Researching my tree of monarchs and Marie Antoinette

lmathew

Hello

when searching my ancestors of Marie Antoinette, it gives an long line of ancestors. The weird thing is, it shows my name only and then straight to the monarch tree. It is not showing my maternal side of my original tree at all.

i did 23& me and it said my haplo group is related to Marie Antoinette.

why isn’t the tree with monarchs showing me only from my maternal side?

thanks

linda mathew

Gail Swihart Watson

Marie Antoinette’s 4 children did not have children. She has no descendants. You are perhaps a descendant of one of her many siblings?

Gordon Collett

I'm sorry, but I not sure I really understand what your questions is. Please allow me to restate what I think you are asking. Please correct me if I am totally off base. I am going to assume that you are taking about family information in Family Tree and that when you are talking about long lines of ancestors, you are referring to the chart created by the View My Relationship function of Family Tree.

"I have done mitochondrial DNA testing with 23&me which gave me a maternal haplotype result. The results report said that Marie Antoinette has the same maternal haplotype and I thought this meant I would have a direct maternal descent from her or at least through my mother.

"However, when I go into Family Tree to Marie Antoinette's page and click View My Relationship, it does not show a direct daughter to mother line to her or any part of my maternal line but instead goes from me to my father then up through the generations to her husband and then to her"

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here. First of all is that the relationship viewer shows only the closest of the multiple ways we are related to someone. When we have ancestry back into the 1700's we will usually have multiple lines that lead back to that person or that person's spouse. If our relationship to the spouse is closer than any direct line, then that line through the spouse is that one that is shown.

The second thing to keep in mind is that for View My Relationship, there has to be relationship. As Gail points out, since Marie Antoinette did not have any grandchildren, it is impossible to have a direct maternal line back to her.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that when we are looking at DNA relationships, we need to remember that what DNA is actually pointing to is common ancestors between two people. Mitochondrial DNA, and therefore maternal haplotype, because of the way it is conserved from generation to generation can point to common ancestors back hundreds of generations. All your haplotype tells you is that you and Marie Antoinette share a common direct maternal ancestor somewhere in the past couple of thousand years. For example, her 50th great grandmother and your 56th great grandmother could be the same person. View My Relationship only goes back 15 generations so it would never show this relationship.