R1b, H7 found in Mallorca ;-)

[guillem]

Hi everybody! My mother tongue is Catalan, which is co-official with Spanish where I live so English would be my third language... I apologize for all the mistakes I _will_ make. Sorry. Feel free to correct me O:-)

I'm a Telecommunications Technical Engineer (3 years degree), a Computer Scientist (5 years degree), and now I'm pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at UIB (Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain).

So, I have some technical background... but I'm fairly new to genealogy and genetics. I'm interested in these areas mainly as a hobby, but I'd love to learn enough about them to do some serious (and hopefully useful, or at least interesting) research in the future.

My DNA has already been tested during the last year at FTDNA (everything but Full Mitochondria Sequence) and now I have a lot of results waiting to be used. I understand that most of these results need to be put in context in many, many senses. I would appreciate your comments and recommendations to get the most of my results. I'd like to know whether some conclusions I've already drawn are totally or partially right (or just wrong!).

For instance, my yDNA haplogroup is R1b and my mtDNA haplogroup is H7. R1b is pretty common (yeah, my paternal line is european, I could probably have said that in front of a mirror with no DNA tests at all ;-) but H7 looks very exciting: it's relatively scarce and unknown. And my maternal line is more mysterious to me, due to our naming conventions!

My full name is Guillem Cantallops Ramis. Guillem is my name. Cantallops is my first surname and I got it from my father, he got it from his father, etc. So the paternal line keeps the first surname here, and Cantallops has probably been related to haplogroup R1b at least for some centuries. I live in Mallorca (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorca#History). In 1229 the island was conquered by Christians (mainly) from Catalonia.

As far as I know, Cantallops has never been a prestigious family name associated to nobiliary privileges. But there are several geographic features and towns called Cantallops in the Pyrenees (it makes sense: "canta" is a Latin root for "sing" and "llops" is "wolves" in Catalan :-) Of course, people coming to Mallorca from these places could have been genetically diverse and it's probably easy to find non-R1b Cantallops. But at least that surname has some kind of relation to the haplogroup.

Ramis is my second surname and I got it from my mother. But she got it from his father so it's not related to the H7 haplogroup. Here we get our second surname from our mother, but we take her first surname, not the second one. So in fact we always get the first surname of both grandfathers. No maternal lineage in our names :-(

I've done some (extremely amateur!) classic genealogic research. I've got data about ancestors of mine in the early 19th century, but for most branches I'm stuck in the 20th century. That's OK, I haven't seen written documents _yet_, I've just interviewed my relatives. The most interesting fact I've found out is that I'm closely related to Juan Mascaró Fornés, a prestigious sanskritist who taught in Cambridge.

I discovered FTDNA when I signed up for the Genographic Project. I did it to learn more about my ancestors. I think it would be great to find out more facts linking me to specific geographic locations, (pre)historic events or ethnic groups. And if I didn't get it wrong, this _must_ be done by comparing my results (and additional informations) to others, and by using statistical methods (I _do_ hate statistics, but sometimes you can't have that abstract thing called "truth" O:-)

Do you know how could I learn more about Haplogroup H7? Can I help to clarify its history? How?

Well, a conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking. Today, the conclusion is here. Nice to meet you. Thank you for reading this messy brainstorm. Happy New Year to everybody, R1b/H7 or not ;-)

[MMaddi]

Do you know how could I learn more about Haplogroup H7? Can I help to clarify its history? How?

Well, a conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking. Today, the conclusion is here. Nice to meet you. Thank you for reading this messy brainstorm. Happy New Year to everybody, R1b/H7 or not ;-)

Guillem,

Happy New Year to you too. Your English is very good, so don't worry about that. My New Year's resolution is to learn at least some Italian as in September I plan to visit the town in Sicily where my paternal grandparents were from. I hope I learn to speak Italian half as well as you write English.

I would recommend that you upload (for free) your yDNA and mtDNA results to ysearch and mitosearch, which are both run by Family Tree DNA. Just go to your Family Tree DNA personal page. Click on the "yDNA Matches" tab and look for the link to click on to upload your yDNA results. To upload your mtDNA results, click on the "mtDNA Matches" tabe and click on the link to upload your mtDNA results. Although run by Family Tree DNA, both ysearch and mitosearch have results from people who have not been tested by Family Tree DNA, so you will have a broader cross-section of people to match with.

I am R1b (R1b1c) too. It used to be that being R1b was very boring, but in the last couple of months that has changed. There are new SNPs that have been discovered that will create new subclades for R1b and have big implications for the understanding of population geneticists of how and from where the R1b haplogroup spread across Europe 10-12,000 years ago as the Ice Age ended. The prevailing theory was that humans found a refuge in Spain during the Ice Age and mainly had R1b yDNA. Then when the glaciers receded, the R1b men spread from Spain into northern, western and central Europe. Now the theory that men with R1b yDNA may have also found refuge from the Ice Age in northern/central Italy and the Balkans and spread north and west from there may be getting some clues to back up this theory. So it's an exciting time to be R1b.

Mike Maddi

[Eternitat]

All my father's family is from Mallorca. He's 2nd generation at most, hence he considers himself Mallorcan Catalan and not really from PR or the USA so much.

His name is Sebastian Colom Alemany. We do not know if his Colom branch were convert Jews or from how far back. We do know that his mother was part German (hence the name) and had ties to the German royal family.

He does not want his DNA to be tested for some reason, but he is into researching family background. Right now he is curious as to whether the latest theory on Cristofor Colom's (yes, the explorer) exact family origin is.

My father attended the University of Barcelona. We've been to Mallorca and to Barcelona in the past- I would like to go again.

I never met anyone named Cantallops. But there was someone named Ramis that my mother knew. There are some Catalan (both mainland and Balearic) immigrants where we used to live. However, my father's family was rather recent and he lived in the mother country for so long that we were considered more "foreign" than the norm. I even have his accent. And that's the reason for my username.