Hi Ed,

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The simple answer is that, unless they're in one of the matches lists of a kit you have access to, you can't. The same applies to admins too, although obviously we have more kits we can see.

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These days there are clearer recommendations of groups to join for new and upgrading testers, and we are seeing people join the project as a result of these upgrades. So, as a project, we can make these kinds of recommendations if testers pro-actively join up as members. For more global requests to people we can't directly contact, we can engage as a group with FTDNA - we've done this in the past, but this is the tactical nuclear option, so it's probably something to be considered once the analysis is complete and we know exactly what we're dealing with.

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Do remember though, that we can expect that a quarter of these testers are already dead and the remainder may not be sufficiently interested in Y-DNA to bother upgrading. The fraction who might upgrade will be much less than from Y-STR testing, for instance. We can't expect the doubling of overall database size over the last six months to equate to a doubling in BigY testing in the future - that will still take many years.

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Cheers,

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Iain.

Hi Jason,

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Good to hear you have your results through. You can find out more about your haplogroup on Discover:

though do be a little critical of the GlobeTrekker output for now - it is still often quite far from the truth.

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Your "terminal" haplogroup, R-FT368395, is between about 1000 and 2000 years old, but probably somewhere in the middle. We can't be more precise than that until we get more data.

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The bad news is that this means that no-one has taken a BigY test who is more closely related to you than that. If that were the case, we would have probably expected to see them on your Y-111 matches anyway. However, we can expect to eventually find new people who are closer to you and provide more accurate dates as time progresses and more people test.

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Your family is held in high esteem in our little world. Of the handful of tested people within your haplogroup, one is James Watson, one of the discoverers of the DNA double helix. You share a relationship at the age of R-FT368395, so somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years ago - that makes him a distant cousin, but very few people can claim such a close relationship!

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You also share an ancestry from somewhere between 1800 and 2600 years ago with an ancient burial, Cherry Hinton 923, from Cambridgeshire. This is via the older and larger haplogroup R-FGC51269.

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From this slightly larger haplogroup, we can start thinking about ancestral origins. This is a very difficult topic to be precise about and it's fraught with difficulty. A big part of this is because of the biases we have in testing. We can begin with the facts. Within the British Isles, the majority of R-FGC51269 appears to be English. However, there may be large continental populations of the haplogroup that are hidden due to lack of testing. You do have one German in this haplogroup.

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Now the speculation. The combination of a German match, a predominantly English distribution within the UK/Ireland and a haplogroup structure with many of its branches splitting within the period 200-600 AD (indicative of when the population growth happened) makes me think that your ancestors were part of the Germanic communities who migrated to Britain during the Dark Ages: we used to call them "Anglo-Saxons", but the cultural net was probably rather wider than this. This assessment is very much an educated guess, so you should be clear not to treat it as either fact or even a probable conclusion, simply the possibility I think most likely.

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Best wishes,

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Iain.

Apparently there's been an update of another nearly 80,000 tests within the last nine days. This suggests that they are working through the FF tests at quite a pace.

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- Iain.

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Hi Mary,

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What this statement means in practice is that that particular STR has failed to produce a test result. For that reason, we wouldn't know if the STR has disappeared, or if the primer has failed because of a mutation in or near the STR.

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To discover what has happened, you need a different form of testing technology. A BigY test will fully sequence shorter STRs, though not many of the longer ones in the standard first 111 that get separately tested by FTDNA. This can be used to identify which of these cases is true.

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A good example of this is the large group R-L1, which forms about 2% of R-U106 and has a null return on DYS439. Using YBrowse.org, you can see that DYS439 covers positions 12403364..12403611 and that the L1 mutation falls right in the middle of this at 12403455: this mutation causes the STR test to fail.

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Whether this knowledge is helpful to the end user or not is debateable and depends on the STR. In either case, it represents a single mutation that has occurred in the DNA strand. Unless the STR length can be recovered by other means (the 247 base pairs of the reference DYS439 is much longer than BigY's 100 base pair read length) then any STR length mutations may not be picked up.

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However, there are cases where STR deletions can identify more serious consequences. The best known of these is DYS464 deletion, which is linked to infertility, since removing all four copies of DYS464 normally necessitates a massive change to the palindromic arms of the Y chromosome, where many of the Y-chromosome's few functioning genes are located. Indeed, it's expected that the reason that multiple copies of DYS464 exist is because the Y chromosome evolved these duplications because it preserves extra copies of these few vital genes, and actions like recLOHs protect them against corruption and deletion.

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Equally, you can also have multiple STRs deleted without consequence. Randall Prouse (a fellow R-U106er) has set up the Multiple Deletion Project at FTDNA to look at these. His own line has had several million base pairs taken out of the Yp arm, and this has been transmitted without consequence for about 1000 years.

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Best wishes,

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Iain.

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Hi Mike,

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As others have pointed out, these individuals are related many thousands of years ago.

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If you'd like to get an estimate of how closely two people are related via Y-STRs, you can try this tool:

For your selection, you can simply uncheck the "exists"/"enable" check boxes at the top of the screen for the seven markers that you don't have to compare.

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Cheers,

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Iain.

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