Adoptions or children being passed off as their g/parents' children etc.
"Shall I just use tracing my ancestry as simply family history instead of hoping I blood descend from ancestors"...
It's a decision you have to make for yourself as we all have our own thoughts on who/what we include in our 'Family' trees.
Personally, I have a habit of investigating any/every avenue I can in my 'Family History' story because it interests me but because I'm hooked I don't think I'd be 'detaching' anyone I found to be a NPE or otherwise...I'd be more inclined to try & find where the connection really was although via DNA there's a chance of finding who the biological parent was.
Lighten up...as the lack of responses from 14.570 viewers seem to agree :D
Annie