In 1885, Xaver, a young Austrian blacksmith, ran away from home to make it big. After finding a new job abroad, Xaver, a foreigner, falls in love with Dina, the 17-year-old Catholic Jewish daughter of his boss. He was later fired. But that’s just the beginning of this family drama.
Dina runs away from home to be with Xaver and finds a place to live and work in the home of Ron, a 30-year-old Jewish factory owner. In 1887, she gave birth to a son, named Renc, who was said to be Ron’s father. Renc received Jewish rites and was baptized in a Catholic church.
But Dina and Xaver remained together, and after Xaver achieved some success in his career, the two married in 1889. Xaver acknowledged Renc, then one and a half years old, as his own child, and Ron supported family support. Xaver and Dina went on to have three more children, including a son named Arles. During World War II, Renc’s full Jewish ancestry was kept secret, while he and his relationships lived in fear of deportation to concentration camps.
The secret of his paternity had been public for many years, but within the family, Renc’s father’s true identity was passed down from generation to generation.
Fast-forward to May 2017, when Cordula Haas, a forensic geneticist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, was approached with an unusual request. The descendants of Renc and Arles want to verify that Ron is indeed Renc’s biological father. The family offered cheek swabs from the surviving descendants of Dina, Renc and Arles for DNA analysis, and – at Haas’s urging – several postcards had been sent by Renc and Ron that might have kept their DNA. them in the remaining saliva. for stamping.
Solving kinship cases is a common task in forensic genetics, but the case is a bit more complicated than Haas used to be. For a year and a half, she and her team tried to confirm the story but to no avail. By October 2018, they had packed up and left. But then, in March 2020, the family returned, this time with more heirlooms. They found some more old postcards sent by Arles on a business trip in 1922.
The scientists compared the DNA found under the stamps of these cards with DNA found on postcards sent by Renc while he was fighting in World War I and on post-war travels. They found a common Y-chromosome lineage, meaning the two brothers share a common father. After more than a century, the family has ended their fatherhood drama: Xaver, not Ron, is Renc’s father.
With family consent, Haas and her colleagues detailed their investigation in a paper published this month in the magazine International Forensic Science. (All names have been changed, at the family’s request.) And while it may seem like an interesting end to a family mystery, extracting centuries of DNA from artifacts— a licked envelope cap, hair from an old brush—Once considered The next big thing in genetic pedigree. Its promise lies in providing people with the opportunity to gain valuable insights into long-dead ancestors and loved ones, look deeper into their genealogies, and potentially reunite with current relatives.
