Dear Mike,

Sorry to be late to the party, I've been away crawling around Neolithic burial chambers and Iron Age brochs in the wilds of northern Scotland for the last two weeks. Fascinating stuff, though rather muddy, and it does come at the expense of good wi-fi.

I'll begin with a warning about Y-DNA testing that people often overlook. Y-DNA testing is not ideally suited to breaking down brick walls, except in very particular circumstances. Generalised Y-DNA testing normally gives the tester a fairly even spread of information over the last few millennia. It's therefore not very good at adding specific individuals to family trees, but it is very helpful in showing where to look for the genealogical information you need, and helping prove specific facts for which you need further evidence.

I've begun with a brief look at the history of your haplogroup. Looking up your tree to R-FGC14877:

https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/R-FGC14877/tree

you can see a distinct change in geographical distribution from German-oriented to British-oriented at R-FGC21340. The rapid forking of the haplotree (i.e. population expansion) at this point may mean that R-FGC21340 is the point in history where your ancestors arrived in the British Isles. If true, this would give you a Roman-era or post-Roman (Germanic migration) entry into the British Isles. While I'd consider this the most probable solution, we cannot rule out the possibility that multiple R-FGC21340 lines made later entries in the British Isles.

Your most-recent known haplogroup, R-FTB9325, is probably early medieval in origin, giving you a considerable amount of history you need to fill in between there are the present. This cannot come from existing BigY testers, so it must come from your STR matches, either from their existing data, or from upgrading them.

As a project administrator, I've had a look at your results at FTDNA and those of your matches. FTDNA's STR-matching thresholds are set such that you should match approximately 50% of the testers you are related to 1000 years ago, thus you should match most of your genealogical-era matches, but will likely have a few pre-Norman matches too. However, this depends strongly on the number of mutations you (and your matches) have accumulated over the last ~1000 years, which is random. For some of us, a Y-37 match always indicates a genealogically meaningful relationship, but many testers find that a number of their Y-37 matches are not related to them for a few millennia. This selection process usually improves significantly by Y-67.

The striking thing about your STR matches is the general lack of Y-111 and Y-67 matches, despite having a significant number of Y-37 matches. On closer inspection, this seems to be because you have a lot of other Tryon testers that have tested to Y-37, but stalled in the testing process there, so a significant amount of information can be obtained if these individuals were to upgrade, ideally as far as BigY-700.

There are several research questions you could focus on here, each of which would need a different but overlapping strategy, e.g.:

(1) Are all 11 testers descended from William Tryon (1646-1711)?

(2) Is Benjamin Tryon closely related to William Tryon?

(3) Where in Great Britain are the Tryon family from?

For (1) and (2), you need to perform the triangulation process that has already been mentioned. You know of descendants of three sons of William Tryon. If you can get a second son of William Tryon to take a BigY-700 test, then you can reconstruct the SNPs present in William Tryon himself, and thus define a haplogroup for descendants of William Tryon. You can probably also reconstruct his STRs too, but you would really need to upgrade a descendant of the third son to Y-111 or ideally BigY to be certain.

With this haplogroup for William Tryon, you can start to make comparisons. Upgrading the four testers whose genealogy is unknown to BigY will allow you to start layering a family tree. You can see if they share any SNPs or STR mutations with the descendants of the three tested sons. If they do, this will tell you which son's line they descend from. This can be a bit of a gamble, as you are reliant on each of the sons generating their own, novel mutation. There is typically only one SNP mutation every 83 years or so, and one STR mutation every 120 years or so in the first 111 markers (the additional STR markers from the BigY-700 test are so far poorly calibrated), so the rate of mutation in the combination of STRs+SNPs is probably only about one mutation per two generations. Nevertheless, you stand a good chance of getting one or two of the four testers defined as being descended from a particular son.

Again, knowing William Tryon's haplogroup, you can upgrade the twelfth tester to identify the point in history where William Tryon and Benjamin Tryon share a common ancestor. If the twelfth tester belongs to the same haplogroup (i.e. shares all the SNP *and STR* mutations of William Tryon's descendants), then he is either a descendant of William Tryon, or shares a connection with William Tryon within a few generations (probably as a brother, or first or second cousin). If he forms a new haplogroup above William Tryon's, then the number of SNP and STR mutations that separate the two haplogroups will tell you roughly how far back in time that relationship is.

Working out where in Great Britain the Tryon family are from will be more difficult, and will require following the very different strategy that Brian has outlined. Namely, find a Tryon family who is either still living in the UK, or can securely trace their origins to the UK, and get them to take a Y-DNA test (it can be a fairly cheap on like Y-37). If they match your group, they will share the same origin for your surname, and you can use their earliest-known ancestor as an approximation of where you are from. Looking at census returns, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire seem obvious locations to try first. The rarity of the Tryon surname helps you at this point, since there seem to be relatively few independent Tryon families, so you are unlikely to find too many false positives. However, it must be acknowledged that finding the people to test requires significant effort. If you are prepared to offer to pay for tests yourself, that normally increases uptake! Ancestry or other family history sites are a good place to identify suitable candidates, because these people already have an interest in family history. They may also have an existing DNA test from which a coarse Y-DNA haplogroup can be extracted.

Hopefully this gives you some helpful pointers for a way forward.

Best wishes,

Iain.

Hi Mark,

Thanks, I did see the spreadsheet you posted. Unfortunately, it's difficult to say much from only 37 markers. There are no convincing indications in there of relationships between Tryon individuals with known pedigrees and those with incomplete pedigrees. You'd have to upgrade the others to look for these, and it is liable that you'd have to upgrade them to Y-111 or even BigY before you found STRs or SNPs that could identify these relationships.

If it helps, I've put below what I think is the ancestral Y-111 motif for R-FT30022, constructed from its three branches. This haplogroup is just upstream from you, and this motif should help you more easily identify if there are any common mutations by taking your comparison to a more recent level.

R-FT30022 13 24 14 10 11-14 12 12 12 13 13 28 17 7-10 11 11 25 15 19 29 15-16-17-18 11 11 19-22 16 15 18 17 37-37 12 12 11 9 15-16 8 10 10 8 10 10 12 23-23 16 10 12 12 15 8 12 22 20 13 12 11 13 10 11 13 12 35 15 9 16 12 26 26 19 12 11 12 12 10 9 12 12 10 11 11 30 12 12 24 13 11 10 22 15 19 13 23 18 12 15 25 12 24 18 10 14 17 9 12 11

Any questions or follow-up from my earlier comments, please let me know.

Cheers,

Iain.