Preponderance of the Evidence in a Civil Trial

[Steve Whitlock]

(03-31-2020 02:44 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 12:27 PM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  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?

Yes, indeed!!!

I am not a geneticist, but can scrape by with some basics. I did the research for the lines used in the NHL mtdna study, with the exception of the Nancy Hanks Hall line, which I concurred with. That's the reason Suzanne Hallstrom asked me to work on the Henry Reed Rathbone project with her. Others, especially Suzanne Hallstrom, took care of the dna processing.

Nancy Royce was our lead genealogist, along with Prof Gerald Haslem and Rich Hileman, with all of them having much longer tenure in genealogy than I. The heart transplant I mentioned in 2006 (last night-early morning) was the beginning for me in 2007-2008 to do genealogy as justification for still being here. I started with an inspiration for my mother-in-law's 90th birthday, and no clue of what genealogy was beyond a few commercials.

I am here today mainly because of the other team members, especially Nancy Carr Royce, whose informative documents you may have viewed at Genetic Lincoln. Nancy drug me, kicking and screaming, to her point of view, after I had opted for easier, more traveled lines. She patiently endured my endless yeah-but's, and whatabouts, to where we are today.

David, the limitation of autosomal testing is about 4 generations, beyond which the results are so weak as to be questionable without an extremely secure paper trail. Y-dna and mtdna (especially mtdna) can last for thousands of years without much degrading. An added advantage of mtdna is that we are more certain of who the mother is, than the father, but mother's are harder to trace with the name changes.

I have found some autosomal matches 6-7 generations back, with good paper trails. The first three generations, and some 4th generations, speak for themselves by the strength of the match. All those mtdna matches you see at Genetic Lincoln, if we had autosomal testing done would be too far back to get to the father of Nancy Hanks Lincoln as a common ancestor, and be conclusive; however, if we knew who the father was it could be helpful if there was a weak autosomal match to suggest a relationship. Anyone who has checked their own autosomal matches doubtless wonders how they have so many unknown matches, much less how a weaker match could be legitimate, while a stronger one is happenstance. And don't forget there are no living descendants to Nancy Hanks Lincoln; therefore, no autosomal dna to gather, unless at some point we get a match from a blood relic proven for Abraham Lincoln, that can also get autosomal results. I'm not certain they have the technology yet to get the autosomal from old blood results. Abraham Lincoln's autosomal dna is only 2 generations from his grandfather, and holds a better promise to get a significant match.

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(03-31-2020 07:47 PM)Steve Whitlock Wrote:  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?

David,

I didn't answer your question adequately. The only dna that Nancy Hanks Lincoln gets from her father is his autosomal dna because women don't have a y-chromosome, but men have an x and y chromosome, a different set of chromosomes. The y-dna for Nancy's children came from their father, Thomas Lincoln.

Nancy Hanks Lincoln also passes her autosomal dna and mtdna to her children, after getting her mtdna from her mother, Lucy Hanks Sparrow, as shown by the study you mentioned. She would also get some autosomal dna from Lucy Hanks, some measure of which goes to her children, just as Thomas Lincoln's autosomal dna, as well as the autosomal dna of the unknown father. Got it?

I know it gets too complicated for me. If you do autosomal testing for yourself and a sibling you would be surprised at how different your matches may be, depending on the distribution of the chromosomes. It is definitely not identical.

Now that you understand perfectly throw in another generation or two for those autosomal chromosomes to further affect their composition and understand the centimorgan levels weaken with each passing generation going back, and you can see it isn't a matter of just transferring mtdna, which has nothing to do with the mtdna of Nancy's father, only her autosomal contribution, which is an unknown. How's that for a run-on blather of a sentence?

I repeat, I am not a geneticist. But I can trace lineages.