Tag Archive | STR

Why Y?

Father’s day is always an occasion for the DNA testing companies to offer discounts on their kits and this year is no different. Give Dad a DNA kit is the message. Why should you? Well his autosomal DNA might find cousins you had lost track of, discover ethnicity you were curious about, or solve an unknown parent mystery. After all, he is one generation closer to your ancestors. I tested my late father long ago and am grateful to have that information. Click here for my evaluations of the different autosomal testing companies.

Dad and I in about 1953 (he was in the Air Force)

Only men have a Y chromosome and there are tests for just the Y. Those tests can give you information about your surname and your deep father line ancestry. Family Tree DNA is the place to test just the Y although both LivingDNA and 23andme will give you a high level Y haplogroup, plus there are tools to determine the haplogroup from an AncestryDNA or MyHeritage test (discussed at the end of this post).

If you know what a Y haplogroup is you can skip this paragraph … The 23rd pair of chromosomes is an XX for a woman and an XY for a man. The problem or benefit is that there is no second Y for that Y to recombine with. Thus unlike the other 22 chromosomes a man’s parents give him, the Y is unchanged from his Dad’s and his Dad’s and his Dad’s and so on, except for mutations. Those little changes accumulate over thousands of years and allow scientists to catalog the Y and trace the migration of mankind around the globe. Each set of Y mutations is assigned to a haplogroup, and subgroup, which can tell you where your ancestors came from thousands of years back. Here is the latest diagram from the
wikipedia article on Y

Y haplogroup world expansion – start at the big Y in Africa (A was the first haplogroup) -image from wikipedia by Maulucioni [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

If you are of European origin then click here for the Eupedia articles on each haplogroup.

Continue reading

How to figure out what Y SNPs are tested at 23andme

Those of us who are tested at 23andme and have also done the Y STR test at family tree DNA may wonder when some family tree DNA project manager says “Test SNP so and so” whether that SNP is already tested by 23andme. This post explains how to figure that out. If I have already lost you, then this post may just be too technical or else not your cup of tea. To better understand Y testing read this Y lesson by Kelly Wheaton.

For a good explanation of what a STR versus a SNP is, read Roberta Estes’ post – http://dna-explained.com/2014/02/10/strs-vs-snps-multiple-dna-personalities

So to figure out which SNPs my Dad has already tested, I first created the L11 subset image below of the R1b Y haplogroup SNPs from the beautiful diagram created for R1b by Mike Walsh because I need visuals:

R1bL11

Back to the original question. My Dad is an R1b etc and 23andme uses a four year old haplogroup designator rather than the current ISOGG R haplogroup listing. A visitor to this blog suggested that we test DF100 because that is an interesting subclade we may belong to since we have these SNPs according to 23andme: L11/PF6539/S127, L52/PF6541, P310/PF6546/S129, P311/PF6545/S128.

The diagram shows that the possible downstream SNPs for Dad are U106, DF100, and P312. So how to find out if they are tested at 23andme? Since the haplogroup at 23andme shows L52 as the last SNP can I assume the others are tested?

Continue reading

It’s a Match!! Lars Monsen’s ancestors are found.

The direct male line descendant of Ole Monsen Titland  (1702-1764) is a Y-chromosome DNA 34/37 match to my Dad, who we thought was also a descendant of Ole. Now we know he is!

Thank you so much cousin Sigmund for finding a distant cousin in direct paternal descent to test.

This story was written up a few months back in a post here but we were waiting on the DNA Y-chromosome STR test to prove our theory. Now it is proven.

Here are the deeper details of the three markers that do not match:

Continue reading

Dad’s 37 STR marker results are in!

Dad’s initial 12 marker STR test showed him to be a classic Western Atlantic Modal Haplotype (WAMH) which meant that he had over 6000 matches at family tree DNA. As you can imagine that was not very useful for finding out which of the many Lars Monsens born around 1781 in the Bergen area might be his g-grandfather. So I spent the money to upgrade him to 37 markers to see if we could do better. Now that the results are in for that, there is only one match four steps away whose most distant paternal ancestor is Swedish. I emailed him yesterday and have not yet heard back. There are also about ten 25 marker matches but they all seem to be English in origin so I have not yet emailed them.

Next step is to use the Ysearch site but it times out on my internet via tethered Blackberry so I will wait until next week for that.

Meanwhile I used the SNPs he was tested for to calculate his Y haplogroup using the latest ISOGG chart and it is R1b1a2a1a1 or R1b-L11*

Look at our test results page to read more about that haplogroup including a number of good links.