Some Native Americans Had Oceanic Ancestors

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Roberta Estes

This week has seen a flurry of new scientific and news articles. What has been causing such a stir? It appears that Australian or more accurately, Australo-Melanese DNA has been found in South America’s Native American population. In addition, it has also been found in Aleutian Islanders off the coast of Alaska. In case you aren’t aware, that’s about 8,500 miles as the crow flies. That’s one tired crow. As the person paddles or walks along the shoreline, it’s even further, probably about 12,000 miles.

Whatever the story, it was quite a journey and it certainly wasn’t all over flat land.

This isn’t the first inkling we’ve had. Just a couple weeks ago, it was revealed that the Botocudo remains from Brazil were Polynesian and not admixed with either Native, European or African. This admixture was first discovered via mitochondrial DNA, but full genome sequencing confirmed their ancestry and added the twist that they were not admixed – an extremely unexpected finding. This is admittedly a bit confusing, because it implies that there were new Polynesian arrivals in the 1600s or 1700s.

Unlikely as it seems, it obviously happened, so we set that aside as relatively contemporary.

The findings in the papers just released are anything but contemporary.

The First Article

The first article in Science, “Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans” by Raghaven et al published this week provides the following summary (bolding is mine):

How and when the Americas were populated remains contentious. Using ancient and modern genome-wide data, we find that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans, including Athabascans and Amerindians, entered the Americas as a single migration wave from Siberia no earlier than 23 thousand years ago (KYA), and after no more than 8,000-year isolation period in Beringia. Following their arrival to the Americas, ancestral Native Americans diversified into two basal genetic branches around 13 KYA, one that is now dispersed across North and South America and the other is restricted to North America. Subsequent gene flow resulted in some Native Americans sharing ancestry with present-day East Asians (including Siberians) and, more distantly, Australo-Melanesians. Putative ‘Paleoamerican’ relict populations, including the historical Mexican Pericúes and South American Fuego-Patagonians, are not directly related to modern Australo-Melanesians as suggested by the Paleoamerican Model.

This article in EurekAlert and a second one here discuss the Science paper.

Migration map from the Raghaven paper.

The paper included the gene flow and population migration map, above, along with dates.

The scientists sequenced the DNA of 31 living individuals from the Americas, Siberia and Oceana as follows:

Siberian:

Altai – 2
Buryat – 2
Ket – 2
Kiryak – 2
Sakha – 2
Siberian Yupik – 2

North American Native:

Tsimshian (number not stated, but by subtraction, it’s 1)

Southern North American, Central and South American Native:

Pima – 1
Huichol -1
Aymara – 1
Yakpa – 1

Oceana:

Papuan – 14

The researchers also state that they utilized 17 specimens from relict groups such as the Pericues from Mexico and Fuego-Patagonians from the southernmost tip of South America. They also sequenced two pre-Columbian mummies from the Sierra Tarahumara in northern Mexico. In total, 23 ancient samples from the Americas were utilized.

They then compared these results with a reference panel of 3053 individuals from 169 populations which included the ancient Saqqaq Greenland individual at 400 years of age as well as the Anzick child from Montana from about 12,500 years ago and the Mal’ta child from Siberia at 24,000 years of age.

Not surprisingly, all of the contemporary samples with the exception of the Tsimshian genome showed recent western Eurasian admixture.

As expected, the results confirm that the Yupik and Koryak are the closest Eurasian population to the Americas. They indicate that there is a “clean split” between the Native American population and the Koryak about 20,000 years ago.

They found that “Athabascans and Anzick-1, but not the Greenlandis Inuit and Saqqaq belong to the same initial migration wave that gave rise to present-day Amerindians from southern North America and Central and South America, and that this migration likely followed a coastal route, given our current understanding of the glacial geological and paleoenvironmental parameters of the Late Pleistocene.”

Evidence of gene flow between the two groups was also found, meaning between the Athabascans and the Inuit. Additionally, they found evidence of post-split gene flow between Siberians and Native Americans which seems to have stopped about 12,000 years ago, which meshes with the time that the Beringia land bridge was flooded by rising seas, cutting off land access between the two land masses.

They state that the results support all Native migration from Siberia, contradicting claims of an early migration from Europe.

The researchers then studied the Karitiana people of South America and determined that the two groups, Athabascans and Karitiana diverged about 13,000 years ago, probably not in current day Alaska, but in lower North America. This makes sense, because the Clovis Anzick child, found in Montana, most closely matches people in South America.

By the Clovis period of about 12,500 years ago, the Native American population had already split into two branches, the northern and southern, with the northern including Athabascan and other groups such as the Chippewa, Cree and Ojibwa. The Southern group included people from southern North America and Central and South America.

Interestingly, while admixture with the Inuit was found with the Athabascan, Inuit admixture was not found among the Cree, Ojibwa and Chippewa. The researchers suggest that this may be why the southern branch, such as the Karitiana are genetically closer to the northern Amerindians located further east than to northwest coast Amerindians and Athabascans.

Finally, we get to the Australian part. The researchers when trying to sort through the “who is closer to whom” puzzle found unexpected results. They found that some Native American populations including Aleutian Islanders, Surui (Brazil) and Athabascans are closer to Australo-Melanesians compared to other Native Americans, such as Ojibwa, Cree and Algonquian and South American Purepecha (Mexico), Arhuaco (Colombia) and Wayuu (Colombia, Venezuela). In fact, the Surui are one of the closest populations to East Asians and Australo-Melanese, the latter including Papuans, non-Papuan Melanesians, Solomon Islanders and hunter-gatherers such as Aeta. The researchers acknowledge these are weak trends, but they are nonetheless consistently present.

Dr. David Reich, from Harvard, a co-author of another paper, also published this past week, says that 2% of the DNA of Amazonians is from Oceana. If that is consistent, it speaks to a founder population in isolation, such that the 2% just keeps getting passed around in the isolated population, never being diluted by outside DNA. I would suggest that is not a weak signal.

The researchers suggest that the variance in the strength of this Oceanic signal suggests that the introduction of the Australo-Melanese occurred after the initial peopling of the Americas. The ancient samples cluster with the Native American groups and do not show the Oceanic markers and show no evidence of gene flow from Oceana.

The researchers also included cranial morphology analysis, which I am omitting since cranial morphology seems to have led researchers astray in the past, specifically in the case of Kennewick man.

One of the reasons cranial morphology is such a hotly debated topic is because of the very high degree of cranial variance found in early skeletal remains. One of the theories evolving from the cranial differences involving the populating of the Americans has been that the Australo-Melanese were part of a separate and earlier migration that gave rise to the earliest Americans who were then later replaced by the Asian ancestors of current day Native Americans. If this were the case, then the now-extinct Fuego-Patagonains samples from the location furthest south on the South American land mass should have included DNA from Oceana, but it didn’t.

The Second Article

A second article published this week, titled “’Ghost population’ hints at long lost migration to the Americas” by Ellen Callaway discusses similar findings, presented in a draft letter to Nature titled “Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas” by Skoglund et al. This second group discovers the same artifact Australo-Melanesian DNA in Native American populations but suggests that it may be from the original migration and settlement event or that there may have been two distinct founding populations that settled at the same time or that there were two founding events.

EurekAlert discusses the article as well.

It’s good to have confirmation and agreement between the two labs who happened across these results independently that the Australo-Melanesian DNA is present in some Native populations today.

Their interpretations and theories about how this Oceanic DNA arrived in some of the Native populations vary a bit, but if you read the details, it’s really not quite as different as it first appears from the headlines. Neither group claims to know for sure, and both discuss possibilities.

Questions remain. For example, if the founding group was small, why, then, don’t all of the Native people and populations have at least some Oceanic markers? The Anzick Child from 12,500 years ago does not. He is most closely related to the tribes in South America, where the Oceanic markers appear with the highest frequencies.

In the Harvard study, the scientists fully genome sequenced 63 individuals without discernable evidence of European or African ancestors in 21 Native American populations, restricting their study to individuals from Central and South America that have the strongest evidence of being entirely derived from a homogenous First American ancestral population.

Their results show that the two Amazonian groups, Surui and Karitians are closest to the “Australasian populations, the Onge from the Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal (a so-called ‘Negrito’ group), New Guineans, Papuans and indigenous Australians.” Within those groups, the Australasian populations are the only outliers – meaning no Africans, Europeans or East Asian DNA found in the Native American people.

When repeating these tests, utilizing blood instead of saliva, a third group was shown to also carry these Oceanic markers – the Xavante, a population from the Brazilian plateau that speaks a language of the Ge group that is different from the Tupi language group spoke by the Karitians and Surui.

