I joined a family association that had pretty much done all the work on Chandler. I am in their DNA program and I have proven links back to my first USA 9th ggf John Chandler b. 1600, and arrived 1610 on the Hercules as part of the Lord Delaware Company at Jamestown VA.

The DNA has little to do with the proving the links. All it does is establish kinship with other families in the USA and the ROW and sets a haplo-group that tells you where your people settled as they moved out of Africa to where we are today. In my case from Scandinavia to UK and Ireland.

The UK father of our John has never been proven conclusively and the guesswork that leads us back to our Royals is just educated guesswork done by family association genealogists. They are willing to commit on his father but the real genealogists don't get seriously involved in the "probable" links that takes it back to guys like Charlemagne.

Learning about my mothers side has been a more reasonable (but frustrating) challenge. I can only prove links back to my 2nd ggf Abraham Leverett b. 1827. We can't prove a father for him and so the guesswork comes early. There is a real possibility of finding and proving his father sooner or later but the certainty that exists for the Chandlers is rare and it usually get very murky and hard to prove after 6-7 generations. I have 6 family branches that I look at and spend some time on, but they all are stuck in the late 18th to early 19th century.

It can be fascinating, especially for an ocd bean counter like me. :)