So they discovered that living descendants of Beethoven weren't actually related to Beethoven because the wife of one of Beethovens great great grandkids had some other guys kids but gave them the surname Beethoven? Weak.

I thought it was that composer Beethoven wasn't related to the modern Beethoven's who were related to the originator of the name.

So composer Beethoven's branch is the "bastard" branch for lack of a more apt term.

They have to change their name to Rivers now.

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Makes you wonder how many people we think of as our ancestors actually aren't

No, it was that Ludwig van Beethoven himself wasn’t really a Beethoven. He didn’t have the Beethoven Y chromosome that all other Beethovens have.

This is what my grandpa found out. Some ancestor around 200 years ago was given our family surname but their Y-DNA didn't match. My grandpa and his cousins (who've now had their Y-DNA analyzed) have the same Y-DNA of another family (our genetic surname, if you will) so they're all related, just not the descendants of their family surname. We laugh about it because we know what the genetic surname is, so we've been tracing where our family surname and the genetic surname had interactions. Sometime between the American Revolution and about 1820 a bastard was born (among other theories)...

This is what my grandpa found out. Some ancestor around 200 years ago was given our family surname but their Y-DNA didn't match. My grandpa and his cousins (who've now had their Y-DNA analyzed) have the same Y-DNA of another family (our genetic surname, if you will) so they're all related, just not the descendants of their family surname. We laugh about it because we know what the genetic surname is, so we've been tracing where our family surname and the genetic surname had interactions. Sometime between the American Revolution and about 1820 a bastard was born (among other theories)...