Although my only planned book on
the Wehners, Bier und Brot,* has long been
completed and published, I still dabble in Wehner genealogy, while working on other,
unfinished studies.
One thing that has remained undiscussed
in these pages is the application of Genetic Genealogy (DNA studies) to the
Wehners. There was little reason to do so as long as we stuck to descendants
of the immigrant brothers Nicholas and Lorenz Wehner. Their history was, for
the most part, quite straightforward. With no “brick walls” and relatively few
puzzles, there was little or no doubt about descendancies and relationships.
Reliable records were abundant. DNA testing was unnecessary
Nevertheless, my wife, Mary
Frances (who is the Wehner descendant, not me), did take an autosomal DNA test
several years back. The test was not to determine ethnicity, for which DNA is
not all that accurate. From classical paper studies we knew that she was almost
solely European (German and English), just like me. But we were curious whether
DNA results might show relatives and branches we knew nothing about. One thing
that surprised us was that her early matches included no claimed Wehner relatives. No, she
was not adopted. It just turns our that Wehner descendants have had little
interest in DNA studies, resulting in an absence of Wehner relatives to match
with. With more and more people undergoing DNA studies, this has now changed.
Mary Frances now has Wehner
descendant matches. She is a Wehner! And her matches confirm (or at least do
not contradict) the contents of Bier und
Brot. Of particular interest is that she shows a distant match to a
descendant of Lorenz Wehner. Mary Frances, on the other hand, is descended from
Nicholas Wehner. This lends credence to our conclusion that Lorenz and Nicholas
were brothers, a conclusion based largely (but not quite solely) on a single
newspaper article stating that in June 1884 Nicholas had visited his brother “Lawrence”
in Pilot Knob, Missouri. And we found four matches for people in the Nicholas line,
three of them descended from Nicholas’s oldest son, John George (always called
just “George”). And one a close match to a second cousin. So it all fits.
Mary Frances also shows distant matches
with three people descended from Johann Michael Wehner, born in Bad Kissingen,
Bavaria, Germany in 1796, who immigrated to Boston in 1838. Was Johann related
to Nicholas, who was born near Fulda, Hesse, Germany, 3 May 1825 and immigrated
to Baltimore, arriving 31 May 1847? Perhaps, even probably. But
autosomal testing includes so many ancestors (32 GGG grandparents for Mary
Frances by the time one gets to Johann George and Flora (Müller) Wehner, parents
of Nicholas and Lorenz), matches may occur because of non-Wehner connections.
Nevertheless, it might be a starting point for an investigation of Wehner genealogy
in Germany, something I have no intention of doing.
*There are no more paper copies of Bier und Brot
available, but I am offering electronic copies free of charge. Just email me
with information about who you are, and I will return the email with a digital
copy attached
