Preponderance of the Evidence in a Civil Trial

[David Lockmiller]

“How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer”
THE ATLANTIC, BY SARAH ZHANG APRIL 27, 2018

When the East Area Rapist broke into the home of his first victim in 1976, human DNA had not yet been sequenced. When he reemerged as the Original Night Stalker and began a spree of murders in 1979, the World Wide Web still did not exist. For decades, the Golden State Killer—as he is now best known—got away with it all.

Then DNA and the internet appear to have caught up. Reporting from The Sacramento Bee and Mercury News indicates that police arrested Joseph James DeAngelo based on DNA found at crime scenes that partially matched the DNA of a relative on the open-source genealogy website GEDmatch. Previous searches of law-enforcement DNA databases had turned up no matches.

GEDmatch allows users to find profiles that match only one particular segment of DNA.

GEDmatch provides a more powerful way of tracing people by DNA and genealogy than a better-known method that only uses the Y chromosome. . . . Autosomal DNA refers to the DNA on the 22 pairs of other chromosomes that are not X and Y. With a web of enough matches or better yet one close match, an experienced genetic genealogist can begin to identify family members.

This work requires enough expertise that a professional genetic genealogist likely helped law enforcement. [End of article quotes.]

As I suggested in my previous post, Lincoln’s mother would be an even better source of DNA because she is the illegitimate daughter of Lincoln’s unknown grandfather.

Logically, the next step would be to find Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s mtDNA. And a Google search led me to the website Genetic Lincoln. Suzanne W. Hallstrom started the Nancy Hanks Lincoln mtDNA Study. Results of the study demonstrated that Abraham Lincoln mother’s mtDNA belonged to the very rare haplogroup X1c and provided evidence of the maternal ancestry of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. The results of the Nancy Hanks Lincoln mtDNA Study were announced on October 21, 2015.

Thus, Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s mtDNA analysis is already available in some form. See on the website: “Nancy Hanks Lincoln mtDNA Study” - Unlocking the Secrets of Abraham Lincoln’s Maternal Ancestry. (Authored by Suzanne W. Hallstrom, Nancy C. Royce, Stephan A. Whitlock, Richard G. Hileman, M.A., J.D., Gerald M. Haslam, Ph.D, AG, FUGA.)

Two names are high-lighted in the previous paragraph because their names are already familiar to readers on this thread. Both gentlemen, Steve Whitlock (who has endured my “relentlessness” foible) and Richard Hileman are very accomplished genealogists with years of experience and extensive Lincoln specialization. Brief and impressive resumes of each from the website follow.

Stephan Whitlock is a native of Illinois with a lifelong interest in Lincoln. He attended Augustana College for one year before entering the United States Air Force where he was a radar specialist. He is retired from the National Cash Register Co. where he was a Group Leader responsible for installing and maintaining computer systems. He is an expert in online genealogy and was instrumental in documenting the matrilineal lineages of most of the participants in the Nancy Hanks Lincoln mtDNA Study.

Richard Hileman received a B.A. (english/philosophy) from St. Olaf College, and M.A. (philosophy) and J.D. degrees from the University of Iowa. He is a retired trial lawyer. He has been an avocational genealogist for nearly forty years, and since 1980 has read everything he could find on the maternal ancestry of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, including research in the papers of Caroline Hanks Hitchcock and Louis Warren at the Allen County Public Library, the papers of William Barton at the University of Chicago, and the papers of Arthur E. Morgan at the Library of Congress.

My genealogy search question is:

If one were to substitute Abraham Lincoln mother’s mtDNA for the Golden State Killer’s mtDNA in an equivalent DNA search analysis, would it not be possible to identify specifically other descendants of the unknown Virginia planter who fathered the illegitimate daughter who became the mother of Abraham Lincoln?

Once these positive result individuals are identified, the most likely ancestry candidates could possibly be traced back two hundred years and more to the unknown Virginia planter who was the actual grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln, the benefactor of his superior genes. One could narrow the search results by geographic location of Virginia (and West Virginia which was part of Virginia at that time). And, as noted previously, another factor greatly limiting the number of possible statistically valid results is the fact that Abraham Lincoln mother’s mtDNA belonged to the very rare haplogroup X1c. I have no idea what that latter phrase means, but I do know that it greatly limits the number of statistically valid results that need to be traced by experts in genealogy.

Wouldn’t it be amazing, that over two centuries after Abraham Lincoln’s birth, Man’s ingenuity, technology, and persistence would be able to determine definitively the true identity of the father of Abraham Lincoln’s “sainted” mother and the grandfather of the sixteenth President of the United States?