Richard III of England - DNA Results

Ulf, if you look closely there are differences (exact phrasing of name, name(s) of wife/wives, profile image, etc).

And if you back up two generations to Edward I, you will find two of Edward II and two of Edward III in the family tree. (Also two of John of Gaunt and his wives/mistresses.)

Yes, which is why some people choose to let these duplicates just sit there because they add zero value to the tree and eat up valuable time fixing all the errors as you merge them in.

Yeah, so then people waste time adding onto duplicate profiles which eventually have to be merged and fixed....

People add duplicates because they can't use Search (not Pro members) or because they don't understand Geni (new members) or because Search is not very good. The last reason will be addressed when Geni has My Heritage Search.

Plenty of people add duplicates where there are no locked profiles.

People don't understand Geni and want their own tree going back to royalty. They could ask to be added as a manager, regardless of whether the profile was locked or not.

here is a good examble. I put in images so I could keep them seperate

matches http://www.geni.com/search/matches/6000000028412929831

Sir Henry "Hotspur" Percy

It's basically a no-win scenario.

Now, about Richard III, his G2a Y-DNA, and his Somerset (non-)relatives' R1b/I1 mismatches....

The I1 appears to be a recent intrusion on one of the five lines - the other four are consistently matching R1b. But we don't know where, or when, that came from - the most distant possibility, and it's not a strong one, is John of Gaunt himself. (Richard III and his brother Edward IV were male-line descendants of another son of Edward III, not John.)

It's rather more likely that someone intruded on the Somerset lineage somewhere between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Unfortunately one cannot post images to these discussions here, but check out https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152408733366436&set=p...

So Charles Edward Henry Somerset is one of the possible cuckoos? Or perhaps his son William Raglan Henry Somerset? (One would think that hanky-panky more recent than that would be known.)

As for the other one, there was IIRC at least one break in the legitimacy of the line, at Charles Somerset, 1st Earl of Worcester - so you sort of have to wonder just how sure Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset could be that the baby was his. ("Mama's baby, papa's maybe.")

Look in Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort Media I used PCpaint and added the graph

He's the last possible place for an R1b incursion, because from him the lines diverge.

Can someone with a good understanding of the culture of the royals give me background on what we know about infidelity by wives -- was this common for an aristocratic woman to have a lover or lovers?

It depended on the woman, and on how good the relationship was with her husband. You need look no further thanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_of_France (Edward II's queen) for an example of what havoc a dissatisfied wife can wreak!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_of_France

Men, on the other hand, and royals in particular, were granted a great deal of license - provided that they stuck to the female gender, or at least kept any same-sex attractions on the down-low. (Edward II didn't, and everyone involved suffered for it.)

The Plantagenet line includes quite a few randy rabbits, starting with Geoffrey of Anjou and ending with the thoroughly wench-ridden Edward IV. (Even strait-laced Richard III sowed a few wild oats before settling down to respectable monogamy and fidelity.)

Adultery is thought to have been common among the elite of the Restoration period. Hard to find good references, but see http://www.phil.muni.cz/angl/thepes/thepes_02_02.pdf

Unfortunately the Tudors saw to it that those wild oats were uprooted - they made as clean a sweep as they could of any possible rival claimants.

A man in Sweden recently found out by DNA testing that he was not the father in a DNA case, he will not be given any money back for having paid alimony to the mother al this years,
( about 50.000$ in todays value).

Some countries seems to have harder laws, some milder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternity_fraud

Thank you Private User and Justin Durand. Interesting reading.

King Richard III is my first cousin, 15 times removed. This is a coincidental lineage.

John Pat

King Richard III is the son of Cecily Neville who is my uncles 12th great grandmother. Uncle Richard has a nice ring to it. ;- )

King Richard lll is our first cousin 17 times removed. Whether he would be by DNA is yet to be known. Richards' Ancestor King Edward is our Grandfather 4 x (talk about pedigree collapse) so if Richard is illegitimate than the other progeny of King Edward must be legitimate somewhere.

I wondered wether the fact that they said he was illegitimate because of a mis match between the decedents of his older sister, was a good enough argument, SHE may be the one with illegitimacy??? I may have missed something tho.

Its throygh the YDna that is the mismatch. Richard is my 12th Great Uncle. He was thought to have been est a R1B haplogroup but his dns sequence is anything but that from what Ive seen

Nobody knew what the Plantagenet Y-DNA was going to be. Guessing "R1b" was playing the odds - it's frightfully common, and the current Bourbons *had* turned out to belong to it (after some erroneous lab work earlier).

However, there were numerous opportunities for hanky-panky in the French royal line due to their habit of insisting on crowning only male-line heirs. Sometimes, as with Henri IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, they had to reach a long way out (he was something like the previous monarch's 20th cousin once or twice removed) and ignore the chances of a Non-Paternal Event.

That's not to mention the questions that were whispered about the legitimacy of Louis XIV and his brother - King Louis XIII was most un-fond of his Queen, preferring to hang about with handsome young male courtiers, and it had taken quite a few years and a lot of cajoling to get the royal pair together long enough for two living children. (If Anne of Austria was so desperate for an heir as to turn to someone else, she must have gone to the same man both times and picked someone whose loyalty and discretion were absolute. It is perhaps worth noting, or not, that a recent remake of Dumas' "Man in the Iron Mask" fingered none other than D'Artagnan as the Queen's secret lover....)