The closest populations that these Native people matched in Oceana, shown above on the map from the draft Skoglund letter, were, in order, New Guineans, Papuans and Andamanese. The researchers further state that populations from west of the Andes or north of the Panama isthmus show no significant evidence of an affinity to the Onge from the Andaman Islands with the exception of the Cabecar (Costa Rica).

That’s a very surprising finding, given that one would expect more admixture on the west, which is the side of the continent where the migration occurred.

The researchers then compared the results with other individuals, such as Mal’ta child who is known to have contributed DNA to the Native people today, and found no correlation with Oceanic DNA. Therefore, they surmised that the Oceanic admixture cannot be explained by a previously known admixture event.

They propose that a mystery population they have labeled as “Population Y” (after Ypykuera which means ancestor in the Tupi language family) contributed the Australasian lineage to the First Americans and that is was already mixed into the lineage by the time it arrived in Brazil.

According to their work, Population Y may itself have been admixed, and the 2% of Oceanic DNA found in the Brazilian Natives may be an artifact of between 2 and 85% of the DNA of the Surui, Karitiana and Xavante that may have come from Population Y. They mention that this result is striking in that the majority of the craniums that are more Oceanic in Nature than Asiatic, as would be expected from people who migrated from Siberia, are found in Brazil.

They conclude that the variance in the presence or absence of DNA in Native people and remains, and the differing percentages argue for more than one migration event and that “the genetic ancestry of Native Americans from Central and South America cannot be due to a single pulse of migration south of the Late Pleistocene ice sheets from a homogenous source population, and instead must reflect at least two streams of migration or alternatively a long drawn out period of gene flow from a structured Beringian or Northeast Asian source.”

Perhaps even more interesting is the following statement:

“The arrival of population Y ancestry in the Americas must in any scenario have been ancient: while Population Y shows a distant genetic affinity to Andamanese, Australian and New Guinean populations, it is not particularly closely related to any of them, suggesting that the source of population Y in Eurasia no longer exists.”

They further state they find no admixture indication that would suggest that Population Y arrived in the last few thousand years.

So, it appears that perhaps the Neanderthals and Denisovans were not the only people who were our ancestors, but no longer exist as a separate people, only as an admixed part of us today. We are their legacy.

The Take Away

When I did the Anzick extractions, we had hints that something of this sort might have been occurring. For example, I found surprising instances of haplogroup M, which is neither European, African nor Native American, so far as we know today. This may have been a foreshadowing of this Oceanic admixture. It may also be a mitochondrial artifact. Time will tell. Perhaps haplogroup M will turn out to be Native by virtue of being Oceanic and admixed thousands of years ago. There is still a great deal to learn. Regardless of how these haplogroups and Oceanic DNA arrived in Brazil in South America and in the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska, one thing is for sure, it did.

We know that the Oceanic DNA found in the Brazilian people studied for these articles is not contemporary and is ancient. This means that it is not related to the Oceanic DNA found in the Botocudo people, who, by the way, also sport mitochondrial haplogroups that are within the range of Native people, meaning haplogroup B, but have not been found in other Native people. Specifically, haplogroups B4a1a1 and B4a1a1a. Additionally, there are other B4a1a, B4a1b and B4a1b1 results found in the Anzick extract which could also be Oceanic. You can see all of the potential and confirmed Native American mitochondrial DNA results in my article “Native American Mitochondrial Haplogroups” that I update regularly.

We don’t know how or when the Botocudo arrived, but the when has been narrowed to the 1600s or 1700s. We don’t know how or when the Oceanic DNA in the Brazilian people arrived either, but the when was ancient. This means that Oceanic DNA has arrived in South America at least twice and is found among the Native peoples both times.

We know that some Native groups have some Oceanic admixture, and others seem to have none, in particular the Northern split group that became the Cree, Ojibwa, Algonquian, and Chippewa.

We know that the Brazilian Native groups are most closely related to Oceanic groups, but that the first paper also found Oceanic admixture in the Aleutian Islands. The second paper focused on the Central and South American tribes.

We know that the eastern American tribes, specifically the Algonquian tribes are closely related to the South Americans, but they don’t share the Oceanic DNA and neither do the mid-continent tribes like the Cree, Ojibwa and Chippewa. The only Paleolithic skeleton that has been sequenced, Anzick, from 12,500 years ago in Montana also does not carry the Oceanic signature.

In my opinion, the disparity between who does and does not carry the Oceanic signature suggests that the source of the Oceanic DNA in the Native population could not have been a member of the first party to exit out of Beringia and settle in what is now the Americas. Given that this had to be a small party, all of the individuals would have been thoroughly admixed with each other’s ancestral DNA within just a couple of generations. It would have been impossible for one ancestor’s DNA to only be found in some people. To me, this argues for one of two scenarios.

First, a second immigration wave that joined the first wave but did not admix with some groups that might have already split off from the original group such as the Anzick/Montana group.

Second, multiple Oceanic immigration events. We still have to consider the possibility that there were multiple events that introduced Oceanic DNA into the Native population. In other words, perhaps the Aleutian Islands Oceanic DNA is not from the same migration event as the Brazilian DNA which we know is not from the same event as the Botocudo. I would very much like to see the Oceanic DNA appear in a migration path of people, not just in one place and then the other. We need to connect the dots.

What this new information does is to rule out the possibility that there truly was only one wave of migration – one group of people who settled the Americas at one time. More likely, at least until the land bridge submerged, is that there were multiple small groups that exited Beringia over the 8,000 or so years it was inhabitable. Maybe one of those groups included people from Oceana. Someplace, sometime, as unlikely as it seems, it happened.

The amazing thing is that it’s more than 10,000 miles from Australia to the Aleutian Islands, directly across the Pacific. Early adventurers would have likely followed a coastal route to be sustainable, which would have been significantly longer. The fact that they survived and sent their DNA on a long adventure from Australia to Alaska to South America – and it’s still present today is absolutely amazing.

We know we still have a lot to learn and this is the tip of a very exciting iceberg. As more contemporary and ancient Native people have their full genomes sequenced, we’ll learn more answers. The answer is in the DNA. We just have to sequence enough of it and learn how to understand the message being delivered.

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

I receive a small contribution when you click on some of the links to vendors in my articles. This does NOT increase the price you pay but helps me to keep the lights on and this informational blog free for everyone. Please click on the links in the articles or to the vendors below if you are purchasing products or DNA testing.

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

What is a Population Bottleneck?

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Roberta Estes

Genetic genealogists often hear the term population bottleneck referenced in various academic papers – but just what is that? And why do we care?

A population bottleneck occurs when there is a dramatic reduction in the population of a particular group of people. Think about the eruption of a volcano – Mt. Toba for example.

Human history is full of population reducing examples, some we know about, like the plague, but most we don’t. And obviously, if the bottleneck was so severe that no one survived – then there are no descendants of those people today – and that’s an extinction event, not a bottleneck. The only way we would ever know those people existed is if we found their remains and sequenced them today – like the Neanderthal and Denisovan skeletons.

As a point of clarity – the Neanderthal and Denisovan did survive – not as pure Neanderthals or Denisovans – but admixed into the homo sapiens population – and they are indeed, us. If you have either European or Asian ancestry, then you have Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry too.

How could that be – all of Europe and Asia descended from these Archaic people? Probably the after-effects of a population bottleneck where a small group of people went on to become a large group of people.

Let’s look at an example.

The best example I can think of is the migration of the Asian people into the Americas. These first people would populate all of North and South America and would become the indigenous people of these continents – by whatever name is applied today. First People, Native Americans, American Indians – they are all of the same stock and the result of at least one population bottleneck.

That first bottleneck occurred when some people crossed over the land bridge, Beringia, between Asia and what is now Alaska.

Erika Tamm et al – Tamm E, Kivisild T, Reidla M, Metspalu M, Smith DG, et al. (2007) Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders. PLoS ONE 2(9): e829. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000829. Also available from PubMed Central.

The bottleneck event that occurred there was that there weren’t very many people. It was probably a small group. Possibly very small. What do we know about them?

There were obviously males and females.

Assuming for purposes of discussion that all of the people who founded the Native American population came at once, or in what is referred to as one wave, we know that there were at least two men and 5 women.

