Data from non-members of Groups

[john franks]

I am thinking of setting up a haplogroup project and am curious to know how Project Group Administrators deal with the issue of useful available data which lies outside that contributed by members of the various Project Groups. I have in mind the haplotypes submitted to Ysearch by people who are not interested in joining a Project but who, by default, must be happy for others to use their data.

I appreciate that you would not put such data in the published yDNA tables for your Groups but might you use them, for example, in compiling statistics for the surname or haplogroup you are working on?

Comments would be appreciated.

John

[Robert Casey]

This is a very good question. You have two sources of those not included in your Surname project: 1) FTDNA members who have not joined your Surname project; 2) Genealogy.com submissions that you receive via email or pick up from Y-Search.

Unless you get people to join your Surname Study (update their profile to include your surname) - even admins do not have access to their DNA submissions for MRCA calculations and inclusion in any charts. You have to the other surname project and copy down their markers or get them through Y-Search. You can not calculate MRCA probabilities on possible NPEs with other surnames unless they join your surname project - this is really not very good. Getting other surname submissions to join when they do not understand possible NPEs is very difficult to do. You have to create your own spreadsheet offline to solve this issue.

There are getting to be a lot Genealogy.com submissions and requests to be included in Surname Studies. Since FTDNA does not allow admins to add non-FTDNA submissions into their database, again you have to add them offline and do not have access to MRCA calculators. The official way to get them added - test them again via FTDNA (pretty costly - but does add a lot of markers between 38 and 67 that Genealogy.com does not have).

Some of the offline spreadsheet tools now have FTDNA MRCA calculators built into their spreadsheets. They also have many other built in tools - this is probably the way to go. Have not tried that yet - but sounds like an improvement - again an offline solution from FTDNA tools.

[john franks]

Robert,

Thanks for your thoughts on this. I will bear them in mind when I get back to the project.

John