The original identification of the Bourbon line as "G2a", based on testing preserved blood said to have come from Louis XVI, turned out to be a product of shoddy lab work and a lot of wishful thinking. A lot of people were shocked and disappointed when it all came apart.

There is absolutely no question that Richard III *did* belong to Group G2a - the only uncertainty is whether the break falls in the generations immediately above him or (more likely) in the Beaufort/Somerset line, which has one known recent cuckoo and several places that another could have been slipped in.

Maven, two corrections, one small, one rather large.

First, Henri IV pf France was a 9th cousin once removed of his predecessor, not a 20th cousin. Your basic idea is still good -- the French went to extraordinary effort to keep the throne in the male line (and originally all to keep Edward III from getting it).

Second, and much more importantly, the idea that Louis XVI was G2a was most definitely not "shoddy lab work" and "wishful thinking", although some sensational journalism tried to take it that direction. Instead, the problem was the source of the blood being tested. There were indeed doubts that it is really the blood of Louis XVI. Full sequencing since the earliest reports shows that it is probably isn't even though there were good reasons for thinking it was. The DNA extracted from the blood should belong to a shorter man, with different eye color, and a substantial chunk of northern Italian ancestry.

There is, however, a huge mystery there. The yDNA from the supposed blood of Louis XVI matches yDNA from the supposed mummified head of Henri IV, with one mismatch. So, the two samples are from men who are paternally related. If neither is authentic, the burning question is how they ended up matching.

You can read a more recent paper (April 2014) here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3998215/

At least one report on the lab work on the "head of Henri IV" said it was "shoddy", with people sniffing and snuffling all over it. http://www.livescience.com/40367-french-king-dna-mystery.html It was also apparently a "short test": "Five STR loci match the alleles found in Louis XVI, while another locus shows an allele that is just one mutation step apart."

Nowadays six markers would not be nearly enough for a positive identification, even if that was all they were able to retrieve.

I would say there was *a lot* of wishful thinking involved, and possibly a "pious fraud" in either the past or the present (the blood in the gourd, which apparently really belonged to J. Random Nobody - and possibly the head too, since possession has not been authenticated all the way back to when it was still on its owner's shoulders).

You're right that Henri IV was 9th cousin once removed - too much yapping about his being "in the 22nd degree of consanguinity", which was presumably calculated by the old method of counting up one side the family tree and down the other instead of the more accurate "distance from most recent common ancestor". I found that information after I had already posted, alas.

That's still plenty of opportunity for somebody to have snuck into the bloodline who isn't on the record.

Short test? People sniffing and snuffling? All that, and yet their results were confirmed by a later full sequence. That should be reason to pause ;)

Another report says the results were *not* confirmed:

The team further compared the Y chromosome taken from the mysterious head with that taken from a blood-soaked handkerchief said to contain the genetic material of Louis XVI. (That "sample" was collected on Jan. 21, 1793, when a spectator at La Place de la Revolution in Paris thrust out the cloth to capture blood gushing from Louis' headless body.) The two samples did not match. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/31/science/la-sci-king-henry-h...

From the same article, later:

Nailing down the identity of long-lost bones is tricky, and disputes among forensic scientists are common, said Alison Galloway, a forensic anthropologist at UC Santa Cruz who has followed, but not been involved in, the royal kerfuffle.

"The original analysis looked good," Galloway said. But Charlier's team should have known that its conclusions would be challenged, she said.

"If you had a group of 100 skulls — all men of European ancestry, let's say — and you had a photograph of a person, about 10 of those skulls could superimpose pretty well on that photograph," she said. Although facial reconstruction makes for great visuals in a TV drama, "it's a technique much better used to exclude somebody" than to identify him definitively.

They've been backpedaling and eating crow ever since the live Bourbon test reports came in.

It might be helpful here to parse more carefully what we mean by "confirmed".

There are two parallel discussions.

On one side we're talking about the scientific test results. The 2nd test confirmed those of the first.

On the other side we're talking about the identity of the remains. That isn't part of the scientific test, although the test can tend to confirm or deny existing ideas.

In the case of both the bloody handkerchief and the embalmed head there is a fairly high quality provenance. The objects are accounted for from the time of their creation to the present, with room for some skepticism because there would have been a good reason to make false claims early in their history. In short, before the tests both were "apparently genuine".

It doesn't say anything about the quality of the lab work on the first test if the remains are proven to be fake by the second test. This is particularly true because the second test confirmed the test results of the first, while simultaneous casting doubt on identity of the remains themselves.

Also, it was clear with both remains that there would have been some, perhaps substantial, contamination over the centuries. Sensational journalism seems to have overlooked this point. When you read about possible contamination *in* the lab, you can be pretty sure you're reading either a journalist gone wild or professional backbiting.

The popular press has been slow to pick up on it but actually the Bourbon results are in the same kind of limbo as the new Plantagenet results. The reason the first Bourbon test is now being questioned is that the second Bourbon test used triangulation to include results from living descendants. The Plantagenet test included that kind of results on the first go.

And, just as the problem with the Plantagenet test centers around the question of when the non-paternity occurred (possibly in the lines of the living descendants), so also the problem with the Bourbon test centers around the same kind of question -- the blood of Louis XVI matches the head of Henri IV, but neither of them match the living descendants.

Remember -- the *main* reason the second Bourbon test discredited the first has nothing to do with sloppy lab work or false results. It's that the DNA does not match the living descendants. (Another reason is the autosomal DNA and what it seems to tell us about physical characteristics, but that has it's own set of problems and is not above debate either.)