How do we know that? Because today we have Y haplogroups Q and C in the Native population and mitochondrial haplogroups A, B, C, D and X in that population as well. Since the Y chromosome is passed from father to son unadmixed with any DNA from the mother, the haplogroups we see today are directly descended from those original founders. Mitochondrial DNA is passed from the mother to all of her children, but only the females pass it on, so we get a direct pipeline view back to the founding mothers.

There may have been more individuals and haplogroups that arrived. Some may have died out in Beringia or afterwards in subsequent bottleneck events.

Let’s say the group stayed together for a while. Then, it got too big to support itself comfortably on the resources available. In other words, the population began depleting the available resources. So, the group separated by a few miles so that they could draw off of a different landscape where food was more abundant.

One group went 20 miles east and one group went 20 miles south. It wasn’t meant to be permanent, but eventually, the split became permanent as that scenario repeated itself over time.

Eventually, one of the groups moved further south and small groups broke off from time to time and moved east across what would be the US and Canada. Part of the group continued south along the Pacific and would populate Mexico, Central and South America.

Let’s say that one of those small bands of people that headed east wound up living in Montana, 12,500 years ago. A child died, and they buried that child.

The group they separated from continued south and their descendants are found throughout Mexico, Central and South American today.

That child’s name is Anzick. His skeleton was found in 1968 and his full genome was sequenced before he was reburied in 2013. When his DNA was sequenced, we discovered, much to our amazement, that Anzick indeed matched people, primarily people from south of the US, at a level that could be interpreted to be contemporary. How could that possibly be?

Think about a bottleneck in this fashion.

There are 4 people, 2 couples. Each person’s DNA is represented by a color. The two males are blue and green and the 2 females are pink and yellow, like on the left side of the pedigree chart shown below.

In the first generation, they pass their DNA to their children and the children are blue/yellow and green/pink. In the second generation, the children intermarry with the other couple’s children – because there are no choices. All of the grandchildren of the original couple have DNA that is blue, yellow, green and pink. The children and grandchildren don’t all carry the same segments of blue, yellow, green and pink – but all of them carry some part of the original 4 founders. There is no orange or turquoise or red DNA to be found, so forever, until new people enter the landscape, they will pass the same segments of blue, green, yellow and pink DNA to their descendants. In an isolated environment, they might not meet new humans for thousands of years – lets’ say 10,000 years.

So, if the Anzick child had blue, yellow, green and pink DNA and the contemporary Native people living in South America have blue, yellow, green and pink Native DNA from those same four founding ancestors, it stands to reason that they are going to match – because it’s the exact same DNA that has been passed around and around for thousands of years.

This matching is the effect of a population bottleneck.

We can think of other bottleneck events too. For example, the Acadians were a bottleneck event. A few shiploads of French Catholic people on an Island in the early 1600s – they didn’t have a lot of choice in terms of spouses. The genealogy saying is that if you’re related to one Acadian, you’re related to all Acadians, and it’s pretty much true. Same with the Pilgrims and the individuals who came over on the Mayflower.

Some bottlenecks are religiously induced – Amish, Mennonite and Jewish, for example. These people marry only within their religion. Today, that’s called endogamy – but it’s a form of a bottleneck event.

We see the results of bottleneck events today in three ways in our DNA. In both Y and mitochondrial DNA, we often see specific haplogroups or subgroups associated with specific populations – like Q and C in Native American Y DNA and subsets of A, B, C, D, X and possibly M in Native American mitochondrial DNA.

We also see the effects of bottleneck events in autosomal DNA. We talk about segments that are IBD, identical by descent, and IBS, identical by state. Identical by descent typically means we can attribute the DNA segment to a specific ancestor via triangulation. Often, everything we can’t identify gets tossed into the IBS box, but it really shouldn’t.

When you hear people talk about IBS, or autosomal DNA segments that are identical by state, there are really two possibilities. One is that the DNA is identical by chance.

The other option is that the DNA is identical by population. This means that the DNA does indeed match because it came from a common ancestor – but that ancestor is beyond the genealogical timeframe. That doesn’t mean the information isn’t useful. Indeed, I think it’s very useful. I want to know if a segment of my DNA is Native, even if I share that segment with lots of other Native people. In fact, that’s exactly HOW we determine a specific autosomal segment is affiliated with Native or any other population group of people. Certain segments are found in a higher percentage across the entire population group. So, to throw these out in personal genetic genealogy by phasing which removes population based matches is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I have several matches on my spreadsheet where I have the notation “Mennonite” or “Acadian” for example, because while I can’t sort out which specific ancestor the DNA came from, it assuredly came from the Acadian population based on the matches – and that’s very useful information.

Population bottlenecks may seem like a scientific term referencing something that happened long ago, but the effects of bottlenecks can be found in every one of us, beginning with Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA and probably including ancestors who survived, or willingly embraced beliefs which in essence created historical bottlenecks.

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

Zeroes aka Deletions – Null DNA Markers

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Roberta Estes

Someone recently asked me about why one of their Y DNA STR marker values was zero, what that means, and how it got to be that way.

Probably the marker most prone to develop this trait is marker 425, the 48^th marker that is in the 67 marker panel. If you haven’t tested beyond 37 markers, then you won’t see a result for marker 425, because it’s in the 67 marker panel which tests markers 38-67.

A null marker result looks like this for Y DNA:

You can see that location DYS425, highlighted in blue, has a zero and a red asterisk.

This means that there is no DNA present at that location, and a deletion has occurred.

Mitochondrial DNA

Deletions also occur in mitochondrial DNA.

If you view your results as CRS values, deletions show as little dash marks.

In the RSRS results view, below, they are shown with a little d indicating a deletion has replaced the normal value shown before the location number.

In the case above in the coding region, an entire contiguous segment has been deleted. In mitochondrial DNA, these are sometimes haplogroup defining.

While deletions also occur routinely in mitochondrial DNA, we’re going to use Y DNA for our discussion and examples.

What Does This Mean?

A zero in Y DNA as a marker result means that no DNA was detected at this location. In essence, barring a lab processing error, it means that the DNA that used to be in this location got deleted in the process of replication at some point in time.

Once DNA on the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA is gone, it’s gone forever. This is called a deletion.

Why Did This Happen?

We don’t know exactly why deletions happen, but they do. If the deletion is in an area that isn’t troublesome to the organism, life goes on normally and the deletion is passed on to the next generation. If the deletion would interfere with a critical function, typically the organism is never born.

So, if you have a deletion, it’s really nothing to worry about, because, chances are your ancestors, for generations, had this same deletion and you are obviously here.

When Did This Happen?

Sometimes we can deduce an answer to this question, at least somewhat.

If your DNA value at location 425 is 0 (zero), there are three possibilities.

1. This mutation happened long ago in your family line – maybe even before the adoption of surnames. This is usually relatively easy to tell, especially if other men from your direct line have tested. If they have, you’ll need to determine if their value at location 425 is zero. If you and they are in a common project, often the easiest way to determine their value is to look within the project page. If you see others with the same surname that match most of your other marker results, and have a value of 0 at 425, then you know that this mutation happened long ago in your family line and has been being passed from father to son ever since – and will be as long as any male who carries that paternal line lives.

You can also check your haplogroup project to see if the people you are grouped, which will have different surnames, with also have a deletion at that location.

In some cases, almost everyone in a particular group has a zero at that location. In the case of marker 425, the value of 0 is almost universally found in haplogroup E-L117, downstream of E-M35, as you can see in the Jewish haplogroup E project.

Sometimes, if the null marker at that location is not prevalent in the haplogroup itself, or in the larger family group, then the null value may be considered a line marker mutation in your specific family line.

2. The null value may have happened more recently. In fact, it’s possible that it happened between you and your father. It happened between some father and son, someplace in your line. If you find that you have a null marker value, and no one else if your family surname project has a null value at that marker, I would suggest proceeding in two ways. First, I would test a second person, slightly upstream. For example, test another paternal descendant of your grandfather or great-grandfather. If they too have the null value, then you know that deletion occurred in some generation before your common ancestor.

If your father is Sterling and his father is Ben, then you’ll want to test one of Ben’s other sons, Hezekiah or Joseph, or one of their sons.

Let’s say that you test Hezekiah Jr. and he too carries a null value at location 425. This confirms that your common ancestor, Ben Doe, indeed also had a null value because he passed it to both of his sons. So, the mutation to a null value happened someplace upstream of Ben.

In this next example, let’s say, based on the surname project results, we know that neither John Doe nor James Doe carry the null value mutation, because at least some of their descendants through various sons don’t carry that mutation. Therefore, it had to happen someplace downstream of Joe and James and between them and you. The question is where.

In the original test, you discovered your null value. In the second test, we discovered Hezekiah Jr.’s null value and by doing so, also discovered the value of that DNA in Sterling, Hezekiah Sr. and Ben, shown in the second test column above.

From previous testing in the family surname project, we know that the progenitor, John Doe and his son James don’t carry that mutation, so that only leaves two generations with an unknown status as to that marker value. If you can find someone descended through another son born to William or Thomas, you can determine which man had the mutation.

But what if Hezekiah Jr. does not have the null value?

Then, either the mutation happened between you and your father or between your father and his father, which can be confirmed by testing either your father or one of your male siblings, or there was a lab processing error.

3. In rare cases, the DNA simply does not read in a particular area. It’s rare, but it does happen. If you find no other family individuals with a null value, I’d ask the Family Tree DNA lab to take a second look to verify accuracy and to see if they can get a good reading if that is the issue. They already routinely do multiple reads on null values, so this is rarely an issue.

Does This Really Matter?

It might matter, because in this line, the null value will serve as a line marker mutation for the family lines BELOW the man who had the mutation. So, in this case, either William or Thomas Doe. So if you find someone who matches this line, and DOES have a null value, it tells you which line he falls under and where to look. If he does NOT have the null value, it tells you not to bother looking in the null value line.

Do Other Markers and Haplogroups Have Null Markers Too?

They do indeed. I’ve written the Personalized DNA Reports for a decade now and I’ve seen null marker values in just about every haplogroup and on many markers, although some instances are very rare and seem to be a one-time occurrence.

In other situations, especially in haplogroup E-M35 (old E1b1b1) and branches, null values are quite common, especially on marker 425. Marker 425 seems to be more prone to zero or null values in every haplogroup than other markers…and no, we don’t know why.

This has been the explanation of null values for normal air breathing humans. If you would like the eyes-glazed-over techie version, this presentation was given at the 2009 Family Tree DNA Conference.

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

Elizabeth Shepherd (1766-1830s), Frontierswoman, 52 Ancestors #79

Posted on July 5, 2015 by Roberta Estes

Elizabeth Shepherd was born July 23, 1766 in St. George Parish, Spotsylvania County, Virginia to Robert Shepherd and Sarah Rash.

We are extremely fortunate to have the Robert Shepherd Bible pages, still in existence in 1991. A sixth great-grandson of Robert and Sarah Rash Shepherd was kind enough to copy and transcribe them, and they have been sitting in my “to do” file, which became a “to do” pile, long enough.

The cousin who so graciously sent the pages also said that he couldn’t capture the entire page in the copy because the pages were bound in the Bible. He provided the transcription following each page – taken from the original Bible.

I am struck by the beauty of these Bible pages – the lovely calligraphy style handwriting. I’ve also noted that the handwriting is all the same, including the death information for Robert – except for the 1858 death note about Sally. Given that Sally is the only child with a death date, and there is also a rather illegible note about her name that looks like it notes someone’s mother – I’m surmising that this Bible was a copy of Robert’s original Bible that was passed down in the Sally Shepherd family line and her death date was of course added sometime after her passing.

The identical handwriting is a dead giveway (pardon the pun) and nobody so far as I know can record their own death after the fact – so this isn’t Robert’s handwriting. If we had the front page of the Bible, we could look at the date the Bible was printed and I’m sure it would be after some of these events occurred. That doesn’t diminish the value of the Bible, just lets us know more about the provenance of the information it holds and alerts us that transcription mistakes could have occurred – since the information we’re seeing has been copied, at least once. But, I must say, copied beautifully and in the old style where the s looks like fs. Known as the long s, this practice fell out of practice in printing in the first part of the 1800s but lasted in handwriting into the second part before dying entirely.

Based on the script, whoever figured and recorded Robert Shepherd’s death date in 1817 is likely the transcriber of the rest of this document. Given that the calculations are in the margin, this Bible was likely in use at that time, so perhaps the earlier information had already been copied into this Bible.

Just take a look at this beautiful script.

Marriages:

Robert Shepherd and Sarah Rash were married in Spotsylvania County Virginia by James Mcrea Church Parson on October 1, 1765.

Robert and Sarah aforesaid removed from Spotsylvania County Virginia to Reddies River Wilkes County, North Carolina on the 7^th of December Annoque Domini 1777.

For all the world, it looks like something was written on the right hand side of the paper too, and has faded to the point where it is no longer legible.

Births:

Robert Shepherd son of George and Elizabeth Shepherd was born in Spotsylvania County and State of Virginia June 17, 1739.

Sarah Shepherd formerly Sarah Rash and daughter of Joseph and Mary Rash was born in Spotsylvania County Virginia State 23^rd of April Annoque Domini 1748, and is now the espoused wife of Robert Shepherd aforesaid.

Their Genealogy born in Spotsylvania County Virginia

1. Elisabeth Shepherd born July 23^rd Anno: Dom: 1766
2. James Shepherd born on March 8^th A:D: 1768
3. Ann Shepherd born on the 8^th of March A:D: 1770
4. Mary Shepherd born on January 17^th A:D: 1773
5. Agnes Shepherd born on the 8^th of February A:D: 1775

Their following children were all born on Reddies River Wilkes County No. Carolina

6. Rhoda Shepherd born on the 23^rd of March A:D: 1777
7. John Shepherd born on the 26^th of August A:D: 1779
8. Sally Shepherd born on the 27^th of February A:D: 1782 Died November 1858
9. Fanny Shepherd born February 13^th 1785

10. Rebekah Shepherd born on the 26^th day of September in the year of our Lord 1787

Deaths:

Robert Shepherd father of the aforementioned family deceased June fifth one thousand eight hundred and seventeen 1817 – at his own house on Reddies River, Wilkes County, North Carolina State where to he removed and settled with his family from Spottsylvania County Virginia December 7, 1777.

After 17 days illness with his old disorder the Stone and Gravel and after residing about 40 years in the aforesaid spot.

Aged according to this record exactly seventy seven years eleven months and seven days, subtracting elven days for his Old Stile birth.

Sarah’s death date is not recorded here, but I think we have evidence of when it occurred in the notes. Sarah was born in 1748, and on this last page, in the upper right hand corner, someone was subtracting 1748 from 1829.

Moving to Wilkes County

According to their Bible, “Robert and Sarah aforesaid removed from Spotsylvania County to Reddies River, Wilkes County, NC on the 7^th of December annoque domini 1777.”

I don’t know if they left on December 7^th for Wilkes County, or arrived on December 7^th, 1777. Looking at the notes about the births of their children, it appears that Rhoda was born in Wilkes County in March of 1777 – so there is a conflict in the record. However, given that this Bible is a copy of the original, perhaps a transcription error occurred. Perhaps December is when they found a place to settle permanently in Wilkes County. Regardless, they were moving about that time.

Hopefully December is when they arrived, as the 340 mile trip, on today’s roads, would have taken more than a month in a wagon in 1777, and certainly in December and January, snow and cold weather could be encountered. It’s actually quite remarkable that the date of their journey is recorded in the Bible. It was obviously seen as quite a turning point and major event in their lives.

Elizabeth would have just turned 11 that summer, old enough to help care for the younger children on the journey. She was the oldest child. Her parents, like normal pioneer parents, had a baby about every other year, so by 1777, Elizabeth had 5 younger siblings to help care for.

While Spotsylvania County had at one time been the frontier, in 1777, the county was more than 50 years old. Wilkes County, however, was indeed the new frontier, with lots of available land, opportunity and adventure galore. Land was almost free for the taking plus a little sweat equity. Ok, if you’ve seen those mountains…a lot of sweat equity. But back in Spotsylvania County, they hadn’t seen the mountains of Wilkes County – but they surely had heard about the land grants. In fact, staking out land is just about the first thing new settlers did.

Robert Shepherd entered land in 1778 near the ford of “Readys River” on John Shepherd’s line. On the same day John entered land on Deep Ford of Reddis River.

The Shepherds lived in what is known as the Reddies River and Purlear section, west of North Wilkesboro about 12 to 14 miles. John Shepherd’s entry number 64 claimed 405 acres at the Deep Ford of the Reddies River. Robert’s entry was next for 200 acres. The Reverend George McNiel, William McNiel’s father, was also a neighbor.

The http://www.danielprophecy.com/map.html website shows the location of the various Shepherd land. Notice Vannoy road and old Highway 16. You’ve seen these same roads in the Elijah Vannoy story. Elijah married Lois McNiel, daughter of Elizabeth Shepherd and William McNiel.

