Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Good King Wenceslas - Possible Y-DNA Royalty Link


My Y chromosomal DNA shows a strong connection to the German surname Vance, or Wentz.  The surname Wentz is thought to have a connection to various Deutch Kings.  My surname is Hamilton, but the Y DNA says I have a close connection to the surname Vance and Wentz.  How close? 37 marker close at

37 MARKERS - 8 MATCHES of which 7 have the surname Vance or Wentz.


According to Wikipedia: 
Y-DNA testing results are normally stated as probabilities: For example, with the same surname a perfect 37/37 marker test match gives a 95% likelihood of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) being within 8 generations,[22] while a 111 of 111 marker match gives the same 95% likelihood of the MRCA being within only 5 generations back.[13]
[22] references www.familytreedna.com This is the company that did my Y chromosome DNA test.

What does it mean to me?  It's long shot, but there may be some relationship to German Royalty, or maybe a saint. 

More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_King_Wenceslas


Many of these families have traced their surname origins to original immigrants in the 18th or 19th century from Germany or Switzerland whose last name was Wentz or a variant like Wantz. In their new English-speaking home, the last name sounded like "Vance", and either through regular usage or by the pen of a government official the new spelling stuck.
Several books (see Online Books of Interest) describe the origin of the Wentz surname as a diminutive of "Wenceslaus" or the German variant "Wenzo", and track the name's association with a Saint Wendelin and of course several kings named Wenceslaus, with variants "Wenzelo" from 1198 through "Wenzel" in the 1300s. "Wentz" and "Wenz" were later variants appearing in the 1300s and 1400s near Basel in Switzerland and several locations in Germany. Other sources cite Slavic variants like Vaclav but agree on the same basic timeline.

The stories say an original Wentz family came out of Bohemia (part of the current Czech republic) or Pomerania (now part of Germany and Poland on the south Baltic Sea) and migrated into Bavaria in western Germany and to the city of Basel in Switzerland some 700 years ago. These stories have so far not been verified. In the 1700s and 1800s, however, several German and Swiss Wentz families immigrated to the US where the name became written as Vance.

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