And so this is Christmas..and what have you done

I think since I've moved my Y DNA results to FTDNA, I've been able to take advantage of a lot of good testing and research within the FTDNA groups and also take better advantage of what I got from Ancestry.com. Last year, I thought my Y was a pretty obvious dud. Now I have what I think is a clearer picture of where my Y DNA ancestor was from..or at least the journey they took.

I'm pretty resigned that we're looking at Anglo Saxon England or some later migration from Flanders or Denmark before 1500AD. I think the Anglo Saxon/Frisian thing circa 500AD is most likely at this point but I can't totally rule out Flemish weavers or Hanseatic League members.

It's not shocking because I've been building this case for a while, initially with a lot of hesitation, but more recently with actual excitement. I feel like I've been able to move from a feeling of dread in the beginning that we Thompsons were not exactly like the other Thompsons to acceptance of a sort. Now I've moved on to learning about where we may have come from outside of the general mythology of Thompson-ness. I have actually enjoyed learning about these groups of people we call "Germanic".

I think the last few days have been an enormous success in that I feel like I'm seeing a pattern emerge that incorporates the Knowltons and Elmers that I've spent so much time with. I can see in the cluster at "Z18 and subgroups" a broad migration round the bottom of the Balitc Sea and over to England...or maybe what would become England in the future. As I watch this pattern play out I'm seeing a definite area of England for us and it's southeast England and maybe more specifically East Anglia although a paper trail to Kent wouldn't be a surprise either.

When I look at autosomal DNA I'm seeing some ties to the area as well, in the many matches that have roots in Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk. By the same token though I can't ignore my father's genetic connections to Germany and Ireland which remain a bit of a mystery. I could definitely see Germany through the Finks (Thompsons) family but many Germans have X matches which means it would be carried on the Seelye side, not the Thompson side. There is also a French component that is evident in our paper trail, but not yet making itself apparent genetically.

Clearly the Y DNA move was good for boiling things down and our autosomal DNA tests require similar work. Like the move for the Y, I should transfer autosomal tests over to FTDNA. Gedmatch.com has proven that the FTDNA database holds some clues for us.

In both the Y and autosomal cases my father and I can no longer be the only representatives of our family. We'll need others beyond the level of my grandparents to help us sort and order matches. Painfully, we'll need them for both the Y (because the Y is important for continuity) AND autosomal tests (because the Thompsons need help on all their lines) which costs money. For my dad it will become important to have a Seelye representative and a Thompson for autosomal testing. Eventually, if we can establish that the Y carries through to the Indiana Thompsons and we're not looking at a more recent NPE, we'll need to look at testing Y candidates from Butler PA..which is a shot in the dark with no guarantee of participation.

It's easy to forget, in the midst of all my talk about genetic testing, that we've made some good advances in paper work too. I think the John B Hollingsworth information is an important clue and gives a good time frame for a move from Butler PA to Madison IN. It's nice to have someone I CAN follow back to Pennsylvania with clear ties to Indiana. It may mean that I should focus more on the Thompsons in Grant Indiana where the Hollingsworth family settles down. All of that is totally paper trail driven.

I've also been able to make good progress on the Hibbard (Thompson/Finks) family totally with photographic evidence and paper trails and made progress on the Finks family itself using census records and oral histories from Finks related people in Virginia. We've had excellent success on the Thompson/Williamson front as well and added a wealth of leads for that family just by using the census to leap a missing generation. I know more about the Jeffers/Jeffries family (Thompson/Finks) than I did before and I may have some genetic evidence to support the wishy washy family trees coming out of Kentucky.

So you can't have just DNA testing alone, you have to be able to find records and connect with people if you're going to be able to make anything out of this mess. I'm lucky to live in a time where most of this work can be done online and I can take advantage of all the great work done by others to fill in gaps.

I think there are still many discoveries to be made and new cultures and histories to learn about and I'm still excited to see how things unfold and we haven't been totally backed into a corner yet. Big studies are coming out of England and Ireland that may shed new light on old data and as always, I meet new people all the time who give me great ideas and fresh creative perspectives.

Autosomal DNA Butler PA possibility?

One of the issues I've had with Autosomal DNA results is that I seem to be looking way to far back in time to match up with anyone near my missing realtives. As an example, I have several people born in the 1800s that I struggle to place, and I have nearly a thousand genetic matches with people who probably match me in the early 1700s. There's quite a leap of time.

Needless to say, Butler Pennsylvania matches are slim to none. I have a few genetic matches with family in Washington PA, but not Butler..until now. Now I have a single match with a person whose Critchlow family is from Butler PA in the 1800s. It was an awesome find! It was also frustrating, because there is no obvious connection with my Thompson family.

Aaarrgh.

In reality this match has family in the right place at the right time, but we could still really match up in the 1700s on a totally different line in a totally different town in a different state with anyone on either side of my dad's family.

