Old English Proverb

[Biblioteque]

"He who has no fools, knaves or beggars in his family tree was begot by a flash of lightning."

[ewd76]

Mine has plenty of fools and knaves, but certainly no beggars. That would be embarrassing.

[Biblioteque]

You can substitute another grouping of people for beggars. What about, philanderers? I have at least two of those, according to Y testing. They are from the 1600s and 1700s. They can euphemistically be called "broken lines" or as my cousin said about one of his ancestral grandmothers, "She strayed to the neighbor." LOL

[benowicz]

. . . I have at least two of those, according to Y testing. . .

What's the quote about the typical incidence of NPE's in the general population? Ten percent per generation? Feels kind of high, but I think that is my recollection.

Anyhow, do both of these effect a single direct male line of descent? Or different male lines?

It's a terrible research problem. There are extremely few confirmed (or even suspected) FGC23343+ identified to date, but there is a bizarrely wide variety of surnames and even birthplaces of the EKA documented.

Luckily a little clarity was gained surrounding the origins of the largest subclade, FGC28369+, due to intense sampling of the members of one particular surname. That was exceptionally lucky because that particular family has a *reasonably* good paper trail back to the high middle ages. Maybe other people have different opinions, but I think there is good support for the idea that FGC23343 expanded from the area between the Isle of Oleron and Saintes in France, maybe around 500 B.C.

The fact that there are relatively few (I think only 2 or 3) other donors with anything like a real chance at being able to research a paper trail back to Saintonge makes it feel like FGC23343 has an exceptionally large incidence of NPEs. I mean, the number of current confirmed FGC23343+ is super small in absolute terms, and because of French legal restrictions on commercial DNA testing, it's a little unfair to compare them to other, saturated regions and subclades like the L21 homelands. Apples and oranges because there is so much haplotype convergence within and between different sub-clades of L21, it's likely that a lot of NPEs there never get identified. But FGC23343 is pretty distinctive, and in relative terms the volume of NPE's seems huge.

Anyhow, please don't consider this a wanton digression. It's just another example of the truth of the proverb, and the fact that the true volume may never be known.

[PDHOTLEN]

Well, I'm the fool and knave in my tree. So everyone else in it looks good by comparison, ha ha.

[Biblioteque]

IMHO, paper is just paper until proven with DNA. I get totally tickled and ticked with the Historical Societies in the US and elsewhere handing out memberships to Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the Mayflower Societies, et al., with membership proven with PAPER, considering the high rate of NPEs! Paper is just paper............and are we really who we think we are.

[georgian1950]

IMHO, paper is just paper until proven with DNA. I get totally tickled and ticked with the Historical Societies in the US and elsewhere handing out memberships to Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the Mayflower Societies, et al., with membership proven with PAPER, considering the high rate of NPEs! Paper is just paper............and are we really who we think we are.

I am amazed at the number of people who are saying that they don't care what the DNA shows, their paper trail is correct.

[Biblioteque]

Jack, yes, it is amazing and oft times is a of lack of critical thinking and/or their lack of understanding the science of DNA. I will admit my learning curve was not all that short! LOL

[Biblioteque]

https://isogg.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event

Since NPEs were mentioned here, this is a link supplied by KATM on an much earlier posting which is informative.

[benowicz]

Thanks. Thought 10% seemed high, as the article seems to imply. At least I know I wasn't just pulling that out of the air.

So most of the events I am referring to probably do not represent true NPEs, since it isn't clear whether their anomalous statistics are attributable to a period before or after the relevant surnames became hereditary. It's only possible to say that early FGC23343 branch founders were VERY mobile.

But the members of the subclade FGC28369 are all very closely related, and it took a long time and some incredible luck to determine what the founding surname was. Within that scope, there appear to be an exceptionally large number of NPEs, as defined in that link.

It was also a great bit of luck for all concerned that family's paper trail led back to Poitou in the high middle ages, and that at least one other member outside of FGC28369 has clear 17th century roots in Oleron. The parent clade Z209+ definitely puts their most remote origins somewhere in or adjacent to the Basque Country, so I personally find all this consistent and persuasive.

It's maybe not the kind of recent, specific information a person would really hope for from their test, but there's still time, and what we have right now is at least a reliable clue.