- Genetic genealogy
genetic genealogy Genetic genealogy is the application of genetics to Genealogy traditional genealogy . Genetic genealogy involves the use of genealogical DNA test ing to determine the level of Genetic distance individuals genetic relationship between individuals. History Image George Darwin sepia tone.jpg right thumb 150px George Darwin , son of Charles Darwin , was the first to estimate the frequency of first cousin marriage s The investigation of surname s in genetics can be said to go back to George Darwin , a son of Charles Darwin . In 1875, George Darwin used surnames to estimate the frequency of first cousin marriage s and calculated the expected incidence of marriage between people of the same surname isonymy . ref George H. Darwin, Note on the Marriages of First Cousins , Journal of the Statistical Society of London 38 3 Sep., 1875 , pp. 344 348. doi inline 10.2307 2338771 DOI ref He arrived at a figure between 2.25 and 4.5 for cousin marriage in the population of Great Britain, with the upper classes being on the high end and the general rural population on the low end. His parents, Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood, were first cousins. This simple study was innovative for its era. The next stimulus toward using genetics to study family history had to wait until the 1990s, when certain locations on the Y chromosome were identified as being useful for tracing male to male inheritance. Dr. Karl Skorecki, a Canadian nephrologist of Ashkenazi parentage, noticed that a Sephardic fellow congregant who was a Kohen like himself had completely different physical features. According to Judaism Jewish tradition, all Kohanim are descended from the priest Aaron , brother of Moses . Skorecki reasoned that if Kohanim were indeed the descendants of only one man, they should have a common set of genetic markers and should perhaps preserve some family resemblance to each other. To test that hypothesis, he contacted Professor Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona , a re ... more details
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