Dear all,
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I've begun to look again in earnest at the phylogeography of R-U106. To begin that, I've started some ground-work. A details the current status of phylogeography and assesses the availability of information. Family matters will likely keep me from this for a while over Christmas, but I have almost completed an analysis of ancient DNA and how it charts the spread of R-U106 as well that I will append to it when I can.
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The take-home message from this document is to make sure your earliest-known ancestor information is up to date. To find this, log into your account, go to your name in the top right, and choose Account Settings. Click on the "Genealogy" tab, then the "Earliest known ancestors" tab below it. You should have a series of text boxes for your paternal ancestor with three pieces of information: a name and birth/death date, a country of origin, and a location.
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R-U106 has 70,626 modern descendants. Of those, 9126 (13%) are in our project (though many of the rest are recent Family Finder additions). Of these, 5805 have stated that their ancestry comes from a specific European country. Of these, 4696 have also given either a identified origin along with the name of their ancestor or a latitude/longitude. Of these, 41% do not match each other. In most cases, this is testers given an earliest-known ancestor in America and a country of origin in the British Isles. This means that we only have complete and fully correct data for 20% of our members. So:
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- Please make sure your earliest-known ancestry is up to date and as accurate as possible (especially including specific locations).
- Please ensure all three boxes are complete and that the information matches between them.
- Please use modern country boundaries where possible (e.g. if your ancestor was from the Austro-Hungarian empire, don't put Austria or Hungary down unless your ancestor came from within their modern boundaries).
- Please don't quote a European country of origin unless you have good reason to believe it's true. Surnames alone aren't necessarily useful: as we've found out, just because you're a Johnson doesn't mean you weren't originally a Johannsson. Neither is the fact your ancestor was born in a British colony.
- If you do have good reason to believe your ancestry comes from Europe but can't prove it, briefly say why in the first textbox (e.g. emigrated from Bristol) and update the latitude/longitude to that location. The more complete you can make this information, the better.
The situation is not dire - we can still make reasonable predictions from the 20% of correct data and reasonable assumptions about the 29% of mis-matching data. However, it would be really helpful to have more of this information believable, self-consistent and complete. By doing this, you will be able to improve our estimates of where our ancestors came from. If you speak to your matches, or if you run another project, please also encourage those testers to do the same.
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Best wishes,
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Iain.