Sometime prior to 1784, Elizabeth Shepherd married William McNiel, the son of Reverend George McNiel, probably in Wilkes County. You might have noticed that this was in the middle of the Revolutionary War, and in many counties, not much was getting registered about that time, including marriages. Their first child, at least the first child that survived, arrived on October 26, 1784, which would suggest that they were married probably sometime in 1783 or maybe early 1784 – although unsourced family history shows the marriage as occurring in 1781.

Elizabeth’s husband, William McNiel, was also from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, enlisting in the Revolutionary War from there in 1777. Did she know him before they moved to Wilkes County? It’s quite likely she did. It’s probable that the Reverend George McNiel recruited a number of Spotsylvania County families to undertake the move to Wilkes County.

Life in Wilkes County

The first church established on the Reddies River was located on the crest of Deep Ford Hill. The name was derived from the fact that the original road leading from New River in what is now Ashe County to the Yadkin Valley crossed the Reddies River at the foot of this hill, and that the ford at this crossing was unusually deep – thus the name Deep Ford Hill.

This Baptist church was established as early as 1783 according to the records of the Flat Rock Church. The Reverend George McNiel was the preacher and the Shepherds made up most of the congregation along with their immediate neighbors, the Rowlands, Judds and others.

The Abstract of the Reddies River Church Membership 1798-1889 by Paul Gregory shows that charter members that were members in 1798 include Robert Shepherd and wife Sarah along with Robert’s brother John and his wife Sarah and their black woman, Grace. It does not include William McNiel or his wife, which is probably a good indication they were living in Ashe County by this time, or that the original membership, even though listed in 1798, was actually from an earlier date. The actual title says “Charter Members” but the date on the page is 1798, which could mean that these are the charter members still attending in 1798. I have seen in other churches where they listed charter members, almost as a retrospective, at a later date

It is also mentioned that some of the Reddies River people buried their dead at the church, probably not much later than 1825. There is no exact census of this cemetery and it may very well simply have been the Shepherd family cemetery.

I visited George McNeil in Wilkes County in 2007 and he was gracious enough to show me all of the early family cemeteries and homeplaces. George and his wife, Joyce, then deceased, are both my cousins on different family lines, and I had known them through genealogy research for more than 20 years. It was wonderful to meet George, but sad to have missed Joyce with whom I exchanged pen and ink letters for years. George and Joyce spent much of their married life visiting the various Wilkes County cemeteries and cataloging the graves. What a wonderful legacy to leave.

George took me to the location of the Deep Ford Church and cemetery, across the road from the church. Nothing remains today of either, sadly.

According to George, the location of the Deep Ford Church was at the intersection of Shingle Gap Road and NC 16 and the cemetery was directly across the street where a trailer today sits on the former cemetery. Locals recalled seeing the original stones when George McNiel was doing the cemetery census.

Years ago, probably 40 now, the landowner used the gravestones to construct a chicken house. Yes, a chicken house. Then, he later bulldozed the chicken house including all of the gravestones into the creek. Would it be evil of me to hope they have all haunted him? I just so desperately wanted to go wading in that creek to see if I could find those stones.

This is the land where the mobile home sits where the cemetery once stood, and across the road the church was located about where the gas station sits today.

What we do know is that Elizabeth’s father, Robert Shepherd died on June 5, 1817 and was buried in this cemetery. In addition, Robert’s brother John died on June 11, 1810 and is buried here as well as is Elizabeth’s mother who died sometime after 1816, possibly in 1829. Sadly, Elizabeth would have already been in Claiborne County Tennessee when her parents died, although she would have stood here to bury her uncle, John, knowing full well that her parents would one day rest here too. If Elizabeth did marry William McNiel in 1781, then she may have buried a child here as well, as their first known child was born in 1784.

William McNiel first shows up on the 1786 Wilkes County tax list and is living 3 houses away from his father, George McNiel. William and Elizabeth own no land until 1792. In 1792-1793 they own 60 acres, but then go missing from 1794-1796. In 1797, they have 530 acres and are now living by Nathaniel Vannoy.

When I originally found William McNiel living beside Nathaniel Vannoy, I thought sure I had hit pay dirt, because Elizabeth’s daughter, Lois, married Elijah Vannoy about 1807 and we didn’t, at that time, know who Elijah’s father was. As it turns out, Nathaniel Vannoy was not Elijah’s father, but his uncle.

The book “Early Settlers of Reddies River” by Paul Gregory tells us that Elizabeth’s family lived on Deep Ford Hill, but that William McNiel moved either before 1800 or about 1803, depending on which of his statements you use, to what is now Ashe County and then to Claiborne County, TN about 1810.

It’s obvious that William McNiel and Elizabeth moved around a bit. Was she pleased with that arrangement, or did she just want to settle in one place and be done with it? I’m guessing she had her hands full with a new child arriving every other year and the last thing she wanted to do was move back and forth over the highest mountain range within hundreds of miles.

They last record we have of William and Elizabeth in Wilkes or Ashe County is in 1810 when they deed land to Elijah Vannoy and his wife, their daughter, Lois.

Judging from these two deeds from Wilkes County Deed Book GH, Elizabeth and William moved back from Ashe County in early 1810 and then sold that land to their son-in-law, Elijah Vannoy the last day of the year.

Page 178 – February 3, 1810 from James Steward and William McNiel of Ashe County NC for $200, 150 acres on the waters of the North fork of Lewis Fork, it being the place where William Yates now lives. Signed by James Steward and witnessed by Alexander Brown and Thomas Brown.

Page 175 – December 31, 1810 between William McNeel and Elijah Vannoy for $250, 150 acres on Boller Creek, a fork of Lewis Fork, place where William McNeel now lives. Witness John Forrester and John Forrester Jr. Signed by William McNeel

Apparently at that time, Lois and Elijah were not planning their migration to Claiborne County, or they probably wouldn’t have purchased the land from her parents.

Perhaps there were discussions wherever people gathered, at the church, at the mill and at the courthouse, about Claiborne County, Tennessee, because what I would term a massive exodus of Wilkes County residents occurred about this time, with many settling together in the northern part of Claiborne County, near the Lee County, VA border. Some spilled over into the part of Hawkins bordering Claiborne and the Lee County border. This area could have been called “Little Wilkes.” Eventually, all of this land would become Hancock County in Tennessee

Claiborne County, Tennessee

By about 1811 or so, William McNiel and Elizabeth Shepherd McNiel would leave Wilkes and Ashe County forever, moving to Claiborne County, Tennessee. Elizabeth, now age 44 or 45 would have her last child about the time they set out on their journey. Elizabeth’s oldest child, Lois, would already have been married to Elijah Vannoy for 3 or 4 years by this time and they would accompany Elizabeth and William.

There is a very interesting story about how this caravan of settlers got to Tennessee. Elijah Vannoy’s daughter said they traveled by flatboat and the journey took two years. This story is told in detail in the Elijah and Joel Vannoy stories, as Joel, Elizabeth’s grandson, was reportedly born during this journey.

We know William made it to Claiborne County and lived to at least 1816 because he witnessed a deed. This William McNiel has to be the husband of Elizabeth because their son, William was only born about 1810 and there were no other McNiel families, by any spelling, living in that region.

In 1816 Levi Carner sells to George McNiel a tract of land lying on the North side of Powell Mountain near Mulberry Gap containing 69 acres for $525. Signed in the presence of William McNiel, James Anderson and Burrell G. Sullivant.

I’m fairly certain that Elizabeth’s husband, William, was gone by May of 1823 when William Inglebarger sells land to Neal McNeal and the transaction is signed by his mother, Elizabeth, his uncle, John McNeil and Joel Fairchild. None of the witnesses can write and all signed with an X, including Elizabeth – so she cannot write.

Unfortunately, there is no 1820 census for Claiborne County, and by the 1830 census, shown below, William McNiel was gone. Elizabeth McNiel is listed on the census however, living adjacent her son Neal or Niel or Neil, depending on how the name was spelled that day. The last name was also spelled in a wide variety of ways, and Neal and McNeal, first and last name spellings, don’t always match either.

Elizabeth also lives just a few houses away from her daughter and son-in-law, Elijah and Lois McNiel Vannoy, spelled Vernoy here.

In 1830, Elizabeth is a widow. There are no records of any deeds showing that William McNiel purchased land. It’s worth noting that Elizabeth also lived adjacent Eli Davis, because Elijah Vannoy’s son, Joel, would marry Phebe Crumley and in 1840, Phebe’s father, William Crumley (the third) is living beside Eli Davis. This family that makes up my ancestors is being woven together in place and time one strand at a time.

