GENEALOGY-DNA-L Archives
Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2001-02 > 0981294303
From:
Subject: Re: [DNA] DNA Question
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 08:45:03 EST
In a message dated 2/3/2001 10:33:44 AM Pacific Standard Time,
writes:
Begin Quote ----
OOPS! That blows that idea... there is a direct female line but it would
come after her son........
Is the only way I could prove that lineage to exhume both the possible
mother and my grgrt grandfather (her possible son) ??? Would I not carry
enough of her genes to make only one exhumation necessary ???
Is there any other way to do this ???
--- End Quote
You get exactly one copy of every gene from your mother and one from your
father. Your father got exactly one copy from HIS father and mother. Which
one did he pass on to you? That's a matter of chance, and on average 50% of
the genes you got from your father were from his father and 50% from his
mother.
By the time you go back a few generations, there's a very small chance that
you would have inherited any specific gene or marker. The exceptions are the
Y-chromosome, which is passed down through males without any shuffling or
loss, and mtDNA, passed down through females. That's why they are so useful,
but it also limits the scope of what you can discover to the straight male
and female lines. This may change in the future, of course, but it would
require a lot of testing.
That doesn't mean you have to do exhumations, though -- if you research your
collateral lines, you may be able to find living descendants who could be
tested to see if their DNA matches yours. If you'll browse the January
archives, there's a thread on what you would need to learn about the DNA of
your 8 great-grandparents.
This thread: