Hi Alex,

Welcome to R-DF98! Our little haplogroup contains some of Europe's biggest names, but only a few percent of its population. From ancient DNA, we can be pretty certain it arose in the Unetice Culture, in or near the modern Czech Republic, a little over 4000 years ago. However, to fill in the subsequent 4000 years, we really would need higher resolution tests, and to explore more-detailed haplogroups where we are also less certain about the haplogroup's origins.

How any individual R-DF98 line ended up in Ireland is therefore a question we can't answer. Even with a complete Y chromosome test, we can only provide an answer for some people. So for the moment, all we can say are generalisations.

In between R-DF98 and R-U106 is the intermediate group R-Z156, other parts of which probably also share Unetice descent. While I can be most detailed about R-DF98 (because, being also my haplogroup, I've studied it most closely), we can also draw from other parts of R-Z156 too to get better statistics.

I have yet to see a R-U106 line in Ireland that can be definitively traced back to before the Norman conquest (the R-Z156>S5520 MacMillan group is probably the best contender). The earliest evidence we have for any R-U106 in the British Isles is two circa 3rd century AD Roman burials (possibly gladiators) in York, which are R-Z156>DF96 and R-Z156>DF98. None of this precludes R-U106 being in Ireland or Great Britain before these dates - indeed several R-U106 lines probably were in the British Isles before these dates - but there must have been much less R-U106 than there is today.

Much of the R-U106 we see in Ireland today (and indeed most of the R-DF98 in particular) comes from the Ulster Scots Plantationers. However, these tend to be in historically Protestant families. There is a possibility of a "not the parent expected" event, such as an Ulster Scot having an illicit fling with one of your Irish ancestors, then running away!

Before the Plantation, the few R-U106 lines we can trace in Ireland probably have their roots in Scotland. The back-and-forth nature of these migrations probably brought a lot of the pre-Plantation R-U106 lines to Ireland. Scottish R-U106 comes from a variety of sources. R-DF98 in particular seems to come mostly from the late medieval settlement of southern Scotland by the Normans, but there is scant evidence in most cases and only a handful of sources to choose from.

And there is also a lot we can't trace. There are many opportunities over the last 4000 years to bring a R-DF98 line into Ireland, and many routes that we probably have yet to see documentary evidence for. So, really, any possibility is open. We can't be more clear than some of these vague possiblities with just a DF98+ call.

We could tell more with further testing: this could be a sequencing test in the future or, if you are sure you don't want to order a sequencing test in the future, you could go for an SNP pack test. This could align you with some existing families, but more likely it will provide a limiting date for the earliest your family is likely to have arrived in Ireland. That could be very recent, or a long time in the past.

Cheers,

Iain.

Hi Alex,

The "not the parent expected" possibility is remarkably common. Even in well-attested genealogies like those of medieval royal dynasties, the rate of unknown cuckoldry is about 1%, perhaps a little more. So "well-to-do" people are by no means immune. If we go back 1000 years, the probability of such events therefore becomes about 30% in any given genealogy.

And that's for situations where we know the genealogies involved. There are plenty cases where the genealogies have been hidden, either on purpose or by accident. Having a bastard child by one partner, and then later getting married to a different partner was very common: if you have a child born before the parents were married, this is a good warning sign of this. The child may inherit the mother's surname, the biological father's surname, or the adoptive father's surname, depending on who they ended up living with. Add to this adoptions from other family members, foundlings and remarriages, and you have plenty opportunity for "not the parent expected" events in your family history. There are plenty examples of this, we all have them somewhere in our family trees, and I can even point to examples in my own family that cross the Catholic-Protestant divide.

In DNA testing, particularly if you invest heavily in autosomal DNA, it's good to think of two family trees: the social one that represents the parents that actually did the upbringing, and the biological one that represents the genes that were passed on. The further back in time we go, the more these trees diverge - for everyone. In the six generations that lived before me, I can clearly point to two instances among my 126 ancestors where autosomal DNA has indiciated a discrepancy between the parents that everyone has assumed and the real biological parents.

I would not totally discount the possibility of Viking heritage. R-DF98 accounts for a small amount of Scandinavian DNA, so there were probably R-DF98 Vikings arriving in the British Isles, but there would be very few of them, and they would be more common in the Danish Vikings that arrived in England than the Norse Vikings arriving in northern Scotland and Ireland. Haplogroups I, R1a and R1b-P312 make up much more of Viking DNA than R-U106, and those R-U106 in Scandinavia tend to be from haplogroups other than R-DF98.

The Viking paper you refer to is by a well-known team - their results formalise a lot of what we were already seeing in our less-rigorous testing prior to the paper's publication. I know and have talked to some of the authors about this paper, which is part of a wider campaign to look at DNA in Ireland. However, look at the paper's conclusions again: they find a greater contribution from Vikings in autosomal DNA, but note that other studies have found a relative paucity of Viking-contributed Y-DNA. Identifying which haplogroups can and cannot be considered Viking is in itself a difficult challenge, and the results may say an equal amount about what we don't know about what Viking Y-DNA consisted of than the relative fractions of Viking Y-DNA present in Ireland today. Either way, there is relatively little Viking Y-DNA detectable in Ireland today.

Any scenario for your family remains a likely consideration. However, I think the "NPE" possibility and the Viking possibility are probably less likely than a family from Great Britain migrating to Scotland some time between the Romans' arrival in England and the Reformation. But that's not a clear winner either: we really can't tell much from a R-DF98 call alone, beyond guessing from the amalgam of data we've found from other R-DF98 families and other nearby haplogroups.

Cheers,

Iain.

Hi Noah,

I wasn't intending to say that R-P312 was more or less common than R-U106 per se, merely that I + R1a + R-P312 represents most Viking Y-DNA, while R-U106 is only a small fraction.

Indeed, R-P312 is probably not much more common among Vikings in Great Britain than R-U106. I don't know of any official studies, but using data from November (because I can't be bothered looking up fresh data), Family Tree DNA's haplotree reports the following ratios of R-P312 versus R-U106 in the Scandic countries:

Denmark 93:102

Norway 245:223

Sweden 380:460

Finland 90:115

Iceland 6:0

Faroes 1:1

This means that R-U106 does edge out R-P312 in Sweden and Finland, but the opposite is true in Norway and Denmark. The relative amounts of R-P312 to R-U106 in Viking DNA therefore does depend on exactly which Viking population you are talking about, even down to the level of a specific region within each country (both R-P312 and R-U106 tend to be more common in the southern parts of Norway and Sweden).

Aptly, I'm currently visiting Orkney, proudly Viking from 875 to 1472 AD. When we talk about "Vikings" and "Viking Y-DNA in Ireland", we have to remember that it also includes a diverse group of people, not just the raiders of the 8th and 9th century. Culturally, Vikings might include anyone from the Viking-controlled isles of Scotland and Man that had been co-opted into the Viking way of life there. Genetically, Viking Y-DNA in Ireland might include the genetic legacy of the Northmen who became the Normans in Normandy and later England. So if you want to get into the finer detail of genetic make-up than the broad brushstrokes of my first e-mail, it's important to be clear what you are including as "Viking" too. Nothing's ever that simple!

Cheers,

Iain.

Hi Noah,

I'm not sure about R-P312 in Scandinavia - it's a little outside my realm of knowledge. Certainly R-P312 seems to have travelled west before R-U106, so got a foothold on the Atlantic Coasts before R-U106 entered the area. Whether that was directly from the Corded Ware Culture or the later CWC--Bell-Beaker amalgam (the Bell Beaker resurgence) I don't think I'm really qualified to assess.

Cheers,

Iani.