Quote Originally Posted by Alan H View Post
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Truth is, IMHO...and this is just my humble opinion, I'll tell you in a few minutes why my humble opinion might be worth listening to....but my opinion is that DNA testing should be corroborated with "paper trails". Just because you share a certain number of polymorphisms with 100 people who have the last name "MacDonald" does not mean that you are particularly closely related to any of them. Yes, the general rule holds....as a GENERAL RULE, the more polymorphisms you share with another person, the more likely you are to be closely related. However, if you are keen to use DNA testing to corroborate lineage to a specific Highland Clan, I think you're spending money on an exercise in futility.

The Clans in the Highlands intermarried for generations. They fathered children by each others women, both legitimately and illegitimately, for generations upon generations. Surnames got changed, dropped, assumed assumed for all sorts of reasons. Many people who came across to the Colonies took on slightly different names, as part of their "New Start".

I would be VERY careful about claiming too much regarding your supposed Highland Heritage based on DNA testing. Understand it well from both the technological standpoint, and also the historical standpoint.

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While I agree that DNA testing is best used when it supplements the paper trail, it's obvious that YDNA testing can show ancestry linking a man to some one whose other descendents are part of Clan X---or who was himself a clansman.

We are beginning to confuse biology with culture. DNA can outline the former quite well. The latter is a trickier thing. What a clan is---or more acurately, what a clan was---is determined societally, not gentically, though of course genetics play a part. (And we won't even get into clan associations.)

Of course there is a great difference between saying "My YDNA shows that I am a direct patrilineal descendant of Somerled, (even though we are pure Italian as far back as we can trace it)" and saying "I am a member of the clan MacDonald."