The DNA
A granddaughter of Pablo Armando has tested at MyHeritage. One result confirms outright what until a fortnight ago rested on a single passport. The other unsettles an assumption this archive had been making without noticing.
On privacy, first. The test belongs to a living person, and this archive omits the living. She is not named on this page and her ethnicity profile is not published. Three figures appear below, and only because they are evidence about Pablo Armando, who died in 1950. The rest is held privately. Method →
Her position in the descent is what makes any of it readable: she is one quarter Pablo Armando. Her other three grandparents are Mary Septima Taylor — English, of Devon and Suffolk — and two Booyzens, Cape Afrikaner.
What it settles
Argentina (Corrientes and Buenos Aires), Uruguay and Paraguay
Group 6330 · built from 178 DNA kits, 61 of them linked to family trees
A genetic group is not an ethnicity percentage. It is a cluster of people who share actual segments of chromosome and whose documented trees converge on one region. This one converges on the Río de la Plata.
It can only have come from him. English Devon and Cape Afrikaner do not produce a Río de la Plata cluster. Of her four grandparents, exactly one was born in Argentina.
So the Argentine origin now stands on three independent legs: his own 1940 passport; the 1908 army enrolment card found in a drawer in Buenos Aires; and a chromosome. A fortnight ago it stood on one.
And the group’s top places for 1900–1950 name Santa Fe. Not merely Argentina, and not merely Buenos Aires — Santa Fe, by name, alongside Buenos Aires, Corrientes and Entre Ríos. That is the first time anything outside this family’s own paperwork has independently pointed at the province the passport and the card both give.
What it questions
Here the result is more interesting than comfortable.
There is no Spanish component whatever. If Pablo Armando had been the Spanish-descended criollo this archive has quietly assumed, a granddaughter should carry something in the order of 25% Iberian. She carries none.
What she does carry is Italian — and her other three grandparents are English and Afrikaner, so it has nowhere else to come from. At one quarter, 11.1% in her implies roughly 44% in him: about one Italian parent.
And the split is northern-dominant, 6.1% against 3.6% — the signature of the Ligurian and Piedmontese emigration that made Rosario the most Italian city in Argentina.
Why that would explain rather a lot
If Juan Carlos or María Lerena was an Italian immigrant, four stubborn nulls stop being mysterious.
| The null | What an Italian family would explain |
|---|---|
| No Lerena marriage at Rosario, 1867–1885 read at full resolution, and clean | A couple who married in Italy before emigrating would not be in that book at all. |
| The register around his birth two months read act by act | It is full of Ligurian and Piedmontese names — Piaggio, Ricotti, Savoni, Bianchi, Ferrari, Daneri, Scorzetti, Busaglia, Forchelli, Balerini, Peduci, Louraschi, Ranieri, Figallo, Comazzi, Tavella, Angeli. That is the world he was born into. |
| His death was registered LERINA treated here as a clerk’s slip | CEMLA records LERINA as an Italian surname — Laurensa Lerina, 59, and Savina Lerina, 55, both Italiana, arriving from Genova in 1889. If the family were North Italian, Lerina may be nearer the original than Lerena, and the “error” may be the one document that got it right. |
| Cajón 985 filed the name by sound | Lera, Lorena, Serena, Perena, all interfiled — a clerk hearing a foreign name. |
The other groups — and they weaken the Italian case
Same day. The slider was moved to low confidence and the count went from three of eight to eight of eight. The result argues against the hypothesis above, and it is recorded here rather than left in a drawer.
A technical point first: the confidence slider governs the genetic groups only. The ethnicity percentages are identical in both views — the same thirteen values, the same figures. Nothing above changes.
| Five of the eight, legible | Whose it is |
|---|---|
| South Africa | the Booyzen half |
| South Africa and Zimbabwe | the family’s spread into the Transvaal and beyond |
| Argentina (Corrientes and Buenos Aires), Uruguay and Paraguay | can only be Pablo Armando |
| England | Mary Septima Taylor |
| Ireland (Cork, Kerry and Limerick) and England | Mary Septima Taylor, or the Cape |
Three remain below the fold and have not been seen.
It does not kill it — a genetic group needs enough tested people from a region with documented trees, and an Italian great-grandparent’s cluster can fail to form. But the easiest confirmation was available and did not appear, and the case is weaker for it than it was this morning.
The asymmetry is worth stating plainly. The Río de la Plata group is a positive result: a cluster formed, at high confidence, from 178 kits. The Italian claim rests on a negative — an absence of Iberian percentage — plus arithmetic on an 11.1% figure. Those are not the same class of evidence, and this archive should not treat them as though they were.
And one thing the eight groups do confirm. Every group except the Río de la Plata one is accounted for by her other three grandparents — two South African, two British Isles. That is what a clean four-grandparent reading looks like, and it makes the Argentine group harder to explain away rather than easier. The thing it proves, it proves more firmly than before.
What it does not do
An ethnicity estimate is not evidence of the same class as a record. At one quarter the noise is large, reference panels bleed into one another, and MyHeritage in particular is known to distribute Iberian awkwardly across French, North Italian and Sardinian. A 0% Iberian reading is suggestive. It is not a disproof of Spanish ancestry.
The genetic group is much the stronger of the two signals, because it rests on shared segments and documented trees rather than on a continental model. And note what it actually says: it says Río de la Plata. It does not say Italian.
What to do with it next
- See the other five genetic groups. Only three of eight are shown at high confidence. If an Italian group sits among the other five, this moves from arithmetic to evidence. One slider, one screenshot.
- Work the matches, not the percentages. A single match with a documented Argentine or Italian tree is worth more than any estimate.
- Re-read the sweeps for LERINA. The Rosario index sweeps recorded no Lerena, Llerena, Larena or Lorena — Lerina was never separately looked for, and it sorts adjacent.
- CEMLA under LERINA and LARENA, treated as primary spellings rather than variants.