My Birthday Present is a DNA Test!

[terialka]

I would like to do the same, but meanwhile:

In the forum is some member of last name Walls???

to advance something

[gilmore]

Actually, the genealogical DNA tests Colonel McNeal is talking about don't show specific relationships to individuals in the past, unless you have their DNA (hair, blood, bones, etc.). It still wouldn't show the specific 'family tree', just whether you're related.

For example, the Y-chromosome DNA test looks at the paternal (father's) bloodline. It can show whether the two tested males are related or not.
....

Not exactly.

Y DNA testing does show if there is a relationship between two men and predicts an estimate as to how close that relationship is, based on the probability of the number of mutations, and thus the number of generations from their most common ancestor.

So, if one of the men has a paper trail of documented evidence tracing his ancestry to, say, one of William the Conqueror's knights, and the other man and he share a common ancestor more recent than than, it can show the probability of descent from the Norman knight for the man without the paper trail. Sometimes these are very high levels of probability, sometimes not so much.

For more info, see the FAQ at www.familytreedna.com

[gilmore]

No not a paternity test! My missus told me last night that she is going to give me a DNA test for my birthday in June. This is so cool! I can finally confrim my Dad's (God rest his soul) work on our Genealogy and see if we really did enter Britain with the Duke of Normandy. Or I might discover I have something more in common with the old Duke. - ha!!? (psst he was a b@st@rd)

I would be prepared for anything.

The names of the knights who invaded England with William were, for the most part, taken from a roll kept by the monks at Battle Abbey, founded by William on the site of the battle of Hastings. (In fact the high altar was said to have been on the very spot that Harald was killed.) Over the years and centuries, it became a high status thing to have been descended from one of these knights, who came to be called "Companions of the Conqueror" in genealogical circles.

However, not all who aspired to such august ancestry were indeed descendants of these knights. Undeterred, some did not let that get in the way of their pretensions. For a donation the gentle monks would add names to the Battle Roll, so that it came to be not very reliable as a historical document. There are other sources that are more reliable, albeit shorter in length.

There is also the chance of misattributed paternity, which, though only 3.7-4% (or about 1 in 25) in the UK and the USA, has a cumulative probability over the generations. I have a formula somewhere for determining its likelihood over a given number of generations. As I recall, it exceeds 50% around 20 generations, or approximately 500-600 years or so. That is, before 1500 CE or so, results may be more likely to be unreliable than not.

[macneighill]

I participated in my my clan DNA study with Family Tree. I now know more about my origins from 10,000 years ago than I know 5 generations back!

LOL . . me too .

My family has been tracing our lineage for quite a many years. We've only made it back to my 3rd Great Grandfather. Well, confirmed that is. We have information that goes a little further back but, we have nothing to support it, other than the documentation we have. The reason we haven't "went with it" is because, there is some information that is conflicting with the documentation we have.

All we know is, our family is of Scots-Irish decent and, moved here sometime around the late 1600's to early 1700's. And, when I received the results from my 37 marker DNA test with FamilyTree DNA . . it didn't really tell a whole lot more than what we already knew. I did have a handful of exact matches (mostly from England, Ireland and Spain . . go figure). However, my particular haplogroup is just a tad bit broad and, pretty much covers just about anywhere in Europe, mainly focusing on an area that reaches from Spain to the British Isles (which doesn't really tell us much ). I hope to order a "Deep Clade" test sometime soon, to determine my subclade assignment, to give us a little more specific region.

[EagleJCS]

I didn't want to get too detailed and generalized a great deal. That's why I suggested looking it up if she wanted to know more.

... Now back to your regular thread ...

[The Barry]

Wow, from the title of this thread, I didn't think that it would be such a happy train of thought!

I must be a pessimist.

[gilmore]

...
All we know is, our family is of Scots-Irish decent and, moved here sometime around the late 1600's to early 1700's. And, when I received the results from my 37 marker DNA test with FamilyTree DNA . . it didn't really tell a whole lot more than what we already knew. I did have a handful of exact matches (mostly from England, Ireland and Spain . . go figure). However, my particular haplogroup is just a tad bit broad and, pretty much covers just about anywhere in Europe, mainly focusing on an area that reaches from Spain to the British Isles (which doesn't really tell us much ). I hope to order a "Deep Clade" test sometime soon, to determine my subclade assignment, to give us a little more specific region.

Have you thought of upgrading to a 67 maker Y DNA test? If you have several exact 37/37 matches, that will winnow them down further and tell you more.