World Wide Venters + DNA
Are SA Venter’s and US/German Venters related to each other ?
Jan Adriaan Venter born 20 June 1881 and Christina Adriana du Plessis. Image taken circa 1906. Grandparents of Piet Venter
About a year ago my friend in the USA, Robert Venter, and I, asked ourselves the question formulated above. We had already been able to trace our earliest known ancestors back to two persons who were born in two different localities in Germany in the 17th and early 18th centuries, respectively. Robert’s earliest known ancestor was Johann Adam Venter, born in Roth, near Meisenheim in the Palatinate, in 1715, and my own earliest known ancestor was Hendrik Conrad Venter, who was born Heinrich Conrad von Dempter, in Hamelin, during 1663.
There are believed to be 60000 Venters in South Africa, so we are a large family. There are 189 Venters in the German Phone Book, and there are also a number of Venters in the USA – our guess is that all of them might be descendants of German emigrants to the US. In fact, Robert’s grandfather was an immigrant from Germany.
There was no way in which Robert and I could connect any of our ancestors in Germany by paper-genealogy, to find out whether we are related, and so we went the route of comparing our Y-DNA results. Robert’s Y-haplogroup, and that of another American Venter (and a Fenter), is R1b1 – a haplogroup is a group of persons classified according to specific DNA characteristics. I was the first SA Venter to have had my own Y-DNA tested for a project run by Robert, and the results showed that my Y-haplogroup is R1a. This also showed up in the tests done on four other SA Venters, who like me, can trace their lineages back to Hendrik Conrad Venter.
The fact that the five SA Venters shown on the chart belong to the same haplogroup (R1a), is hardly surprising, because this was the expected result, unless there was some non-paternal event in someone’s male ancestry that would have broken the ‘lineal’ chain or standard ‘pattern’ of Y-chromosome markers. Such markers are passed on unaltered, except for some random mutations, through many generations, from father to son, in any family lineage. Bearing all of this in mind, we are now almost in a position where we can state positively that SA Venter males are R1a’s, and that our ancestor, Hendrik Conrad Venter, must also have been an R1a.
Photo of Johann Venter born 12 November 1871 in Roth, Germany and Elizabeth Weinig (USA) grandparents of Robert Venter.
Are R1a and R1b1 Venters related? The answer is no! At any rate, a family relationship cannot be proved within conventional genealogical time frames – on the contrary, we would have to go back a few millennia to find a common ancestor. And he would apparently have been a person living somewhere in the Caucasus, whose haplogroup would have been R, or R1.
This article is an abridged version of an article called, “How many ‘Venter-lines’ world-wide?”, which obviously has a much broader scope. We are hoping to find out how many different lines of ‘genetic cousins’ we have – people with the Venter surname, or similar surnames.
Click here to see the Venter Tree. The People highlighted in red are those who have had their DNA tested
Persons who can help us in this research can contact the authors here.
Article written by Piet Venter (South Africa) and assisted by Robert Venter (U.S.A) .