A week ago, I attended a full day seminar in Denver on DNA. The speaker was Bennet Greenspan who created
Familytreedna.com. He is the go-to source for DNA questions and I decided to ask mine!
But first, a very, very brief intro into DNA and the reasons it's important in genealogy.
yDNA - you test the male of a particular surname. This DNA goes from father to son to son to son forever. In 2001, I had my brother "Moore" tested for my dad's line. I had our mom's brother "House" tested to know the DNA of my mother's father's line.
mtDNA - you test the male for his mother's mother's mother's mother's DNA. And these "markers" are different from the yDNA markers. I had my brother tested for our mother's line.
autosomal DNA - you can test yourself to get the matches for everyone else between your father's line and your mother's line. I had mine done a few years ago. It also shows the probable migration of your ancestors. This will find "lost" cousins and track things like your mother's father's mother's father's line.
A haplogroup is an identifier that puts your DNA together with other people who have similar, but not identical DNA.
Pretty cool! Familtreedna has now tested over 1.2 million people. My brother and uncle were among the very first back in 2001 with kit numbers around 1600. Lots has been learned since those early DNA tests. However, there is no reason to retest because DNA remains the same.
My question for Mr. Greenspan was:
If you have 2 males with the same surname, yet they fall into 2 different haplogroups, can they be related?
His answer (which I have in writing):
You would have to go back 500 to 1000 generations to find a common ancestor. In simpler terms, you might find that you had a 500th gr grandfather in common!
Can we identify that as a cousin? Only from the generic standpoint that all humans are related and thus all humans are cousins.
Is this important to the Cotopaxi story? Maybe. I'll let you decide.
In a
prior blog, I posted this family tree for E. H. Saltiel
E. H. Saltiel's oldest son, John Tammany Saltiel, changed his name to John Taman about 1914. He had a son, Osborne J. Taman, who is a direct male descendant of John Saltiel, even though he has a different last name.
Osborne had 2 sons. If they had their DNA tested, it would fall into the same Haplogroup as E. H. Saltiel.
And we can see the ancestry tree for E. H. Saltiel
Next we can go to the
Jewish DNA project and look to see if Yomtov Saltiel b 1741 is shown.
He is. You want to look for this line:
Which shows us that E. H. Saltiel would have a DNA of R-m269.
This is known as the Yomtov line.
Anyone who descends for Yom Tob (Yomtov) Shaltiel (Saltiel) will have a DNA haplogroup of R-m269. Further, I have been able to verify E. H. Saltiel's ancestors through census records and other documents in England.
So now we know that E. H. Saltiel and the Taman brothers should have a haplogroup of R-m269.
The
Saltiel in London has this family tree.
Verification of this line's DNA
can be found here - where we find Elias Saltiel born in 1738. This is known as the North Sea Line.
look for these lines:
Which again show us the Haplogroup is G-M201.
In order for the London Saltiel to be a cousin to E. H. Saltiel, he would have to go back 500 to 1000 generations in order to find a common grandfather in order to establish a cousin connection.
We can safely say that these 2 men are not cousins. They do not have a common ancestor within the past 500 generations. Their DNA is in different Haplogroups.
DNA proves they are not related....even through they share a common surname.
That is example number 1 for Cotopaxi. We have another example.
Isaac Leib Shames and Benjamin Zalman Milstein are brothers. But they have different surnames. In Russia, they were forcing young Jews into the army and they were required to serve 25 years. Think about that....twenty-five long years! One way around this when there were multiple sons in a family was to find a couple who did to have children and let them adopt one of the sons. And this is what happened to Isaac Shames and it's why he changed his name.
He could have changed his name back when he came to America. There was nothing stopping him. But to honor and respect the family who adopted him in order to help him avoid 25 years of Russian military service, he chose to keep the name Shames.
It has now been as much as 5 generations since Cotopaxi. What if a Shames descendant were to marry a Milstein descendant and not realize that they have a common ancestor? DNA can prove that for them! And what if it's another hundred years down the line, you might want to get a DNA test no matter who you marry!
Cotopaxi also has descendants who were adopted (remember the
"Finding Lena" blog?) She was a Friedman adopted by a Snyder when she was quite young.
We also have in that same blog the story of Sam and Sarah Shuteran, adopted by Samuel Friedman....and they did not know about this adoption until much later in life. What if they'd married a Shuteran?
First cousins can and do marry and it often works out. But I just think I'd like to know about it before the wedding ceremony!
I'm starting to think that DNA and genealogy go hand in hand. Certainly can prove or disprove the facts of a relationship.
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