Match at 37 Marker Exact Match, what does this mean?

[Wilma Wildcat]

I would enjoy a little discussion on this topic. Our Y DNA results don't match well with others with our surname; but do match well with others of about five and possibly six other different surnames. All of us look handsome together on a spreadsheet.

Also, we have a match of 67 GD4 with one surname who has his best match of 67 GD2 with one of the other surnames -- whom we also match at 67 GD2 (also our best match). Is this fellow (the GD2) more likely to be in the donor line to us both?

In the projects these folks are in, they are all in separate groups of their own on the results pages and also don't match their surnames well except for their own family, it appears. None of our family has apparently tested with FTDNA or Y search. We're alone while the other surnames have multiple testers.

I have a couple of scenarios and also a question about how to find which one is the original Y donor. First: I'm picturing a large family of children who become orphaned a couple centuries ago, and half a dozen families take a son each.

Then second I picture one very charming fellow who fathers sons with half a dozen married women of other surnames. Do these scenarios sound plausible to the experts? What other scenarios would you suggest.

I should perhaps mention that we ourselves have tons of relatives and ancestors who have been going happily along for a couple hundred years at least thinking everything was on the up and up, as far as I know.

There are cemeteries full of our dearly departed relatives, so we don't lack for family and nobody has ever suggested we weren't. I haven't discussed this with anyone in the family but my brother.

[nathanm]

I would enjoy a little discussion on this topic. Our Y DNA results don't match well with others with our surname; but do match well with others of about five and possibly six other different surnames. All of us look handsome together on a spreadsheet.

Also, we have a match of 67 GD4 with one surname who has his best match of 67 GD2 with one of the other surnames -- whom we also match at 67 GD2 (also our best match). Is this fellow (the GD2) more likely to be in the donor line to us both?

In the projects these folks are in, they are all in separate groups of their own on the results pages and also don't match their surnames well except for their own family, it appears. None of our family has apparently tested with FTDNA or Y search. We're alone while the other surnames have multiple testers.

I have a couple of scenarios and also a question about how to find which one is the original Y donor. First: I'm picturing a large family of children who become orphaned a couple centuries ago, and half a dozen families take a son each.

Then second I picture one very charming fellow who fathers sons with half a dozen married women of other surnames. Do these scenarios sound plausible to the experts? What other scenarios would you suggest.

I should perhaps mention that we ourselves have tons of relatives and ancestors who have been going happily along for a couple hundred years at least thinking everything was on the up and up, as far as I know.

There are cemeteries full of our dearly departed relatives, so we don't lack for family and nobody has ever suggested we weren't. I haven't discussed this with anyone in the family but my brother.

You might want to construct a cladogram of the close matches. It can help determine which ones are on the same branch, and which are closer to a hypothetical ancestral haplotype.

[EdwardRHill]

I first tested awhile back maybe 5 plus years ago. Around that time I had read that you have to have the Haplogroup test to confirm if you are a exact match. I have 12 or 13 exact matches at 12 markes all different surnames than mine. I have 4 matches at another site that doesn't offer the Haplogroup test. One of those matches has tested at FTDNA and I have one other match there also. We are all predicted to be R1b and I have had the test done because I have a different surname than my higher test level matches so I needed to test my Haplogroup. You have too match Haplogroup to be a exact match. If you are not in the same Haplogroup you are not a match.

[EdwardRHill]

I first tested awhile back maybe 5 plus years ago. Around that time I had read that you have to have the Haplogroup test to confirm if you are a exact match. I have 12 or 13 exact matches at 12 markes all different surnames than mine. I have 4 matches at another site that doesn't offer the Haplogroup test. One of those matches has tested at FTDNA and I have one other match there also. We are all predicted to be R1b and I have had the test done because I have a different surname than my higher test level matches so I needed to test my Haplogroup. You have too match Haplogroup to be a exact match. If you are not in the same Haplogroup you are not a match.

I took to long to edit above and was not allowed to change it to this. I first tested awhile back maybe 5 plus years ago. Around that time I had read that you have to have the Haplogroup test to confirm if you are a exact match. I have 12 or 13 exact matches at 12 markers all different surnames than mine. If you are a exact match with someone with a different surname at the 12 marker level your common Ancestor would be before the use of Surnames about 400 years ago.

The more markers you test the clearer the picture is. The lower marker level below 37 with a different surname can be disregarded. All matches at a higher level need to test their Haplogroup to make sure they are a exact match. If they don't match the same Haplogroup they are not related. If they do match than they maybe a NPE (None Paternal Event) or the name was change for what ever reason.

[efgen]

I would enjoy a little discussion on this topic. Our Y DNA results don't match well with others with our surname; but do match well with others of about five and possibly six other different surnames. All of us look handsome together on a spreadsheet.

What's the ancestry of this line? There are some very valid reasons for matches with different surnames for certain populations.

Elise

[Wilma Wildcat]

Elise, it's just English; Border Scots, Scots-Irish; Anglo-Saxon; Colonial American since 1600's sort. From our matches, it's likely whatever happened, happened here in the U.S.

