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Author Topic: Fitzpatrick's DNA Work?  (Read 10424 times)

Sheila Shigley

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Fitzpatrick's DNA Work?
« on: January 13, 2012, 07:33:36 AM »

Hi all - hope you're well!  This popped up in another forum, in case it's of interest.

Excerpt:

By Gene Johnson
Associated Press
Posted Jan 11, 2012 @ 05:01 PM

SEATTLE —
Detectives are hoping a murderer's biological link to the nation's colonial past will help identify him in the 1991 killing of a Washington teenager....Colleen Fitzpatrick has a background in nuclear physics, but she's found a second career in using forensic genealogy — genealogy assisted by DNA profiles — to track people down or help find relatives....Fitzpatrick says she has also tracked down a distant cousin of Amelia Earhart's navigator, Fred Noonan, who agreed to provide a DNA sample. If the remains of the famous pair, who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 as Earhart tried to circumnavigate the globe, are ever located, Fitzpatrick has the DNA ready to prove the link, she said: "The solution to that mystery might be in my freezer."
http://goo.gl/JBDfE

I know there was some question as to Fred's complicated line - Colleen has explained it thus, but I don't know enough about the case to know whether this means she did or didn't have the necessary DNA in the end, or whether more Noonan DNA has been collected since the following 2008 piece:

HAWKINS WORLDWIDE DNA Project
Newsletter 2008-06
30 June 2008

For the past few months, I have been the genealogist on the Amelia Earhart project, run by a group called TIGHAR - The
International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. TIGHAR has been researching the fate of Amelia Earhart and her navigator
Fred Noonan for years.

Recent efforts include DNA testing artifacts that have been found on Gardner Island in the Pacific, to compare with mtDNA
of Earhart and Noonan. In Amelia's case, she has a grand neice who could serve as a DNA reference, but Fred Noonan is
tougher. He was not married, no children, and an only child. His mother Helen Egan died in about 1896 when she was 33 yrs
old.

I am happy to report that about three weeks ago I was able to locate a family in England related to Fred Noonan along the
direct female line of the family. If you go up the tree from Fred to the common ancestor (his grandmother born in 1829) and
then back down the tree to the English family, there are eight generations separating Fred from these living references.
Ryan Parr at Genesis Genomics is now amplifying the DNA after confirming it is human. He has asked me to find a second
relative along a different line as a backup, just in case the mtDNA has experienced a mutation in the intervening generations. I
have a line descending from Fred's great grandmother (born in 1805) at the moment, down to about 1900.
Will let you guys know if there are any developments.

Stay tuned. Thanks to DNA & Genealogy, we might be able to find out what happened to Amelia Earhart.

Colleen  http://goo.gl/Y10fI
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Ric Gillespie

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Re: Fitzpatrick's DNA Work?
« Reply #1 on: January 13, 2012, 07:53:15 AM »

Colleen was mistaken.  The person she found was not in Fred's line.  I have all the data.  Just haven't had time to pull it all together and post it.
So far we have not been able to find a source (living descendent in the female line) for Noonan's mitochondrial DNA.
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Sheila Shigley

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Re: Fitzpatrick's DNA Work?
« Reply #2 on: January 14, 2012, 01:39:17 PM »

Colleen was mistaken.  The person she found was not in Fred's line.  I have all the data.  Just haven't had time to pull it all together and post it.
So far we have not been able to find a source (living descendent in the female line) for Noonan's mitochondrial DNA.

Thanks for that, Ric!  Too bad, but...the search goes on.
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