In order to apply for membership, you must either be directly related to a current or past member, or present birth certificates or other written proof of direct relationship to all of those going back to your Rev. War ancestor, which is a big ask. Since my great-grandmother was a member, in order for my daughter or granddaughters to become members, they would have to provide proof of their descendance from her, IOW birth certs for my grandmother and mother and me (and them) . I’m assuming it’s the same for the SAR.
But it doesn’t work to tell you anything about specific lineages, because the doubling of ancestors each generation within a panmictic population means that there are a vast number of overlapping lineages within that population. Historical DNA samples only contain information at the species or subpopulation level, between populations where gene flow has been nonexistent or very limited.
You’re thinking too far back in time. If the DNA from the remains of a notable person from a few centuries ago were available they could be compared to their modern day recorded descendants.
And I don’t think you’re considering how little time it takes to generate a vast number of overlapping lineages. Recombination further degrades any signal. Within a few hundred years you have millions of ancestors, and even if you could isolate some specific unique mutation that you share with a historical person, there are a vast number of paths of common ancestry by which a specific historical person could have the same sequence as you without being your ancestor.
The only thing you might usefully do with a historical DNA sample would be (as I mentioned) to look at the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA. But it still couldn’t tell you if this specific person was your ancestor, just that you had shared ancestry along the paternal or maternal line.
Depends on the family. The majority would not have had family records at all or invented/co-opted them about a century ago.
If they had accurate records at all, they will go back at least several centuries years and will (somewhat unrealiably) go back at least 1000 years and perhaps 2 millennia. If not (the majority), then hardly more than a century. If Armisen can reliably trace his back more than a few hundred years, then he’s descended from the upper class.
Those descended from royalty or nobility typically have some kinds of apocryphal (though written) records dating back to the BCE era. There’s a fairly good sized breaks for many clans in the mid 10th century AD for the normal reasons (fire, flood, war), which is about as far as there are unbroken, written records for my patrilineal lineage (there are fragments dating to earlier), though if/how recently those can be reliably verified and trusted is subject to debate and study. From my mother’s side, it would be those apocryphal records, almost folk tales really, going back even further.
My question still stands. How far back has anyone’s ancestry been confirmed through DNA comparison? If I compare your DNA to someone you think is one of your grandparents would you consider that scientific proof to a reasonable certainty that you are or not their descendant? How far back can we trace anyone’s lineage on that basis?
If by “trace a lineage” you mean identify a continuous sequence of ancestors, the answer is going to be no more than a few generations. Certainly far less time than documented lineages.
And if there’s any significant gap, a DNA sample alone from a historical person is not going to determine whether they are your ancestor.
In the US the western migration was a period of meager education and frequent moves that broke the link with the past. My paternal grandfather was born into a farm family in Kansas with a tradition that they had moved there from Ohio. The first documented evidence I have is that he registered a homestead during the Oklahoma land rush of 1899. From there family letters give me a reasonably reliable record of the family history.
On my mother’s side we are descended from a boy who was orphaned by a 1700s cholera epidemic in Vermont. There is a town record of the event and of the boy being indentured out. He ran away from the indenture and joined the army. After a couple of years he deserted and went west where he became an itinerant Methodist minister serving remote farms and communities in northern Oklahoma. His family provided reliable records from the mid 1850s on.
So, the link to the orphaned boy in Vermont and farmers in Ohio are just family traditions ( ‘there were two brothers, they went to town one day and did not return - it’s believed they were shot in an altercation over horses’). Unless your family was sedentary, with a close church association, it’s tough to get beyond 1800.
Ok. So has this been done to any extent? There are tons of people who have their parentage confirmed. I imagine grand-parentage could have been checked in some sort of inheritance or custody issue. There’s plenty of people with living ancestors from more generations back then that. I’m wondering if anyone has gone back to comparisons to people no longer alive. Perhaps even in DNA comparisons used to identify unknown remains.
Of course we have sequenced ancient DNA samples. But not for the purposes described in this thread, because for the reasons I have explained that kind of lineage information is not in the DNA. DNA can tell you about individual relationships at very close range. At long range, it tells you about populations and relationship between populations.
I can’t speak for the DAR, but I’m a member of the Sons - SAR, and they changed this a while back. One now needs to prove linage all the way back to the Revolutionary ancestor, not just to a more recent member of SAR. Their argument is that proof back in the day wasn’t that substantial, and it amounted to “I know that grandpa Jones fought at Saratoga.” There are tools at our disposal today to find the proof.
Looking at 23-and-me and Gedmatch, I can definitely triangulate with relatives to go back to one set of great-great-great-grandparents, born in the 1830s. That is mostly in the female line, but it does require that my father really be my father (this is using his genetic data, though so the distance of the match might specifically be because of mtDNA).
It’s quite hard to use DNA for anything very far back, though my recent ancestors seem to have all been faithful in marriage, or else copulated with in-laws who were closely related to their spouse.
So let’s say today there is a 25 year old person who has found a written record that says their great great great great great great grandmother was born in 1899 and fathered by George Washington.
Their grandmother born in 1949 is alive today, and there happens to be samples of DNA recovered from the possessions of their great grandmother born in 1924. Could their DNA show that the 25 year old is a direct descendant of their grandmother? The grandmother can be established to be the daughter of the great grandmother through DNA. How many generations back could descendance be established from DNA samples if they were available from other generations. What if George Washington’s DNA could be recovered from his remains. For simplicity let’s pretend his brother Charles was no longer alive by 1899. How many generations forward would we need to find DNA from to establish a direct descendant of George Washington?
All these questions assume a reasonable degree of certainty of DNA matches beyond random chance.
That seems strange to me. A generation is about 30 years, so in 300 years there are about 10 generations. The number of ancestors doubles with each generation. So that means you’ve got about 1000 ancestors three centuries ago. A lot, but far from millions.
600 years to get something over 1,000,000 which is still “a few hundred”. One problem is that many of those are the same people.
I guess it depends on what he meant by “a few hundred years”.
Historically generation time has been closer to 20 years. And if 10 generations gets you to 1000 ancestors, 20 generations gets you to a million, so certainly within hundreds of years.
Right, you do not have that many distinct ancestors. But you do have than many overlapping lineages, which is why DNA does not contain information on specific lineages beyond a few generations in the past.
If you have DNA samples from every generation, then yes of course you can prove each parental relationship in turn and establish a continuous lineage.
What you can’t do is take a sample from one person 10 or 20 generations ago and prove anything very specific about their relationship to you.
Yes, obviously for every generation, but how many generations could you skip?
It would depend on how much other contextual information you have. From DNA alone, and without samples from surrounding family members to provide context, all you see is genetic relatedness - so a grandmother looks like an aunt, you share 25% of your DNA with them. And as you get into more distant relationships, the sampling error around the expected shared amount of DNA becomes more significant; as does inbreeding, overlapping lines of descent.