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.