Ive been reading some comments about the DNA tests on King Richard III and they just make me laugh. People seem shocked that there might be breaks in the royal lineages. Why? Ive been doing genealogy research for more than thirty years now. As careful as I am with documenting my sources (as are friends of mine like Christine), in the end it is really all for naught on the paternal lines because women cheat on their spouses, just like men do. No matter how diligent I am, no matter how carefully I research things, no matter how many pieces of documentation I can come up with to verify a childs parentage, a percentage of those fathers are going to be wrong, and my lineages are going to be wrong because of it. Anyone who thinks the male lines of their genealogies are correct has their head in the sand. All I can document is who their dads are, who the man was who raised them. I can never accurately document who the man was who fathered them. And to be honest, we cant even always know who their mothers were because there were practices back in the day that can cast doubt on even that. Genealogy is a wonderful hobby, but it isnt a science, even for those of us who do it properly. We can never know just how accurate our information really is. Well never know which men in our lines were cuckolded. Well probably never find out which women ended up with an infant they raised as their own because their daughter/niece/cousin/neighbor/friend had the baby and for one reason or another couldnt keep it. Its hard enough to uncover the lies people tell when you can directly ask them about it, much less trying to uncover them many years later when you cant ask anyone and you dont even have reason to ask. It isnt likely that anyones genealogy is correct for more than a couple of generations in one direction or the other. But genealogists, and for the most part most family members, ignore that dirty little idea and prefer to believe that every woman has been 100% faithful to every man she was ever married to. It should be no surprise to anyone that there are differences in the paternal DNA between the samples from King Richard III and his ancestors and modern relatives. It should be expected, but it goes to show how much we choose not to think that women cheat, that people are surprised and dismayed by this revelation.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 10:29:00 +0000
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