About once a month I’m contacted by a DNA-matched distant cousin who, like me, is trying to connect the DNA dots and figure out how we’re related. This month one of my Y-DNA “matches” made contact. I haven’t heard from many of these men-folk and there’s a good reason for that. You’ll recall that only men carry a Y chromosome and we get them from our fathers who got theirs from their fathers and so on and so forth. As such, the relationship between men who share Y-DNA in common can go back as far as 300,000 years. I have a handful of Y-DNA matches who share my last name. We kind of figure Martin Trentham is our common ancestor. But for most of my other Y-DNA matches, we’ll likely never figure out how we’re related and we simply have to accept that we’re cut from the same man-cloth.
That’s what makes the email I received this week so interesting. First off, it did not come from one of my Y-DNA matches – it came from the sister of one of my Y-DNA matches. As she explained in her email, she coerced her brother, whose last name is “Hudson”, into taking the Y-DNA test so that she could further her own genealogical ambitions. (I admired her from the start.) She went on to say that she had tried and failed to figure out we were related. Now, given what I thought I knew about Y-DNA, I actually heard my own eyes rolling when I finished reading her email. Why on Earth did she think she’d be able to solve this? I can’t even figure out one my 3rd great grandmothers much less a relationship that potentially goes back 300,000 years.
Except that it doesn’t. She pointed out in her email that the “genetic distance” between her brother and me was “1”. “What does that mean?” she asked. After all, that seems like we’d be pretty closely related, right? Hmm. Maybe she’s onto something. So I logged into my FamilyTreeDNA account to take a closer look at my Y-DNA test results and this particular match that is her brother, Mr. Hudson. Although I read what I could about “genetic distance”, it sounded like a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo. That concept is beyond me right now. But what is not beyond me is the concept of probability. That I understand.
Oh, boy. This might be as controversial as my post last year when I suggested my great grandmother Lula Betty might have been born “Lurah Elizabeth”. Here goes…
According to our Y-DNA test results, the probability that Mr. Hudson and I share a common male ancestor who is (only) 8 generations back is 95%. Inversely, that means there is only a 5% chance that our common ancestor was NOT 8 generations back. Do you follow?
Time for another list:
0. Me
1. My dad
2. My grandpa Basil Trantham
3. My great grandfather Lutiness Trantham
4. My 2x great grandfather Campbell Jackson Trantham
5. My 3x great grandfather Robert Floyd Trantham
6. My 4x great grandfather Martin Trantham of Williamson County, Tennessee
7. My 5x great grandfather Martin Trentham, Jr. who married Elizabeth Martinleer
8. My 6x great grandfather Martin Trentham, Sr. whose will appeared in 1783
9. My 7x great grandfather Martin Trentham – the Subsheriff of Somerset County, Maryland circa 1692
That’s NINE generations of Trantham males that I know of and Mr. Hudson and I likely share a 7th or 8th great grandfather.
It gets worse. My father has about 40 DNA matches on Ancestry.com who have a “Trantham” or “Trentham” ancestor in their family trees. He has about 200 DNA matches who have a “Hudson” ancestor in their family trees. You do the math. This begs the question that is now on my mind: was the father or grandfather of Martin Trentham (#9) a “Hudson”? Could he have been adopted? Did he change his name when he arrived in the New World? Was he abducted by a band of Trentham gypsies and raised as one of their own?
Anything’s possible I suppose. DNA doesn’t lie.
Kenfolk: Hudsons???
Relation: 8th or 9th great grandfather??
Common ancestors: Frankly, I’m a bit perplexed.