REBER DNA STUDY OVERVIEW
On the opening page of the Reber family DNA project you read that we began in hopes of answering the most common questions: “Who am I, where did I come from," etc. As DNA technology became available, we realized that some of these questions could be answered with scientific precision. DNA cannot tell you everything you might want to know, but it will show you your genetic relationship to other living people.
As we started our project our objective was to identify members of the Reber family and to let everyone named Reber know what we were finding. The first men analyzed had different haplotypes and were thus not related to each other. At first we thought that this might have been a laboratory problem, but eventually we accepted the fact that we were looking at results from two different Reber families of German ancestry.
Analyses of additional men named Reber confirmed that there are at least two families of German descent. Our scope has now expanded to include Swiss and French participants and descendants. The Swiss have not yet shown a relationship with either the German or French families but this may change as more men are included in our project.
The requirement for participation in our DNA project is to be a man named Reber or one of the related variant surnames, with at least some known genealogy traceable to an ancestor named Reber. Men are required because the DNA analysis uses the Y (male) chromosome.
We now have thirty-eight men, representing German, Swiss and French family branches participating. Related surnames are Raber, Raver, Rebert, Rabert and Ravert. Of the men with related surnames analyzed, the results have had mixed success. There is no guarantee that DNA will prove a relationship even if written genealogy says that there should be a match. Of our Reber participants, five men have not been matched with a Reber ancestor, but most of the other men have had their Reber lineage verified!
The matching of genealogy and DNA is now identified as Genetealogy and is explained in detail at: http://www.genetealogy.com/
We have presented the DNA analysis results as family presentations on the Recap page . Men with extended analyses have their results shown on Extended Analyses Results.
Updated
Saturday, 27 October 2007