The Long Journey of your Genome: Part 2

Many of us wonder what path our ancestors traveled through prehistory to the time that pieces of their journey were recorded in various forms of the written word. Those of us who have European female ancestry can use a full mitochondrial test to tell us from which of the Seven Daughters of Eve we descended through our direct maternal lines. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that we may have descended from several of the seven daughters described by Bryan Sykes or even from sisters of the Eve hypothesized in his book. For example my maternal grandmother in a direct umbilical line descended from Helena but my paternal grandmother descended in a parallel line from Ursula. My daughter and son descended from Helena by a very different "umbilical cord" line. Through my daughter-in-law my Dowell grandchildren picked up a second line from Ursula and a line from Katrine through their maternal grandfather. 

Connecting these ancient SNP defined lines with our documented genealogies has been more problematic. Some of us have been able to make haplogroup connections that are meaningful to our genealogical research; but most of us have not. Full mitochondrial databases are still very small compared to both yDNA and atDNA databases so matches are not as common. Also, as I discussed in Part 1 of this series, the amount of information recorded in your mitochondria is minuscule compared to that contained in your chromosomes.

Beginning to read your  - Results 

Much of the information that is reported to those of us who have taken the BIG Y test is unintelligible to most of us -- at least at first. FTDNA does not report our BIG Y results in the yDNA section of our My DNA page. Rather, it is in the Other Results section. This is the first indicator that BIG Y results have not yet been integrated with the rest of your yDNA reports. This is most important to remember when you try to understand the place of your own SNPs within the FTDNA. No SNPs have been added to the Y-DNA Haplotree since the inception of BIG Y testing a year ago. 

Only SNPs that had been discovered by FTDNA or GENO2 prior to November, 2013 are included in the FTDNA's current tree. Even some of the SNPs for which you may have confirmed results from individual tests at FTDNA are not reflected on their current tree. These also may not be included in their listing of your confirmed results on your opening my DNA page. For example in 2012 I took an individual SNP test at FTDNA for a SNP named DF13 and was found to be positive. DF13 was then and is now known to be below L21. However, I am still being shown to have a terminal SNP of L21 on my FTDNA report. More recently BIG Y has discovered about thirty more SNPs below DF13. 

There is no way FTDNA could have included those thirty SNP in their tree yet. This is a different kind of exploration. The BIG Y is a voyage into the unknown inner space of our yDNA. However, DF13 was known and I had been tested for it more than a year before BIG Y blasted off and more than a year before the last update of FTDNA's current tree. This is not a criticism of FTDNA's tree as much as it is a caveat warning you not to read too much into it. Probably less that one-tenth of the SNPs on our Y chromosomes, about which we know today, were known at the time FTDNA was putting the current table together. It is going to be a monumental effort to update it.

I think I'll stop now before continuing soon with some hints on how you can begin to interpret your BIG Y results. That is really what I started to do in Part 1 before I decided I needed to give some background first.

What's So Big About The BIG Y Test?

Some of you may be in a similar predicament to the one I have been in for half a century. I know who my 6th great-grandfather is on my surname line; but I don't know anything about where he came from. My ancestor, Philip Dowell showed up as an established tobacco planter in Southern Maryland in the 1690s. The rest of his life until his death in 1733 is pretty well documented. 

My first DNA test back in 2004 was supposed to help. It didn't. Well actually it did. It told me I was not related to most of the Dowells who were in Colonial Virginia. I wanted it to tell me who I was related to on the other side of the pond. On that question I have not really progressed much since 2004 or 1966 for that matter.

Over the years I have been able to make connections with many of living descendants -- including straight line male Dowell descendants of three of his four sons who lived to produce offspring. By testing our yDNA and triangulating the results we have been able to reconstruct what Philip's 111 yDNA STR marker test report would have said if he had been tested by FTDNA. However, we really are not much closer to tracing his origins prior to 1690. Over the last decade we have made contact with a few other non-Dowells who are within spitting distance of Philip's yDNA signature at 67 and 111 STR markers.

I was an easy recruit to take the BIG Y test when it was rolled out in November. My sixth cousin -- once removed, George Dowell and a more distant ySTR match, Herb McDaniel also decided to test.


yDNA Haplogroups

Many of you may know that R1b is the most common male haplogroup along the Atlantic coastline of Western Europe. One of its branches, L21, is very heavily represented in the British Isles. Many of those who have taken yDNA tests in the last decade have either been confirmed or at least projected to belong to the L21 group. 

For those of you who are not into STRs and SNPs, L21 is a SNP along the human migration path that represents permanent branching. To the best of our knowledge at the moment, the first male to have his "G" mutate to a "C" at location L21 on his yDNA did so about four millennia ago. All of his straight line male descendants have inherited this C. 

Now with the new SNP data flowing in from BIG Y and other expanded tests of SNPs along the yDNA, we are able to shrink the four millennia down somewhat. My goal is to find SNPs that have occurred in the last 3 to 5 centuries. This may help us connect our SNP paths with our STR data and with our traditional genealogical trees.

SNP Trail from R1b-L21 to S1026 and even more recently.

In the last month we have been closing that gap, but we still have a long way to go. My own most recent SNP is getting closer. Indications are that DF13 (also known by other designations shown in the box above) first appeared about 3,500 years. Now we have SNP S1026 to narrow the gap even further. After that come 5 SNPs in the center box in the chart above. They need a lot of analysis to place them in the proper sequence with each other and in the right historical era. Five of the seven of us who so far have tested positive for S1026 share those five SNPs which are just in the process of being named as I write this post. Then it looks like there are 18 additional SNPs even closer to the present that I share with Herb McDaniel. It will be interesting to see how the results of my cousin George and others help us fill in even more of our time gap. 

I am not advocating that  any of you rush and order the BIG Y or the Full Genomes Y Sequencing tests. These are still vehicles for discovery of SNP trails rather than for finding cousins. STR tests are still better for the latter. If  you want to SNP test, your dollars will be better spent if you build on what is being discovered by others. Generally your best strategy will be to find a near or even a  distant STR match who has taken one of these mega tests. First confirm the most recent SNP you appear to share by taking a single SNP test. Then consult with your haplogroup or surname project coordinators for suggestions for addition SNPs to test individually. Happy SNP chasing!