Hi Jason,

Being the first person in your Y-STR match set to upgrade can be very useful in terms of deeper ancestry, as it puts your group in a wider geographical context. For the people in your wider haplogroup, this also establishes the existence of a new branch, which can be very instructive when we start to look at origins.

To clarify the point on Y-STR matches, your matches themselves are not upgraded. So if a person has only taken a Y-37 test, then you will still only see them on your Y-37 matches page. However, if you have only tested Y-37 (as Damir has) but your matches have tested to Y-67, Y-111 or BigY themselves, then upgrading to BigY will let you see these matches at the level to which they've tested.

Deceased persons' DNA is an increasing problem in genetic genealogy. The average age of new testers seems to be about 65, perhaps because something about retirement triggers a genealogical interest! However, this means that (in the US) the average tester will only live around 15-20 years, so anyone you see with a four-digit kit number is already more likely to be dead than alive. Unfortunately, there's very little that can be done, as the testing companies are generally very hesitant to use someone's DNA without clear instruction from that person or their official respresentative. This is why it is very important that testers today name a beneficiary to their account. This can be as simple as making sure the account login is passed onto your descendants, or it can (preferably also) be set up in your account:

https://help.familytreedna.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004731636-Beneficiary-Information-Tab

Cheers,

Iain.

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.

There are two places you can find out information about what Family Tree DNA holds about a haplogroup. These are the public haplotree and their Discover project:

https://www.familytreedna.com/public/y-dna-haplotree/R;name=R-FT209276

https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/R-FT209276/

I mention Family Tree DNA specifically, because they hold well over 90% of all the deep Y-DNA tests in the commercial markets, and many of the early academic samples too. For shallower tests, which don't go down to the same depth, there will be more at other companies like 23andMe, Ancestry, LivingDNA, etc.

L45 is one of the SNP mutations contained in most of these shallow tests and R-L45, the haplogroup it represents, is a family of people stretching back to a common ancestor living 2500 years ago. It is very likely that a deeper Y-DNA test than the one supplied by 23andMe would place you in a smaller branch of this family - i.e., a more recent haplogroup.

Looking at Family Tree DNA's public haplotree for R-L45, we can see a total of 308 testers, of whom 134 have stated origins, of whom 101 are from Europe and 90 are from the British Isles in particular. The remaining 11 are from Germany, Denmark and Sweden. There will be many more in other testing platforms.

Family Tree DNA knows about 96 different haplogroups within R-L45. Looking at a smaller haplogroup like R-FT209276, we have seven testers, of whom three have stated origins in Scotland (1) or Ireland (2). R-FT209276 is about 2000 years old, which is still fairly old compared to most haplogroups in R-L45. It's unlikely that there are other people in R-FT209276 on other testing platforms, since only Family Tree DNA and a few other specialised companies offering Whole Genome Sequencing tests will offer tests that cover these smaller haplogroups (and can find new ones).

This shows the difference between the shallow, chip-based tests like 23andMe, and the deep sequencing from tests like Family Tree DNA's BigY test.

In terms of working out our origins, these deep tests are vital. Knowing you are R-L45 says something about where your male-line ancestors were 2500 years ago. That says nothing about where they have travelled in the last 2500 years, so it is not very useful at picking out modern origins - like any of the cultures we think have influenced Scotland or Orkney in particular. We generally don't see R-U106 in Pictish populations: R-U106 tends to be representative of later incomers to the British Isles, and the Picts appear to be mostly from the R-DF13 haplogroup, so it is unlikely that your ancestors were Pictish, but that's about as far as we can tell.

A deeper haplogroup can tell you more about your recent ancestry (though often we are still trying to work this out, and answers are rarely clear-cut). For example, my family are from Aberdeenshire. We know that they were part of the Unetice Culture 4000 years ago, but we think that they lived in France until medieval times.

When we see R-U106 in Orkney, it is more normally associated with Viking ancestry, but there are clear instances of people coming there from medieval Ireland, and the notable Orcadian family Sinclair (unproven but likely Norman French) is part of R-U106 too. So it is not a clear-cut case to say that, because your family is from Orkney, they must either be Picts or Vikings. Other possibilities remain too, and your haplogroup of R-L45 makes these more likely. R-L45 is clearly a Germanic haplogroup, but different parts of it will have gone and become the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans and other groups that populated different parts of the British Isles.

Cheers,

Iain.