[Wilma Wildcat]

P.S. I was just going over some correspondence, and I found something I missed before.

An individual from one of the other surnames said he had a hunch that the mother of their oldest known ancestor was a widow. So it seems like adoption could be a likely scenario. And in that case the donor would be that surname.

This would have occurred in the 1600's colonies, so plenty of time to count for the less close GD's.

[Wilma Wildcat]

You might want to construct a cladogram of the close matches. It can help determine which ones are on the same branch, and which are closer to a hypothetical ancestral haplotype.

Thank you; it's a good idea, if we could get everybody to test, which doesn't seem likely, unfortunately. Some have already said they tried and failed to interest relatives to test again or for the first time.

We do know which sub clade it is, though; one of the surnames is already in the sub clade project, and the admin can suspect others pretty well by markers. Our test is in the pipeline now.

[nathanm]

Thank you; it's a good idea, if we could get everybody to test, which doesn't seem likely, unfortunately. Some have already said they tried and failed to interest relatives to test again or for the first time.

We do know which sub clade it is, though; one of the surnames is already in the sub clade project, and the admin can suspect others pretty well by markers. Our test is in the pipeline now.

I didn't mean a deep clade test, but constructing the type of diagram known as a cladogram from the matches you already have.

If it's not too many, one can be drawn fairly easily by hand in Visio, PowerPoint, or any other graphics program that can draw shapes and connecting lines. Group people together with identical haplotypes into separate nodes. (It looks nicer if the nodes are sized according to how many people share that haplotype.) Then draw lines between the closest matching nodes, noting which marker differs on the line. Do the same for all the nodes, branching them off their nearest matches.

Otherwise, if there are too many potential matches, and lots of differing markers, there's plenty of software to help construct them. Coincidentally, I was just experimenting with Network today, which is free to download. You can enter in each taxon (person ID) and locus (marker), and the corresponding STR values. Or to make it easier, since you already have a spreadsheet, it can load the values from a file. It expects a .ych file, which is simply a text file with the numbers formatted a specific way. (It comes with examples, or you can edit the numbers and save it to see the format.) For my experiment, I exported a spreadsheet of 30 people with 12 markers to a .csv file, then manually edited it to change it to .ych format (took less than 5 min.). It also lets you weight the markers, which I fiddled with a bit, based on the mutation rates. I attached one of my results, although I'm still just getting the hang of the software.

[Wilma Wildcat]

nathanm, thanks for the instructions. We might get a chance to work on that this weekend. We have to install Windows for that program, as there doesn't seem to be a cladogram program for Mac. I've seen a mutation rate chart, but don't know how to weight it.

[nathanm]

nathanm, thanks for the instructions. We might get a chance to work on that this weekend. We have to install Windows for that program, as there doesn't seem to be a cladogram program for Mac. I've seen a mutation rate chart, but don't know how to weight it.

I wouldn't be so sure there aren't similar programs for MacOS. Look through this ginormous list of various genetics-related software. I'm a Mac user myself, but I decided to try Network while I'd rebooted into Windows to draw some diagrams in Visio. There are lots of other programs that make similar charts, but Network seemed like the simplest, most straightforward to start with. I also found more detailed instructions for creating the input files today on Colleen Fitzpatrick's Forensic Genealogy website.

Her instructions include a link to Y-Utility, which I'd seen before, but seems rather complicated (thankfully, it has its own instructions). It can take raw haplotypes and output them in different formats, including Network and another software package called PHYLIP. The notes include a couple more links, including one on creating charts from the Ham Surname DNA Project. The latter instructions require PHYLIP and MEGA, which both run on MacOS, although I haven't tried either one yet.

Regarding weighting, the Network software defaults to a weight of 10 for each marker. However, they can be changed to any value from 0 to 99. I was just using the first 12 markers, of which eight have similar mutation rates. DYS392 & DYS393 are slightly slower mutating, DYS388 even slower, and DYS426 is glacial compared to the rest of the markers. Since DYS426 is orders of magnitude slower than the rest, weighting it at 100 and leaving the rest at 10 is probably a good starting point. I tried a few different weightings to see how it affected the cladogram.

[deniseneufeld]

This opens up a can of worms!

I have a feeling (based on the name matches I am getting) that most people are not who they believe they are. It only takes one infidelity on the paternal side over the last 500-1000 years to put ones Y markers anywhere but where one believes. The only way to "know" is for many of your recent male cousins to test and then a map can be made where the "chain-of-custody" is broken.

[Yaffa]

This opens up a can of worms!

Especially if you have Indigenous ancestors who might have belonged to tribes that were mother clan. So far I have 5 on record who got mother's surnames instead of fathers. Y -DNA has revealed I got 2 more NPE lines on top of the ones I have on record and Im sure there might be more. Makes it even harder to find your connections on Family Finder because it can go to any line ancestor. This issue is all happening within 100 years of the living.