Marsha - 
Same thing happened to me in both my surname family, and again in my father's mother's York family! We have had to dead end our research with one Rev. soldier, Captain William York who is indeed not a York at all, or rather he is the only one in his group with a J haplogroup! Now where did that come from? Seamen? Rome's Legions? We will probably never know!

Like you I spent 30 years researching my surname family, and with assistance, linked the family of Col. John Starke back to one Thomas Starke of London, whom we had always thought was the same family, however I have not proved it! However, our Thomas Starke was not a Starke at all! While the Thomas of London DNA was a G haplogroup, prob. descendants of Rome's Sumerian Legion, and my brother's and a cousin's DNA was the more common British Isles F1b1! Talk about falling into the most populated group! While shocked by the 'J', I was more than disappointed to learn we were not really members of the Starke family! Many other descendants of our Thomas b. 1740 have been doing research longer than I have, and all the family records handed down through the family are wrong! I have checked hard for the 'weak link' in our family chain, and it HAS to be Thomas b. 1740 since we really have no proof of his birth other than his obituary, and his parents were not named. So far, we have found two men with identical DNA, one a O'Neal and the other a Kennedy, so I should perhaps be searching in N. Ireland rather than England and Scotland where the most dominate Stark(e) families lived.

However you can't fool DNA!

I think, perhaps, our Thomas was the young son of a widow who probably married into the family (probably Col. John Starke's father, William, since the names are the same... and this family's history has always been linked with ours. We will probably never know what our surname SHOULD be... but now after subsequent generations since 1740, we ARE members of the Starke family, if only from Thomas, who was not a Starke at all! ;-)

Let me know when we are having fun!

Diane Stark Sanfilippo
  ----- 
  DNA testing is so much fun.  But it is indeed sad to throw out 20  
  years of research and wonderful family stories that are suddenly "not  
  yours".  I have proved to myself beyond the shadow of a doubt that my  
  children do not connect to the Civil War soldier named Archy Moses  
  that I spent many hours "fleshing out" over the years.  I don't know  
  if I will ever solve the question of with which Scots-Irish man they  
  do connect, however, it is VERY evident that their ancestry is Scots- 
  Irish or Irish or Scots from the DNA results and that the surname is  
  NOT Moses.  I worried about sharing the results with my son, but he  
  said with all honesty that it was the first time I had ever told him a  
  genealogy story that he was really interested in.  I highly recommend  
  getting involved with the DNA testing that is out there for  
  reassurance that you are on the right trail or as in this case for  
  proof that you are looking in the wrong direction.  Marsha Moses


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