GENEALOGY-DNA-L Archives

Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2003-03 > 1046660737


From: OrinWells <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] DNA Testing
Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2003 19:05:37 -0800
In-Reply-To: <12a.2455b618.2b93fbb2@cs.com>


At 07:28 PM 3/2/2003 -0500, wrote:

>Did you approach it this way because of guidance from BYU, or did you have
>that concept in mind? It seems like the logical way to proceed, but it is not
>apparent when a person is new to DNA testing.

It was a bit of a combination. I knew where I wanted to go from the start
and BYU nudged me into trying to find 4 descendents of each family for
testing. That was much more of a challenge than I had first
imagined. Finding one descendent is not too hard. Finding four from the
same family is a major effort. I did a lot of cold calling after I boiled
off all the relevant researchers. In the end we missed on a couple of
families.

But the number 4 is not a bad number. I expanded the scope by trying to
get descendents from different branches. Ideally different sons of the
earliest known ancestor. Sometimes we had to step this down a generation
or two as well due to lack of descendents. The thing that brought home the
usefulness of 4 participants was discovering non-matching alleged
descendents in several families (rule out one of the 4 - create a new
mystery), then, with the exception of a couple of families, there were
generally at least one or two with mutations. With three or four good
samples you have a chance to figure out what the baseline pattern is. With
two differing samples you can not be certain.

We have now passed 250 participants and are closing on 200 tested samples.

On Tuesday I am told there will be an article in the Wall Street Journal on
DNA testing in general featuring our project (legacy of having a
participant who is a writer for the WSJ). It is currently scheduled for
the front page. I tried to make sure they mentioned the labs and the fact
there are many more surname projects underway to give you folks some
coverage indirectly. My ugly puss may also appear in the usual WSJ drawing
format.




Orin R. Wells
Wells Family Research Association
P. O. Box 5427
Kent, Washington 98064-5427
<>
http://www.rootsweb.com/~wellsfam/wfrahome.html
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