AZ-AvondaleUG-L Archives

From:
Subject: DNA Options
Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2005 16:32:12 EDT

Lack of Male Relatives Thwarts DNA Options
By Cornelia Fenenga Warner
()

I've been watching and reading the DNA discussions with great interest,
long before DNA itself was discovered -- back when cancer genes and blue
and brown eyes were all we discussed. Anyway, I've absorbed some of the
information, and something's been emerging for a while and is starting
to come to a head to my mind,

DNA is a wonderful tool. Not perfect, but neither is any research. It's
just a tool to be used to get where we need to be, but I have an issue,
and for me, it's a big issue -- what do those of us who are female and
have no male relatives do?

On my mother's side, there were three children, my mother, her sister,
and her brother. Her brother had a single child, a daughter. He died
young, of cancer. The next generation back, their parents were both only
children. Allan John WAGNER was the only child of Charles J. WAGNER and
Annie McDONALD. We have no siblings for Charles and Annie's siblings
elude my research.

Florence Ardell WYRUCK was the only child of Francis John WYRUCK and
Alice Augusta COLLINS. I may find a living male WYROUGH cousin someday,
but none of Francis' children by his first wife had any children of
their own. Alice had several siblings. Two were brothers. one never
married, the other had a son, but I cannot trace a child of his as they
come into the mid-1900s and I am unable to access the records necessary
to know if there is a child alive today.

From there I must go outside of my branch of the tree, which is really
no help whatsoever in the area of DNA. Being female, I have no hope of
using my own DNA to identify which of two apparent brothers with the
surname COLLINS we descend from -- or what their ancestry is.

The funny thing is, I have the female line documented back to 1776. I
don't need the mitochondrial DNA until I get to that period. It's all
and every one of my maternal male lines, my WAGNERs, McDONALDs,
WEYRAUCHs and COLLINS, and a few of my paternal male lines (but not the
father's father's father, etc, which I have back into the mid-1600s! --
my ROSSes and CHITTENDENs,)

It's very frustrating not to be able to share in the research or find
out what lines of descent are truly mine once the records peter out.
So, does anyone know of a solution or another way for us to find our
male ancestors when DNA isn't the answer?

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