Who was the father? Watch out for “extra-pair paternity”

As reported in The Guardian newspaper the women of the 19th-century urban poor were not always faithful to their husbands (in contrast to their countryside sisters) according to some research published in the journal Current Biology.

 

 

You can read The Guardian‘s story here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/16/whos-the-daddy-difficult-to-say-in-victorian-times?fbclid=IwAR3MobMb4x-tnyx3Ffmwg2GbH_tq9u5nH8md6zsVDJaGQPFfwh-GAq5uR0U

The authors of the paper conducted research where they compared the Y chromosomes of 513 pairs of men who supposedly share a common ancestor. Their aim was to discover what the prevalence was of what they called “extra-pair paternity” over the past 500 years – in other words, they were looking at how many times in the family trees of these 513 pairs of men that the father named on the birth certificate differed from the actual biological father.

 

I wonder how many people discover from doing a DNA ancestor test that they are not related biologically to the ancestors they had thought that they were from doing the paper trail research in the records?

Food for thought?

Old Woman with a Baby in her Arms Metropolitan Museum of Art [CC0]
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