Also note that Elizabeth lives 2 houses from Josiah Ramsey. We’ll need that in a minute too.

I wonder if William McNiel passed away about 1816, because Lois’s son, William is born about 1816 and she may have named the child after her father if he was ill. The last sighting we have of William is when he witnessed an 1817 deed. Given that William never owned land, he would very likely have qualified as an impoverished Revolutionary War veteran and might have applied for benefits in 1818, were he alive.

In 1840, Elizabeth is no longer listed on the census, nor is a woman of her age listed living with any of her children. Elizabeth passed away sometime between 1830 and 1840. I’m inclined to think she passed away between 1830 and 1832, because I have never been able to find any records that she applied for a Revolutionary War widow’s pension. That act was passed on June 7, 1832 and while these people may have been distant and lived back in the mountains, applications were being drafted and sent from this area within a month of that legislation. The grapevine was a powerful communications medium, especially when it involved either juicy gossip or money.

Never Underestimate Your Cousins

When I published the story about Joel Vannoy, my lovely cousin, Dolores wrote to me and asked how I knew the land on Mulberry Creek, across from the “bridge house” was the exact land Elijah owned? To anyone familiar with this area, the house with the bridge in front, crossing the creek between the house and the road, is a landmark. There is only one house fitting that description.

I explained to her that cousin Dan had found the land based on the stream in Elijah’s land grant survey, and then the homeowner had Elijah’s original land grant from the state of Tennessee. Dolores said she wondered, because the Ramsey family eventually came into possession of that land. Nothing more was said, because while Dolores and I are cousins, it’s not through the Vannoy or McNiel lines or her Ramsey line. Those lines did intermarry later, but are not our common ancestors.

Then, a couple weeks later, I happened across a piece of information that seemed important.

Niel McNiel’s land abutted that of Josiah Ramsey. Josiah Ramsey is noted at being the progenitor of the Ramsey line in Claiborne/Hancock County, and, there is an old Ramsey Cemetery. Now, the Vannoy Cemetery is “missing,” soooo, I had to ask Dolores if she knew exactly where the Josiah Ramsey Cemetery is located. Sure enough, not only did she know where it was located, she sent me more than I asked for, including some important puzzle pieces for me that she didn’t even know she had.

Since William McNiel never owned land and Elizabeth is living beside son Niel in 1830, it occurred to me that I should see if I could locate the land that Niel patented in several land grants. Sure enough, I did, and it’s just a couple miles north of Elijah Vannoy and Lois McNiel Vannoy’s land on Mulberry Creek.

Cousin Dolores sent two documents of primary importance.

On this map, note the Thomas Chapel Church, lower left, the Liberty School and Bales Gap. They are and were important to finding locations on present day maps. Josiah Ramsey’s land is noted as well.

On the 1830 census, Elizabeth McNiel and Niel McNiel live between Josiah Ramsey and Eli Davis.

On this map, Ramsey researchers have overlaid the Josiah Ramsey lands. Two areas are of particular importance

First, Neil McNeil’s land, abutting Eli Davis, is shown on the upper right.

In the lower left, Daniel Rice’s land is shown where it would abut Elijah Vannoy’s lands, which confirms yet a third way that we indeed have located Elijah’s land correctly. Given that in the 1840 census, William Crumley (the third,) whose daughter Phebe would marry Joel Vannoy, son of Elijah Vannoy, is living dead center between Eli Davis and Littleton Brooks, we now know exactly where he was living and we can see how close he lived to Joel Vannoy’s land that abutted Elijah’s land. Whohooooo…my lucky day!

Now, where is this land today?

I mapped the location where Elizabeth Shepherd McNiel would have been living next to Niel McNiel on present day Turner Hollow Road at the far right end of the blue line. At the far left end of the blue line, where the red balloon is located is near where Elizabeth’s daughter Lois McNiel lived on Mulberry Gap Road with her husband Elijah Vannoy. Keep in mind that they would likely have taken the “back way since Rebel Hollow and Turner Hollow intersect and it looks like Joel and Elijah Vannoy probably owned the land between Mulberry Gap Road and the back side of Rebel Hollow Road. The actual address of the Vannoy property is across the road from both 7321 and 6979 Mulberry Gap Road, today.

To go from Neal and Elizabeth’s to Joel and Lois’s you had to pass the Ramsey land and mill located about where the “8 minute” box is located on the blue line.

On this map, you can see Bales Gap, then to the left you can see where Bales Ford either still does or once crossed the Powell River. If you look at the Niel McNiel land, you can see that if you draw a line straight right from Bales Ford, it intersects the Niel McNiel upper land at the beginning, about the blue dot on Turner Hollow Road.

Ironically, I see on the upper border of this photo Bartley Hollow which is the land that was owned by cousin Dolores’s family – downstream of the Speak line she and I share. It seems it’s always a small world in these mountain communities.

On this enlarged area of the property map, you can see the driveway or private road on Neil McNeil’s land.

On this map, you can see where the current day driveway or road occurs on the Niel McNiel map and its branch into the Eli Davis land.

On this map, I’ve noted with arrows the approximate location of the boundaries of both of Niel McNiel’s parcels.

Given that we know that Elizabeth Shepherd McNiel lived by her son Niel, and now we know where Niel lived – we also know where Elizabeth lived – and probably where she died as well.

In fact, this might be Elizabeth’s house. Family lore says that this is the house that Lois McNiel eloped out of to marry Elijah Vannoy. However, this story came out of Hancock County, not Wilkes County and this house could be Lois’s parents’ house, but in Hancock County, not Wilkes.

Given that William died sometime after 1816 but before the 1830 census, he had to be buried someplace. Son George McNiel also lived in this vicinity. By the 1830s when Elizabeth died, surely there was an established cemetery for the McNiel clan in this immediate area – maybe in conjunction with Elijah Vannoy. Maybe both families had a cemetery on their land. In either case, both are now lost, so while we know that Elizabeth was likely buried someplace on this land, or perhaps on Elijah’s land where her daughter lived, we don’t know where that might be.

One thing these Ramsey maps did point out is just how many small, undocumented family cemeteries exist, or existed – and there are surely more that we don’t know about – especially early cemeteries abandoned when the original family moved away.

After Elizabeth’s death both the Vannoys and the McNiel’s would sell their land on Mulberry Creek and move down the road a few miles into Claiborne County on Little Sycamore Creek where they were all living in the 1870s.

A hundred years later, when I first visited the Claiborne County families, all knowledge of the location of the original land in Hancock County had disappeared into the mists of time.

Elizabeth’s DNA

In the Lois McNiel article, I listed her daughters that gave their mitochondrial DNA to their children in the hope that maybe someone descends from these daughters to the current generation through all females. The current generation can be a male, since women give their mitochondrial DNA to all of their children, but only the females pass it on.

Here, we list Elizabeth’s daughters, with the hope that we can find a descendant whose DNA we can test to add a chapter to Elizabeth’s story. Where did her maternal line originate?

Elizabeth’s daughters who had female children who may have descendants today through all females are as follows:

Lois McNiel born about 1786 and married Elijah Vannoy about 1807 in Wilkes County. Lois died in the 1830s in Claiborne, now Hancock, County, TN. She had daughter Permelia born in 1810 who married John Baker and had daughters Sirena and Nancy Jane. Lois’s daughter Nancy also born about 1810 married George Loughmiller and had daughters Mermelia, Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Marty and Lyda. Lois’s daughter Sarah born in 1821 married Joseph Adams and moved to Arkansas. They had daughters Nancy Jane who married Franklin Skaggs, Rebecca who married William Leroy Throckmorton Bee Boren and Margaret Ann who married John Ward and moved to Oregon.
Sarah or Sallie McNiel was born about 1784 and married Joel Fairchild in Wilkes County. They moved to Claiborne County where Sallie died on January 2, 1861 and is buried in the Fairchild Cemetery in Hancock County. She had daughter Elizabeth Fairchild born between 1820-1825 who married Samuel McCullough and had daughters Sarah (b 1852), Elizabeth (b 1864), Susan (b 1867) and Cordia (b 1870).
Mary was born about 1792 in Wilkes County. She married Robert Campbell in 1817 in Claiborne County and died in 1881 in Bradley County, TN. I show only one child for her, Anderson, but I have a very difficult time believing she didn’t have additional children.
Nancy McNiel born in 1794 in Wilkes County married Alexander Campbell in 1815 in Claiborne County and is shown with only 3 male children. She died in 1839 in Hancock County. She likely outlived her mother, but not by long.
Elizabeth McNiel born between 1800 and 1810 married Andrew McClary. The 1840 census shows them with 2 daughters, but I can’t find the family in 1850.

