DNA Proves Joe Hart and Jimmy Harte are Cousins: Maybe 10 Generations Removed
Editor’s Note: I pressed Joe on whether DNA had actually solved any mysteries for him, or ended up useless. As a partial answer, he reports that when he and Jimmy Harte got their Y chromosome results back, the lab said they were related — with a common ancestor perhaps 10 to 20 generations in the past, judging by the number of mutations. Joe knew enough about Irish genealogy to realize no paper trail would ever reach that far back; church records rarely take you beyond great-great-grandparents. So the two were content to call each other cousin, though Joe was never quite satisfied with “99% certainty” at 18 generations.
Transcript
Speakers: WJB — William J. Bowe; JH — Joseph Hart. Transcribed from the recording; punctuation added and obvious mis-hearings corrected.
WJB: Now, Joe, what I’m hearing from you is that DNA and genealogy — certainly don’t start there, and you’re unlikely to get anywhere in your understanding of the family tree unless you’ve got other things. But I gather in some fashion, it actually permitted you to answer some mysteries. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it ended up useless at the end of the day. I’m rambling.
JH: You’re asking that question again, and I’ll get around to answering it here in a second. But I wanted — and as a partial answer to that — Jimmy and I got our Y chromosome test results back, and it said that we’re related. Based on the number of mutations in our Y chromosomes, they could make an estimate of how far back our common ancestor was.
WJB: Okay.
JH: I already knew enough about Irish genealogy to know that when they suggested that our common ancestor was 10 generations back, 10 to 20 generations in the past, that there was no chance that we were going to ever build a paper trail that would go back that far. In Irish genealogy, traditional genealogy, looking through the records and the documentation, you’re not going to get past a great-grandparent level or a great-great-grandparent level. You’re going to be extremely lucky if you get back to triple great-grandparents. You might be able to do that in a combination — well, you’re probably going to do that in church records. Church records didn’t start until a certain period, and then they didn’t start throughout the whole of Ireland at the same time. So anyway.
So Jimmy and I found out we were related back a number of generations. So we had to be satisfied with that. We were willing to call each other cousin after that. But just that statistical element, saying your common ancestor at 99% certainty is back 18 generations — that just didn’t sit very well with me. I was used to looking —
WJB: Sorry. So he wasn’t close enough, as it turns out, that you were going to put him in your will.
JH: A little bit more distant.
