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 spouse at the time. And we know that men often wed pregnant women, perhaps assuming the unborn child is their own.

I had an opportunity to use this technique with one of our project contributors. George (not his real name) knew that the father he grew up with was not his biological father. He was given the name of his biological father as John Black (also not his real name). He was given a year of birth and even an address for this man. 

Eagerly he awaited the recent release of a Census to gain more knowledge of him. To his surprise 'his' John Black died as a child, between the two censuses - he could not be George's father. We were actually clued into this already because there were no matches to John's maternal line. There were certainly matches to John Black's paternal family (as this was the family that led back to George Buchan and Jean Johnson).

What was going on? He was given the name by his mother, and this was confirmed by his uncle!

Further review of an earlier census found a cousin of John Black also named John Black, who also lived on the same street. If this second John was actually George's father, then George should have matches to the second John's maternal side. 

Investigating John Black's maternal family

The second John Black had a father named James Black and a mother named Sally White (also not their real names). This James Black connected back to our Buchan+Johnson line.

Sally White's parents were Edward White and Mary Green. George should have matches to descendants of Edward and Mary if Sally was his paternal grandmother. The White name has been tricky to examine due to men with the same name in the same area; and in fact there were no matches to descendants of Ed and Mary White. However, I did find six matches who were descended from Mary Green's parents. 

Chart of George's Paternal Grandmother Line

This proves that Sally White is one of George's ancestors. She is his paternal grandmother, the mother of the second John Black. After changing George's paternal grandparents to be James and Sally Black, all six people appeared as having Common Ancestors to George, though not all were on Thrulines.

By 'asking' the wife of James Black, ie Sally White, whether George matched any of her family (and he did), we were able to prove that George was the son of the second John Black. There is of course no document in existence which corroborates this conclusion. Without DNA evidence, George would not know one quarter of his pedigree.