If you descend from any of these women through all females, please contact me. There is a DNA scholarship waiting for you.

In Summary

Elizabeth was an amazing lady, even though we only know her through the records of the men around her, except for the 1830 census.

She saw and lived through two wars fought on our own soil, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Her husband fought in the Revolution, although they weren’t married at that time. Two of her uncles fought as well, one at King’s Mountain. Her father was a patriot and provided supplies.

Elizabeth was a young teen at the beginning of the Revolutionary War and a young woman when it ended. Life must have been interesting, listening to the talk of the war as news trickled in about battles fought and lost or won…and lives lost. Those who farmed yesterday, fought today and would never come home. All they could do was pray.

It was during this time that the family moved from Spotsylvania County, Virginia to Wilkes County, NC. Was the war somehow part of the reason? Was the journey more dangerous because of the war? Surely it was, because the Indians had allied themselves with the British.

Elizabeth was involved with the formation of the first Baptist Church in Wilkes County. Her parents were Baptist, the neighbors were Baptist…Elizabeth was going to be a Baptist and that’s all there was to that! An entire group of Baptists moved from Spotsylvania County to Wilkes County, along with their preacher, Reverend George McNiel, Elizabeth’s future father-in-law – and Elizabeth was among them.

A few years later, Elizabeth’s sons were old enough to have served in the War of 1812, but I don’t have any documentation that says they did. This was during the time they were migrating from Wilkes County to Claiborne County – and if it did take 2 years as family lore suggests, that might be why her sons never served.

Elizabeth lived in two centuries and survived in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee with children and without a husband. She probably buried babies and children, possibly alongside the trail. She raised ten children to adulthood.

Elizabeth left Spotsylvania County, Virginia and would ultimately live in three states and on two untamed frontiers. At least twice, she pulled up stakes, packed up a wagon with all of her belongings along with a bounty of children, in the middle of a war, and set out for the unknown.

Indeed, Elizabeth was an amazing woman.

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

Botocudo Ancient Remains from Brazil

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Roberta Estes

Update: Please note that I am leaving this article because the scientific information is accurate, BUT, it was subsequently discovered that the remains were mislabeled in the museum and were not Native.

One thing you can always count on in the infant science of population genetics… whatever you think you know, for sure, for a fact…well….you don’t. So don’t say too much, too strongly or you’ll wind up having to decide if you’d like catsup with your crow! Well, not literally, of course. It’s an exciting adventure that we’re on together and it just keeps getting better and better. And the times…they are a changin’.

Courtesy National Geographic https://natgeoeducationblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/world_map_of_y-dna_haplogroups.png

We have some very interesting news to report. Fortunately, or unfortunately – the news weaves a new, but extremely interesting, mystery.

Ancient Mitochondrial DNA

Back in 2013, a paper, Identification of Polynesian mtdNA haplogroups in remains of Botocudo Amerindians from Brazil, was published that identified both Native American and Polynesian haplogroups in a group of 14 skeletal remains of Botocudo Indians from Brazil whose remains arrived at a Museum in August of 1890 and who, the scientists felt, died in the second half of the 19^th century.

Twelve of their mitochondrial haplogroups were the traditional Native haplogroup of C1.

However, two of the skulls carried Polynesian haplogroups, downstream of haplogroup B, specifically B4a1a1a and B4a1a1, that compare to contemporary individuals from Polynesian, Solomon Island and Fijian populations. These haplotypes had not been found in Native people or previous remains.

Those haplogroups include what is known as the Polynesian motif and are found in Indonesian populations and also in Madagascar, according to the paper, but the time to the most common recent ancestor for that motif was calculated at 9,300 years plus or minus 2000 years. This suggests that the motif arose after the Asian people who would become the Native Americans had already entered North and South America through Beringia, assuming there were no later migration waves.

The paper discusses several possible scenarios as to how a Polynesian haplotype found its way to central Brazil among a now extinct Native people. Of course, the two options are either pre-Columbian (pre-1500) contact or post-Columbian contact which would infer from the 1500s to current and suggests that the founders who carried the Polynesian motif were perhaps either slaves or sailors.

In the first half of the 1800s, the Botocudo Indians had been pacified and worked side by side with African slaves on plantations.

Beyond that, without full genome sequencing there was no more that could be determined from the remains at that time. We know they carried a Polynesian motif, were found among Native American remains and at some point in history, intermingled with the Native people because of where they were found. Initial contact could have been 9,000 years ago or 200. There was no way to tell. They did have some exact HVR1 and HVR2 matches, so they could have been “current,” but I’ve also seen HVR1 and HVR2 matches that reach back to a common ancestor thousands of years ago…so an HVR1/HVR2 match is nothing you can take to the bank, certainly not in this case.

Full Genome Sequencing and Y DNA

This week, one on my subscribers, Kalani, mentioned that Felix Immanuel had uploaded another two kits to GedMatch of ancient remains. Those two kits are indeed two of the Botocudo remains – the two with the Polynesian mitochondrial motif which have now been fully sequenced. A corresponding paper has been published as well, “Two ancient genomes reveal Polynesian ancestry among the indigenous Botocudos of Brazil” by Malaspinas et al with supplemental information here.

There are two revelations which are absolutely fascinating in this paper and citizen scientist’s subsequent work.

First, their Y haplogroups are C-P3092 and C-Z31878, both equivalent to C-B477 which identifies former haplogroup C1b2. The Y haplogroups aren’t identified in the paper, but Felix identified them in the raw data files that are available (for those of you who are gluttons for punishment) at the google drive links in Felix’s article Two Ancient DNA from indigenous Botocudos of Brazil.

I’ve never seen haplogroup C1b2 as Native American, but I wanted to be sure I hadn’t missed a bus, so I contacted Ray Banks who is one of the administrators for the main haplogroup C project at Family Tree DNA and also is the coordinator for the haplogroup C portion of the ISOGG tree.

You can see the position of C1b2, C-B477 in yellow on the ISOGG (2015) tree relative to the position of C-P39 in blue, the Native American SNP shown several branches below, both as branches of haplogroup C.

Ray maintains a much more descriptive tree of haplogroup C1 at this link and of C2 at this link.

The branch above is the Polynesian (B477) branch and below, the Native American (P39) branch of haplogroup C.

In addition to confirming the haplogroup that Felix identified, when Ray downloaded the BAM files and analyzed the contents, he found that both samples were also positive for M38 and M208, which moves them downstream two branches from C1b2 (B477).

Furthermore, one of the samples had a mutation at Z32295 which Ray has included as a new branch of the C tree, shown below.

Ray indicated that the second sample had a “no read” at Z32295, so we don’t know if he carried this mutation. Ray mentions that both men are negative for many of the B459 equivalents, which would move them down one more branch. He also mentioned that about half of the Y DNA sites are missing, meaning they had no calls in the sequence read. This is common in ancient DNA results. It would be very interesting to have a Big Y or equivalent test on contemporary individuals with this haplogroup from the Pacific Island region.

Ray notes that all Pacific Islanders may be downstream of Z33295.

Not Admixed

The second interesting aspect of the genomic sequencing is that the remains did not show any evidence of admixture with European, Native American nor African individuals. More than 97% of their genome fits exactly with the Polynesian motifs. In other words, they appear to be first generation Polynesians. They carry Polynesian mitochondrial, Y and autosomal (nuclear) DNA, exclusively.

In total, 25 Botocudo remains have been analyzed and of those, two have Polynesian ancestry and those two, BOT15 and BOT17, have exclusively Polynesian ancestry as indicated in the graphic above from the paper.

When did they live? Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating with marine correction gives us dates of 1479-1708 AD and 1730-1804 for specimen BOT15 and 1496-1842 for BOT17.

The paper goes on to discuss four possible scenarios for how this situation occurred and the pros and cons of each.

The Polynesian Peru Slave Trade

This occurred between 1862-1864 and can be ruled out because the dates for the skulls predate this trade period, significantly.

The Madagascar-Brazil Slave Trade

The researchers state that Madagascar is known to have been peopled by Southeast Asians and not by Polynesians. Another factor excluding this option is that it’s known that the Malagasy ancestors admixed with African populations prior to the slave trade. No such ancestry was detected in the samples, so these individuals were not brought as a result of the Madagascar-Brazil slave trade – contrary to what has been erroneously inferred and concluded.

