Why No Y?

 

Before we take our final leave of the Stevens quandary—the abrupt appearance and equally quick disappearance of Hugh Stevens—there's one last question I have. To put that question in shorthand, I'm wondering why there is no Y—as in Y-DNA, the genetic test which can reveal a subject's father's father's father back through time and even beyond the dates of genealogical records.

To test Hugh Stevens' supposed brother's line—that of John Stevens who immigrated to Lafayette, Indiana, in 1851—my husband took the Y-DNA test at Family Tree DNA. He tested for 111 markers, certainly far less than the 700 markers used in the most complete Y-DNA test available now, but still a sturdy indicator representing John Stevens' genetic legacy.

The result? After ten years of waiting, there are only two other men who match my husband at that 111 mark. The kicker is: neither of them is surnamed Stevens.

If I look at my husband's current matches at the next lowest level—67 markers—he has thirty two matches, but the closest of those is a genetic distance of three, not an exact match. Again, the test taker goes by a different surname. In fact, not one of those thirty two matches goes by the surname Stevens. We are not getting close here, either.

What could be the cause of this lack of results? Of course, the easiest answer could be that no one from this Stevens family has tested besides my husband. However, despite NPE possibilities—"not the parent expected"—another reason might be that there were no male descendants left to test on this patriline, other than my husband's own male cousins on the paternal side. My husband's paternal grandfather was an only son, and his father before him, though having one brother with surviving children, included a son who had no children of his own.

And that leads us back to immigrant John Stevens, the father of those two brothers. Could he have been the only surviving son of his father, as well? Or could this lack of Y-DNA matches be due to another reason—perhaps that our John Stevens wasn't really a Stevens son after all? It becomes quite a lonely planet here, when looked at through a lens like that.

No matter what the reason—only surviving Stevens patrilineal descendant or immigrant hiding under an alias—it's clear that no one else has yet tested who descends from that patriline, whatever name it turns out to be. And it's also clear that, with no further leads to answer our research questions, we need to set aside our study of John Stevens' Irish roots, likely for a very long time.