Rick wrote:
You are right in that conventional research is absolutely necessary.
There must be at least one rock-solid conventionally verified line back
to a certain ancestor for the DNA tests to work.
In fact, you can never get by with just one person because, no matter
how solid the public documentation, there is always the chance of a
break behind the scenes. Indeed, with two people to test, the DNA
line can be verified only as far back as the most recent common
male-line ancestor of the the test subjects.
discrepancies in what I have been told about my ancestor Benjamin
Samson Carpenter b ca 1771 NC? and his son William Bailey Carpenter
(not my ancestor) b ca 1808 SC, and the results posted on the ftdna
Carpenter website.
According to the people who *are* descendants of WBC, they don't have
proof that WBC was the son of BSC, even though they tend to think it's
so. If you have proof, I'm sure they and we all would be interested
to see it. This is particularly interesting because of the conflict
seen in the DNA test results. Let me explain...
We have three matching descendants of WBC in the project, and we can
recontruct the DNA of their common ancestor (WBC's son Cary C.
Carpenter). That stops just one generation short of reconstructing
WBC's own DNA, but we do know that the three descendants also match a
large group of additional Carpenters, and so it seems unlikely that
there is any disconnect between our testees and WBC. That's one side
of the story.
On the other side, we have one descendant of BSC by way of his son
John. This descendant matches a *different* large group of
Carpenters.
Conclusion: *either* BSC and WBC were unrelated, *or* there is a
mistake somewhere in the lineages.
to show that WBC was the son of BSC. Without that rock-solid
conventional line established, all a DNA test would do is show that I
am descended from someone else.
Suppose you took the test and found that you matched Group 7 or Group
8. If your link to BSC were through a son other than John, that would
make you the tie-breaker. You would be helping to settle a
long-standing research problem and also getting some independent
corroboration of your own descent from BSC. On the other hand, if you
found you did not mather either group, you would be opening up the
question all the more and making life more interesting for everybody
concerned.
John Chandler