Genealogy Chat

Hi Shirley, I'm not sure what you're wanting to prove by DNA testing. I get a sense that you have some question about whether the persons involved are indeed half-siblings. If that understanding is correct and what you're wanting to do is test against each other to prove or disprove the common father, I would think that any of the labs that specialize in paternity testing could do that. and I don't know about your area, but here in California there are LOTS of labs that do paternity testing. feel free to e-mail me privately if I'm still not understanding your needs -duane

Hi again Shirley, If you have not already discovered via other folks, the only DNA test that has any real meaning for family history is the Y Line, Father to Son and the Mitochondrial DNA line, from Mother to all her children but which is only passed on to future generations through her daughters. Half of your total DNA is from your father and half from your mother but it cannot be used for long term inheritance studies down a family line for the reasons explained by Leonard.

For anyone who's interested there was an article in the 'Review' section of yesterday's Mail on Sunday newspaper about DNA testing. There's a special readers' offer of £140 (usually £180 apparently) available through Oxford Ancestors on 0800 783 4943, ref. MOS1 or there is a webstite on www.oxfordancestors.com. Hope this might help someone. Carolyn

Thanks everyone for your helpful replies. Leonard's was very interesting but seemed to only go into any great depth with father/son (male line) and mother/daughter (female line) DNA testing. How about father/daughter where the father has been deceased 20+ years? There is a female half sibling and male half siblings sharing the same father only, so DNA on the female line won't work. ShirleyB

We have a Watts family reconstruction project underway at Family Tree DNA. It has so far tested about 30 individuals' Y-chromosomes and we have had some notable successes in connecting families where the paper trail of their relatedness had been lost. I am the one who originated the idea, and my original intent was merely to find out which of the American Watts families I connected to. My own Watts line has been in the Americas since at least the birth of my gg-grandfather sometime between 1795 and 1799 (and logically for some generations before that). The project has grown quite beyond my original concept; we now have in the records two men from England, and one Canadian who is first generation from England. We've also grown beyond simply Watts and have individuals living under the surname Watson and also the surname Watt. Family Tree DNA offers Y-chromosome testing of 12-loci, 27-loci, and 35-loci, but for what we're doing here, for most of us there is no reason to go to the extra expense of the higher-resolution test. 12-loci is plenty enough to confirm or deny relatedness where you already suspected it, and it's plenty enough to give directions of research where you do not expect it. This testing takes advantage of the fact that the Y-chromosome (that part of our DNA that makes us male) is exempted from the mix-and-match that occurs in the rest of our DNA during meiosis. This means that the Y-chromosome passes unchanged from father to son, and by extension that all males who are biologically, continuously male-descended from the same ancestral male will all have the same Y-chromosome. There is a slow mutation process, but over the time frames we are presently concerned with it can be all-but ignored. Relatedness can be detected over separations of thousands of years. In order for this test process to be useful, the two individuals being tested against each other must be biologically male-descended from the ancestral males that they are being chosen to represent. Adoptions or false paternities anywhere in the ancestral chain of either side will break this continuity and make the test useless. This test will not tell you the exact relationship between either your test subjects or their ancestral targets. All it will tell you is that they came from the same ancestral male. For example, in my own line, we suspected that my gg-grandfather John Watts who moved from Tennessee to Arkansas in or about 1838 was probably a brother of Josiah Watts who moved from Tennessee to Mississippi at about the same time. Locating a descendant of Josiah and testing him against myself I proved that we are perfectly matched on the Y-chromosome as tested. This does not, however prove that John and Josiah were brothers. The result would be the same if they were father and son, close cousins, uncle and nephew or several other possible permutations of relationship. Given the rest of the evidence -- that they lived in the immediate same area of Tennessee; that they were only about five years apart in age, that they appear to share family members between their households, and that they have remarkably similar choices of names for their children, we conclude what was already pretty obvious. They were most likely brothers. There is also a mitochondrial DNA that passes from mother to child without change and that is similarly powerful and similarly limited in testing lines of continuous female descent. Family reconstruction projects tend to use the Y-chromosome because in our culture the surname follows the line of male descent, and it's simply easier to identify likely candidates. As most of us know who have been following geneaology for any time, tracing back a line of female ancestry more than half a dozen generations is fiendishly difficult. I do in fact have my own mitochondrial DNA test on file (which is to say my mother's; her mother's, etc), and my first cousin's m-DNA (which is my father's mother's; her mother's etc). I get a lot of low-level matchups on my cousin's; not a single one yet on my own. hope this explanation helps, and if there are any Watts/Watt/Watson males out there who would like to join into a pretty well-established group, we'd be pleased to hear from you. by-the way; I have no financial interest in FTDNA, only a strong intellectual interest in the process. I know that Oxford Labs does essentially the same testing that FTDNA does, and there is at least one other lab based in Utah and associated with the LDS Church (not to say affiliated; I frankly don't know). If you are a Watts male and have your numbers from one of those labs & would like to share them with us, I'd be glad to check for matchups & let you know what I find. I do serve as the volunteer coordinator of the Watts family project. In practical terms that means that if you go onto the FTDNA website and send a request to join the Watts group, it will send an e-mail to me. And it means that I keep contact with most of the serious researchers in all the Watts lines in America, and I facilitate contacts between different individuals whenever I notice anything that seems worthy. So far our 30-something individuals resolve into eight definite Watts family lines with about eight individuals that don't match anybody else and that are also uncorroborated within their own family lines. My criteria are somewhat arbitrary, but in order to qualify as a family line, there have to be two or more representatives that are second cousins or further apart who match each other, or a single individual has to match at least 11/12 to one of our existing lines. FTDNA does have fifty or so family projects underway -- just because I'm a Watts and am interested in the Watts project doesn't mean if you're from a different family that there is nothing in DNA for you. www.familytreedna.com -duane watts ps: my e-mail address is d w a t t s AT j p s . n e t (collapse the spaces out and substitute the circle-a AT symbol. those are just feeble attempts on my part to reduce the amount of spam I have to deal with)

It's a shame that as yet, Genes Connected hasn't tried to get its members a good deal with one of the DNA testing companies. Oxford Ancestors UK was one of the first companies to start testing the Y chromosome for men (The Y is passed on only from father to son). It was also the first to test for Mitochondrial DNA (passed on only in the egg of the mother. )i.e. all the children of one mother will have have the same mitochondrial DNA as each other. The mother inherits her mitochondrial DNA from her own mother and so on. O.A. discovered that there are seven 'tribes' of Mitochondrial DNA types in UK. OA only test the Y Chromosome for ten sites and this is not enough for a man to deduce a close relationship with another man sharing exactly the same pattern. Some American companies (eg. Family Tree DNA) however, test for 25 and more sites on the Y chromosome and this helps to prove relationships of people sharing the same name.

my twins were dna tested for medical research in the genetic development of twins ( hubby and I also tested) all we had to do was wipe several cotton buds round the inside of our mouths and put them in a test tube thing without touching them. The tube had a liquid in it which i presume was preservative, totally painless for us Shelli

Can anyone tell me what's involved in DNA testing? How can you prove parentage? ShirleyB