Ask the Wife
A great technique to analyse our DNA We mostly use DNA to confirm an ancestral couple by finding matches to their descendants through a child other than our own ancestor. We can often have a 'surname' bias, with that bias being the paternal surname, so that a match becomes a 'Buchan' match. So we constantly need to remind ourselves that the wife also contributed to the DNA we are detecting in our matches. For our common ancestral couple this means Johnson DNA. Our matches back to this couple are more accurately Buchan+Johnson matches. "Ask the wife' or more correctly 'ask the partner/spouse', means to look for evidence that the DNA of the other parent in a couple is also present in our match list. This can be helpful when one ancestor has multiple wives, and we are unsure which wife was the mother of a match. It can also be the case when a wife has multiple husbands. Increasingly though, people are finding that the wives have other partners than their s