When y-DNA Breaks the Family Tree

Do you ever feel as if DNA results are breaking family connections instead of verifying them?

That has certainly been my experience with my Kentucky CRAWFORD research.

For years, many researchers have identified William, James, and John Crawford, who lived in the early Garrard County, Kentucky, area, as brothers. That relationship appears in online family trees and has become part of the commonly accepted reconstruction of this Crawford family.

But what happens when Y-DNA says otherwise?

Testing a Descendant of William Crawford

Some time ago, I asked a descendant of William Crawford of Madison County, Kentucky, whom I will identify as RC, to take a Y-DNA test.

Since Y-DNA is passed from father to son along the direct paternal line, I hoped RC's results might help confirm William's connection to the other Crawford men living in the area.

Instead, the results created another Crawford puzzle.

RC's Y-DNA placed him in the R1b-05 group of the Crawford Y-DNA Project.

More recently, I received an email from another tester, DC, whose Y-DNA matches RC. He, too, has been placed in the R1b-05 group.

That becomes significant when those results are compared with descendants of James and John Crawford.

A Different Y-DNA Line

Direct paternal descendants of James and John have previously tested. Their results place them in the R1b-01A Ardmillan group of the Crawford Y-DNA Project.

Thus, we have descendants of men traditionally identified as brothers falling into two different Y-DNA groups:

• William Crawford → R1b-05

• James Crawford → R1b-01A Ardmillan

• John Crawford → R1b-01A Ardmillan

Even more importantly, the Big Y Time Tree does not show these two groups sharing the kind of recent paternal connection that would be expected if William, James, and John were biological brothers.

In other words, the Y-DNA evidence does not support the traditional family structure.

So Where Is the Error?

Below is part of the response I sent to DC after looking at the results:

The William that RC has as his ancestor is shown as the brother to James and John on the FamilySearch tree. Unfortunately, Y-DNA does NOT support this relationship.

Thus, there is an error somewhere. I just don't know where.

And that last sentence is the important part.

The DNA results do not automatically tell us which relationship is wrong.

Perhaps William was never a biological brother of James and John. Perhaps one of the documented paternal lines between these Crawford men and the modern testers contains an incorrect parent-child relationship. There could also have been an adoption, informal name change, or other non-paternal event somewhere along one of those lines.

What the DNA does tell us is that the traditional family tree deserves another look.

Breaking Connections—or Correcting Them?

It can be frustrating when DNA appears to tear apart relationships that have been accepted for years. Yet perhaps the DNA isn't really breaking the family tree.

Instead, it may be showing us where the documentary research needs to be revisited.

For my Kentucky Crawford research, that means I can no longer simply accept the claim that William, James, and John Crawford were brothers. I need to return to the records, carefully document the paternal line of each Y-DNA tester, and investigate how—and whether—these Crawford families actually connect.

Instead of answering my Crawford question, Y-DNA has given me another one:

If William Crawford wasn't the biological brother of James and John Crawford, then who was he—and where does his Crawford line belong?

And so the Crawford puzzle continues.