G2G: When a man is confirmed by DNA, is his wife confirmed too?

Question

What is wikitree's policy, when a man is confirmed by DNA?

Is his wife confirmed too? She has to give birth to the child.

When a woman is confirmed by DNA, her husband doesn't have to be the father.

Answer 1

Here's a link to the DNA Help page: Help:DNA Confirmation (wikitree.com)

It says that if you have a match whose relationship is known through traditional genealogy, and you've taken an autosomal test, and you are third cousins or closer and the DNA test predicted relationship corresponds, then:

• If your match is a sibling you can confirm your relationships to both your parents.
• If your match is a half-sibling you can confirm your relationship to the one shared parent.
• If your match is a first cousin on your father's side you can confirm your relationship to your father and his relationships to both his parents. If your match is a first cousin on your mother's side you can confirm your relationship to your mother and her relationships to both her parents.
• If your match is a second cousin you can confirm relationships back to great-grandparents.
• If your match is a third cousin you can confirm relationships back to great-great-grandparents. 

Comments

My point is this :

If my match is a sibling, technicly we can't be sure to have the same father, if the mailman is a handsome looking young man.

If my match is a half-sibling on my fathers side, our mothers have to be true too - DNA or not - because mothers can't deny their children.

So, everytime a father is confirmed by DNA, the mother has to be true too - DNA or not - because mothers can't deny their children.

Everytime a mother is confirmed by DNA, technicly the father could be the mailman.

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If you and a sibling match as full siblings, then you had to have the same parents.  If there's a question about parentage, then matching with cousins will clarify whether the biological parents are as expected or there was an NPE or donor event.

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Technically, mothers can "deny their children", actually, although it is undoubtedly much less common. Every once in a while to run into a case where there is a large family, the oldest daughter gets pregnant at a young age without being married, and the child is simply passed off as the real mother's youngest sibling. There's also such a thing as adoption.

The point is, if you match someone over 2000cM (but less than 3000cM), that person can only be a full sibling. If they were really a half-sibling, the match would only be somewhere between 1500cM and 1900cM.

For more distant relations, it's harder to tell whether it's really a half-relation instead of a full one, so seeing if you have appropriate matches on both sides of your family becomes more important. Sometimes you'll have a match that's too strong to be a half-relation, but other times you might not. The confirmation rules are not completely foolproof, I don't think, but cases that "fall between the cracks" have to be pretty uncommon. I haven't run into one, or heard about one yet.

Answer 2

Depends what is being confirmed. If autosomal, perhaps you could male that case, but it wouldnt be ironclad unless you had one tester who confirmed via mtdna AND auDNA, matching to the other testers who confirmed via yDNA and auDNA.

YDNA or mtDNA by themselves only confirm one of the couple (male for YDNA, female for mtDNA)

Answer 3

Shouldn't think so.  Unless he married his sister, then they are going to have their own separate DNA.  Their child is going to have a mix, of course.

Answer 4

For 3rd cousins and closer, the confirmation depends on the total amount of shared autosomal DNA.  Is the amount shared sufficient for their known relationship?  Their shared DNA will usually be from both ancestors (who compose that couple).

Answer 5

DNA Confirmation is dependent on the relationship of the child to their parents, whether they are married or not. That is why the "confirmed with DNA" indicator is only set on the child's profile.

Birth certificates are the traditional way determine the identity of a person's parents and DNA test matching is a way to provide additional evidence to confirm or reject a relationship.

DNA confirmation source citations are not considered purely genealogical sources and should not be used to mark relationships "confirmed with DNA" without other evidence.

Comments

To be more precise, I think, DNA confirmation tells you whether the legal parents (the ones on the birth certificate) are the same people as the BIOLOGICAL parents. They generate a "fake" birth certificate for adoptees, and there's never any guarantee that the father given on a birth certificate is the true biological father.

Mostly, DNA confirmation is meant to show that there hasn't been some sort of error in the research, but it also can expose when the biology doesn't match what's "on paper". I'd actually guess that the latter is a more common cause of a discrepancy than the former.