For most of the mutations among those tested (i.e., the differences from the modal haplotype of the family), their mutation is unique to themselves; these are sometimes called "private" mutations.  Until more cousins are tested and these indiviuals started getting matches, their private mutations don't tell us much more than we already know.  It's when cousins starting matching on their private (non-modal) mutations that we can start finding out where the "nodes," the branches, in the tree are because if two people share a private mutation, we know they must have a common ancestor closer to themselves than the family's progenitor.  Or at least we believe they should because these mutations are rare and there is a low probability of the same mutation occuring more than once in the same family in a few generations.

At the present time, with 18 people tested to 67 (or more) markers, we have only two such cases (of matching private markers), one of which is helpful because it is congruent with the subjects' paper genealogy and the other of which creates a serious conundrum because either we have to accept the same mutation happened more than once or that we have some serious errors in paper genealogy.

The troublesome matches are the two alleged descendants of Johann Pieter who match the descendant of Antonius in being 20 at DYS570.  In Chart 1 I resolve the issue be assuming the mutation occurred three times, which is frankly hard to swallow.  In Chart 2, I follow the DNA test results rigidly, but doing so is not at all congruent with their paper genealogy.

Snyder County Pioneers is a collections of hundreds of brief biological sketches.  Fisher was an historian, not a genealogist, and if he had good documentation, he rarely cited or quoted it, which makes everything he did automatically suspect.  Snyder County Pioneers is a secondary source, and these sketches shouldn't be given any more weight than we would give any other of those county histories from the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Yet Fisher's sketch of this family has been accepted uncritically as a "starting point" for the genealogy of the family.  It's time to go "back to the drawing board."