Hi Damir,

Martin correctly describes your situation. I'll just add a few points.

You may want to see this alternative visualisation from Family Tree DNA of what the family tree of R-BY5715 looks like:

https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/R-BY5715/tree

If you look in the scientific details, you will see that your R-BY5715 family is about 2000 years old, and if you look in the variants tab, you will see that BY5719 is one of the SNPs that defines the R-BY5715 haplogroup.

YSeq's R-U106 super-panel is a good way for people to cheaply test down to a recent haplogroup. We recommend this test for people who aren't planning to take a BigY test but are interested in the deep history of their families. The benefits of this are that we have a fairly clear idea of the origins of the high-level haplogroups, so we can roughly tell where your ancestors were thousands of years ago (I think I've explained that background to you already). However, as we approach the present, we paradoxically have less information to work with, because we have fewer testers on which to base our judgements.

However, your YSeq tests are simply a static, yes/no test for a set of haplogroups. The BigY test is a discovery test. The test will scan approximately a quarter of your Y chromosome and look for new SNP mutations that you hold. With this, new haplogroups can be formed. You will find your place within R-BY5715, whether that is in a pre-existing haplogroup, or a new haplogroup. Immediately, we can say that you may find relatives closer to the present than 2000 years ago, which is where you are currently stuck.

But also, your SNPs will then be on record when new people come along, allowing new haplogroups to be formed in the future, which we don't know about yet. In future, as more people test, this will let you find new relatives closer to the present. So BigY is partly an investment in the future as well. You will find out more as the years pass.

You will also get a lot of STR results. If you have any Y-37 matches, these will get refined to Y-111, and you can use the leverage of the additional 600-700 STR markers you will get as part of the BigY to see how close you are to any matches who have also tested to these levels. Some of these matches may turn out to be irrelevant, but you may also gain matches if people have tested who are closely related to you, but have many mutations in the first 37 markers.

How useful you'll find that information really depends on what you're interested in, and exactly what the results are (which are unpredictable). Probably we will at least find something interesting for you about where your family was 1000-2000 years ago, perhaps more recently, but there is no guarantee. It can be a bit of a gamble.

Ultimately, there is also a point to kick-starting research in your area. If you have a BigY test, then it gives more reason to the people around you to test as well, since they can then immediately see how they are related to you. After all, the YSeq test you have just taken gets its SNPs from BigY tests: if you want your family's SNPs on the YSeq test, you may want to upgrade to BigY!

I'm also guessing from your name that you are of Croatian heritage. We desparately need people from southern and eastern Europe to upgrade to BigY to address the gross biases we have against testing in these regions. You would be very much doing our statistics a favour by upgrading, and with better statistics we can be clearer about how R-U106 has branched and spread over the last 5000 years. You will also help improve the estimates of how old all of the haplogroups within R-BY5715 are and, with these improved TMRCAs, we may be able to tell more about where R-BY5715 came from and how it spread.

So there are a lot of benefits to upgrading to BigY: a younger branch in the family tree, a better idea of how you are related to other tests, improved measurements of how old your recent chain of haplogroups are, and better statistics for us all. Whether those benefits are worth the cost is up to you!

Best wishes,

Iain.