No help (yet?) from YDNA
This Father’s Day, The Legal Genealogist intends to whyne.
No, that’s not a misspelling.
You see, the couple in this photo are my paternal great grandparents: my father’s father’s parents.
On the left Emma Louisa Graumüller.
On the right Hermann Eduard Geissler.
They were married in Köstritz in what is now the German state of Thüringen on 22 June 1879.1
Emma was born 27 October 1855 in Köstritz. Baptized in the Lutheran church there on 4 November 1855.2 Her parents Johann Christoph Graumüller and Auguste Wilhemina Zimmermann had been married in that church in 1852.3 At the time of her wedding, her father was a deacon of the church there.
Hermann was born 20 April 1855 in Ossig bei Zeitz in what is now the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt. Baptized in the Lutheran church there on 21 April 1855.4
But — sigh — no marriage records for his parents.
Quite the contrary in fact.
The baptismal register records in exquisite detail that this bouncing baby boy was the first-born uneheliches kind (illegitimate child) of Friedrike Geisler.5
Nowhere — not even once — is there so much as a hint as to Hermann’s father.
Not in his birth record.
Not in his marriage record.
Not in his death record.6
And — sigh — not from the YDNA tests of his descendants, sons of the son of his son.
My brothers all match each other perfectly in their YDNA results, thank heavens. My paternal half-brother and my two full brothers who have tested are all 37-for-37 marker matches, my half-brother has SNP tested to place them all firmly in the E-V13 haplogroup, and the two who’ve tested at 67 markers have no matches closer than a genetic distance of seven.
That means their odds of sharing a common ancestor in that male line don’t even hit 10% until six to seven generations ago. The odds don’t hit 20% until the eight generation mark, and they don’t hit 50% until 12 generations back.7
Rough translation in plain English: nobody closely related to whoever was Hermann’s father has tested. No clues, at least not yet, and likely none until DNA testing is much more common in Germany.
Happy Father’s Day.
Whyne…
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “A Father’s Day whyne…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 20 June 2021).
SOURCES
- Kirchenbuch Bad Köstritz, Trauregister Seite 11 Nr. 11 aus 1879, Marriage Record of Hermann Edward Geissler and Emma Louisa Graumüller, 22 Jun 1879; digital image in possession of JG Russell). ↩
- Ibid., Taufregister Seite 110 Nr. 52 aus 1855, Baptismal Record of Emma Louisa Graumüller, 4 Nov 1855; digital image in possession of JG Russell). ↩
- Ibid., Trauregister Seite 434 Nr. 11 aus 1852, Marriage Record of Johann Christoph Graumüller and Auguste Wilhemina Zimmermann; digital image in possession of JG Russell). ↩
- Evangelische Kirche Ossig (Kr. Zeitz), Taufregister 1855 nr. 4, Hermann Eduard Geisler, 21 Apr 1855; Kirchenbuchduplikat, 1799-1874 (Staatarchiv Magdeburg); digital images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org : accessed 22 June 2019). ↩
- Ibid. The spelling of the last name rotates among Geisler, Geissler and Geißler. We use Geissler today. ↩
- Death Certificate, Nr. 645 (1933), Eduard Hermann Geisler; Standesamt Gera, 31 July 1933 (photocopy provided by Stadtarchiv Gera, 2011). ↩
- Y-DNA TiP Report, run 20 June 2021, Family Tree DNA. ↩
Made some good friends while in Germany during the early 60’s. Very thrifty folks! Spending their Marks to check their ancestry…nope, they would probably laugh and say are you kidding. As far as they are concerned, their ancestry is not to be questioned…even in the throes of faching.
To all of us with a similar problem: Trying to find a Y-DNA match with a foreign relative assumes, of course, that the German descendant wants to know specifically about his paternal ancestry and took a Y-DNA test from Family Tree DNA. Many of us tend to forget that people who live in the same area where their ancestors lived are much less likely to do that–they think they already know. But what if the person wants to find out about his health? No matter how remote the possibility seems, there is always a chance that someone took a full genome test (or even a Y-DNA test) from another company. I would highly recommend upgrading to the Big Y test and transferring those results to YFull and anywhere else that accepts results from multiple companies and may attract a foreign audience. In addition, there could be a match at FTDNA but the STRs may have mutated enough to cause a person to not show up on the match list. These potential matches may not have joined a haplogroup project. SNPs are much more reliable than STRs, so getting a more specific terminal SNP from the Big Y is helpful in making better matches and finding out more about our ancestry. But most importantly I have recently made foreign Y-DNA matches with people who did not test at FTDNA. In any case, as you know, we never know who may test in the future, why they will test, and what company they will use. It pays to be in more than one database.
Thank you Linda. You have answered a question I was about to ask you elsewhere.
Judy, even if it’s not in our direct line, I think nearly all of us have a case like this.
Mine is a rare haplogroup with an exceedingly rare sub haplogroup and no matches . I found some useful suggestions in the blogs of Linda and also Roberta Estes and am slowly working through them.
In another case among my ancestors there is a surname hint among the child’s forenames, but the surname is fairly common in the area, so that tracking descendants involves trying to untangle several lines often all using the same first names. So that method of tracking some possible males for testing is impractical.
Good luck to all on such a quest.
This sort of testing is illegal in France, so if at least some of the descendants of your common ancestors now live in France…