ROOTS & BRANCHES

Faithful readers of the “Roots & Branches” column will know that Eric “Rick” Bender of New Mexico is probably the column’s most prolific correspondent.

I’ve met Bender in person, too, a few times over the years – most recently at the Lancaster Family History Conference a couple of weeks ago.

Bender says he had a good time at the conference during his trip back East, and one of the highlights for him was being able to powwow with DNA guru Darvin Martin, who has been a part of the conference committee for quite a while.

Bender’s paper trail for his surname line ends in the early 1800s with four birth and baptismal entries in the Bethel Moravian Church records for the children of John & Catharina (Stroh) Bender, including the entry for his known great-great grandfather, Levi, born 1813.

So Bender had turned to DNA testing. He was concerned about privacy issues – “I still am, actually,” he says – but was convinced to take the test. “I joined Family Tree DNA and submitted a sample to their Y-DNA test, via their Bender Project,” Bender said. “Martin suggested the 67-marker test.  That was six years ago.  I got a lot of information that was of little use to me; mostly, I had weak hits (matches) that were more unsettling than they were helpful.  Darvin told me not to sweat it and explained some of the results.” Y-DNA is the sex chromosome that is passed only from father to son and therefore is useful in finding whether people of the same surname have a mutual ancestor within the last few hundred years.

Bender later joined Ancestry DNA but since it only does autosomal DNA testing – which is mightily useful for finding cousin-ships back a few generations, but not for the deeper Y-line – it didn’t end up being useful to him.

In a couple of cases, Bender was able to eliminate some Bender lines in the east-central Pennsylvania area “That’s a big deal actually,” he said. “Short of finding your family, discovering who is not your family is pretty helpful.”

Bender also met with Jim Landis, who compiled the voluminous “Descendants of Valentine Bender” with help from his daughter, Patricia Bender. At first it seemed as if this line would be eliminated, too, because they didn’t show up as cousins in the Ancestry autosomal test.

But through Y-DNA testing of Eric and Patricia’s son Jeremy, their results were rated a 98.82 percent probability of sharing an ancestor within eight generations. “I’m convinced: I am part of Valentine’s family,” Eric Bender says.

While there is still work to do – confirming an origin in Germany, for instance, Eric has a degree of closure. “At any rate, I’m prepared to finish writing my Bender genealogy; it’s been sitting, unfinished, in my computer for about 15 years,” he said.