I'm not sure of the reason. A possibility might be that you can know for
sure who the mother is, but the father might not be the mother's husband. I
think Orin refers to these as non-paternal events.
Raymond R. Wells
-----Original Message-----
From: OrinWells [mailto:orinwells@wells.org]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 10:32 PM
To: ZachariahWells-L(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: Fw: [Zachariah Wells] Re: Cluster analysis of Wells DNA
data
At 07:50 AM 1/21/2003 -0800, Sharon Terca
wrote:
I don't understand any of this....I just read an article in the
Heritage
Quest magazine that said that the military uses the mtDNA only when they
are identifying unknown soldiers. The only males that are used are
brothers. Lying in bed, last night, I tried to figure a rational reason
to it and couldn't come up with any. Can any of you figure it out?
The fathers could be used as well as other close male relatives. In this
case they would be looking for two things. 1) a match on theY-Chromosome
which should be identical between the brothers and 2) the mtDNA which would
be identical because they shared the same mother (but only if that is the
case). If these two match, you can be certain the two are brothers because
the likelihood of a match in any other soldier to this brother would be
pretty close to astronomical. The father, cousins, uncles etc. would be
good only for the y-Chromosome DNA because it is passed father to son
virtually unchanged. All males who share a common male ancestor would have
the same y-Chromosome DNA.
Orin R. Wells
Wells Family Research Association
P. O. Box 5427
Kent, Washington 98064-5427
<OrinWells(a)wells.org>
http://www.rootsweb.com/~wellsfam/wfrahome.html
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