The closest I come to something familiar is an offhand relationship between this match and a Bodine from New Jersey. Not stellar.

I still have hope of finding that connection somewhere though and I'll keep picking away at it. Since this and several other larger matches at Gedmatch.com are actually tests from Family Tree DNA it may be a good idea to pay the $50 and get my dad's test over there for a while.

Also it goes without saying that getting DNA from other known Thompsons would be helpful too.

New Eyes on Y DNA

During the course of puttering around on various DNA related forums, I began a conversation with another Z14 person who is not in my cluster. In conversing back and forth about his Y STRs and mine I asked if he would check his DYS458 to see if he had a microallele there. For all I know it is common to every Z14 person...so why not check. Truthfully I had expected that he did have one.

Interestingly though, he did not. Meanwhile other members of  my cluster do have this microallele. To me it really gives validity to the clustering that has been done by the project admins. They grouped us without knowing that we shared this oddity simply by the strength of the pattern in our other markers.

Okay so what it means to me that there is another Z14 person who does not have a microallele on DYS458:

Since I've learned that you retain the microallele through mutations it would place the mutation that caused the microallele in a period in time after the SNP Z14 came into being. I'm not sure if microalleles are a one way street, but it seems that way from what I've heard. So for me  and the people I've contacted in my cluster who have the DYS458.2 it would make the timeline something like this:

R1b -> R1b-U106 -> R1b-Z18 -> R1b-Z14 -> microallele at DYS458

I've seen the age of Z18 given as roughly 2000 years so Z14 is necessarily younger than that (although I don't know the estimates of it's age) and our shared microallele is younger than that. All it does is get you closer in time to the current date. To me that was exciting, because it really would be some sort of definition between Z14 people, creating branches in our tree and the possibility that there are SNPs that may follow these clusters that we don't know about yet.

The second thing that came about during our conversations was that I looked at some of my values that weren't as obvious at the 458.2 that I've spent so much time with.

We were talking about killer values at specific alleles. Values that almost no one shares. As an example I used my DYS463 which is 23. 

Here's an example of why this stood out to me. It has a lot to do with Ancestry.com's presentation. The highlighted values with numbers are those that differ from mine. You can see that my GATAH4 is not incredibly popular, but my DYS463 is down right offensive to other mammals. 

See it there DYS463 I have 23...nearly everyone else has 25. No one at ancestry has 23. I had never really put it together but my new Z14 person sure did. It's right on the Z18 and subgroups page labelled 

DYS463=25 or the "Root of all Evil". http://www.familytreedna.com/public/r-z18/default.aspx

Apparently if you have a 25 at DYS463 then they are 78% sure that you're going to come out R1b-Z18. So 25 is the mode for Z18 humans. It's also the mode in my cluster at FTDNA where I appear to be the only person who does not have it. I'm also one of the few people who tested for it.

That is why all of my ancestry matches seem to have this 25 value at DYS463..they are all also more likely to be R1b-Z18. I thought 25 was the value for all humans, but it turns out it's a dead giveaway for Z18 status. So the irony is that I don't have it and I'm Z18 positive. I am the odd man among my own matches.

It's odd, but how odd can it be?! Well, there are some reasons I may not see other Z14 people with my 23. One is that you would only know anything about DYS463 if you tested at SMGF or Ancestry.com for their 46 marker test or ordered the 111 test at FTDNA.

According to SMGF 23 at DYS463 is about 8% of the population. If I take that as a rough guide and look at Z18 where 25 is the mode and I'm also in a smaller subset of the population that has a DYS458.2 then the odds of finding matches at all seem pretty unlikely.

So nobody at ancestry has it, and nobody at the Z18 group had it (of those that tested for it). Time to go back to good old SMGF and have a look. 

You'll have to squint, but it's there DYS463 is 23 and who do I share it with at SMGF? The Knowltons and the Elmer. Since there are multiple Knowltons and I also have Knowltons and Elmers at FTDNA, I would imagine this is a pattern for our families. SMGF is hard because it has no haplogroup information. There are others at SMGF who have the 23 like Dester from Switzerland, Nunn from England and Burke from Ireland (apparently the name is an anglo saxon name based on burg).

I couldn't tell you who else in the cumberland cluster has it beside me the Knowltons and the Elmers, but I can say that the one Damron at Ancestry.com has 25 there. The Damerons share the DYS458 microallele, but not this really odd value at DYS463...or at least that is the case for the single Dam(e)ron test I have at Ancestry.

So to me that is exciting. if we had more 111 marker tests in our cluster it would be interesting to see who else in there has this. It's also interesting that these two families, the Knowltons and Elmers have their roots in Southeast England and maybe even more specifically East Anglia?

It makes me more confident of the work that has gone on thus far and, to me at least, it strengthens the position of England on my Y line.

It also points out how valuable another set of eyes is, even when you may not be related for the last 1500 years you can still give each other a helping hand.