Voyaging on European Ships as Crew, Passengers or StowAways

Trade on Euroamerican ships in the Pacific only began after 1760 AD and by 1760, Bot15 and Bot17 were already deceased with a probability of .92 and .81, respectively, making this scenario unlikely, but not entirely impossible.

Polynesian Voyaging

Polynesian ancestors originated from East Asia and migrated eastwards, interacting with New Guineans before colonizing the Pacific. These people did colonize the Pacific, as unlikely as it seems, traveling thousands of miles, reaching New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island between 1200 and 1300 AD. Clearly they did not reach Brazil in this timeframe, at least not as related to these skeletal remains, but that does not preclude a later voyage.

Of the four options, the first two appear to be firmly eliminated which leaves only the second two options.

One of the puzzling aspects of this analysis it the “pure” Polynesian genome, eliminating admixture which precludes earlier arrival.

The second puzzling aspect is how the individuals, and there were at least two, came to find themselves in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and why we have not found this type of DNA on the more likely western coastal areas of South America.

Regardless of how they arrived, they did, and now we know at least a little more of their story.

GedMatch

At GedMatch, it’s interesting to view the results of the one-to-one matching.

Both kits have several matches. At 5cM and 500 SNPs, kit F999963 has 86 matches. Of those, the mitochondrial haplogroup distribution is overwhelmingly haplogroup B, specifically B4a1a1 with a couple of interesting haplogroup Ms.

Y haplogroups are primarily C2, C3 and O. C3 and O are found exclusively in Asia – meaning they are not Native.

Kit F999963 matches a couple of people at over 30cM with a generation match estimate just under 5 generations. Clearly, this isn’t possible given that this person had died by about 1760, according to the paper, which is 255 years or about 8.5-10 generations ago, but it says something about the staying power of DNA segments and probably about endogamy and a very limited gene pool as well. All matches over 15cM are shown below.

Kit F999964 matches 97 people, many who are different people that kit F999963 matched. So these ancient Polynesian people, F999963 and F999964 don’t appear to be immediate relatives.

Again, a lot of haplogroup B mitochondrial DNA, but less haplogroup C Y DNA and no haplogroup O individuals.

Kit F999964 doesn’t match anyone quite as closely as kit F999963 did in terms of total cM, but the largest segment is 12cM, so the generational estimate is still at 4.6, All matches over 15cM are shown below.

Who are these individuals that these ancient kits are matching? Many of these individuals know each other because they are of Hawaiian or Polynesian heritage and have already been working together. Several of the Hawaiian folks are upwards of 80%, one at 94% and one believed to be 100% Hawaiian. Some of these matches are to Maori, a Polynesian people from New Zealand, with one believed to be 100% Maori in addition to several admixed Maori. So obviously, these ancient remains are matching contemporary people with Polynesian ancestry.

The Unasked Question

Sooner or later, we as a community are going to have to face the question of exactly what is Native or aboriginal. In this case, because we do have the definitive autosomal full genome testing that eliminates admixture, these two individuals are clearly NOT Native. Without full genomic testing, we would have never known.

But what if they had arrived 200 years earlier, around 1500 AD, one way or another, possibly on an early European ship, and had intermixed with the Native people for 10 generations? What if they carried a Polynesian mitochondrial (or Y) DNA motif, but they were nearly entirely Native, or so much Native that the Polynesian could no longer be found autosomally? Are they Native? Is their mitochondrial or Y DNA now also considered to be Native? Or is it still Polynesian? Is it Polynesian if it’s found in the Cook Islands or on Hawaii and Native if found in South America? How would we differentiate?

What if they arrived, not in 1500 AD, but about the year 500 AD, or 1000 BCE or 2000 BCE or 3000 BCE – after the Native people from Asia arrived but unquestionably before European contact? Does that make a difference in how we classify their DNA?

We don’t have to answer this yet today, but something tells me that we will, sooner or later…and we might want to start pondering the question.

Acknowledgements:

I want to thank all of the people involved whose individual work makes this type of comparative analysis possible. After all, the power of genetic genealogy, contemporary or ancient, is in collaboration. Without sharing, we have nothing. We learn nothing. We make no progress.

In addition to the various scientists and papers already noted, special thanks to Felix Immanual for preparing and uploading the ancient files. This is no small task and the files often take a month of prep each. Thanks to Kalani for bringing this to my attention. Thanks to Ray Banks for his untiring work with haplogroup C and for maintaining his haplogroup webpage with specifics about where the various subgroups are found. Thanks to ISOGG’s volunteers for the haplotree. Thanks to GedMatch for providing this wonderful platform and tools. Thanks to everyone who uploads their DNA, and that of their relatives and works on specific types of projects – like Hawaiian and Maori. Thanks to my haplogroup C-P39 co-administrators, Dr. David Pike and Marie Rundquist, for their contributions to this discussion and for working together on the Native American Haplogroup C-P39 Project. It’s important to have other people who are passionate about the same subjects to bounce things off of and to work with. This is the perfect example of the power of collaboration!

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

Lydia Brown (c1790-1840/1850), Buried or Attending a Wedding?, 52 Ancestors #78

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Roberta Estes

All I can say is thank heavens for the government. Even back in “the day,” the government had a place in the lives of the citizens, whether they liked it or not, and because of the government, we have records today. In this case, without a marriage record and land records, we would never know the name of Lydia Brown, who she married or who her parents were. She would have been another no-name anonymous end-of-line female, but thankfully, she isn’t.

Besides, I love the name Lydia. It’s lyrical, almost musical. Had I known these names earlier, I might have named my daughters Lydia and Phebe.

Lydia was born sometime around 1790, or maybe slightly earlier, to Jotham and Phebe Brown, probably on Brush Creek, a branch of Little River, in Botetourt County, Virginia where they were living at that time. That part of Botetourt became Montgomery County.

By the time Lydia was about 7, her parents began selling their land, probably in preparation for moving, but Jotham died sometime between March of 1797 and May of 1800 when his widow, Phebe and heirs sold 104 acres on Terry’s Creek, a branch of Little River. Were it not for this deed, we wouldn’t have the names of Jotham’s children, nor would we know when he died.

From the Montgomery Co., VA court records – Deed Book C – page 326, courtesy of Stevie Hughs. May 16, 1800 – the following heirs of Jotham Brown, deceased, conveyed 104 acres lying in that county, on Terry’s Creek, a branch of Little River to Benjamin Craig of the same County.

The heirs named on the deed as follows:

Wife, Phoebe Brown,
Christopher Cooper & wife Jane Brown
Salvanes (Sylvanous) Brown
John Willis (wife unstated)
David Brown
John Brown
Mary Brown
Lydia Brown
Elizabeth Brown
Jotham Brown
Mirey Brown
William Brown

Lydia would have been between 7 and 10 when her father died and the land was sold. By the time the family moved to Greene County, she was probably 12 or 13.

Lydia’s mother, Phebe, was probably very perplexed about what to do. She was about 50-60 years old and she still had 3 unmarried children that she was raising. Lydia was the baby. Granted, she did have older children to help, but still, with many of the family members wanting to move to Greene County, or at least contemplating it, she had a decision to make.

Phebe’s oldest daughter, Jane Brown Cooper and husband Christopher Cooper obviously wanted to settle in Greene County, as they were the first to arrive in 1803. Phebe’s sons, Sylvanus, David and Jotham would follow by 1805. We don’t know for sure whether Phebe settled in Greene County, but unless she died before she could get there, it’s likely she did.

Phebe’s children who were at that time unmarried all married in Greene County, Lydia and Mercy both in October 1807 and William in 1811. So either Phebe settled here, living out her final years with her children, or she died and one of her older children took the younger ones to raise.

Given Phebe’s age, probably between 50 and 60 about that time, it’s certainly possible that she lived a good many years, probably with Jane Brown Cooper and family. We do know that Phebe signed as a witness on the deed when Christopher and Jane Brown Cooper sold their land in Montgomery County in preparation for the move to Greene County – so it’s very likely she moved right along with them.

Lydia would have lived with her mother, probably in the Jane Brown Cooper homestead, which was then, a cabin. Stevie Hughes found the location of the cabin, sadly, after it has been torn down. The last thing it had been used for was a storage shed. It was located very near, within 100 feet of Baileyton Road and Spider Stines Road, in Greene County. In the photo below, 100 feet from Baileyton Road would be about half way to the row of trees, below.

On down the road was the family burying ground. In the photo below, you can see the little balloon on the site.

If Phebe accompanied her family to Greene County, this is assuredly where she lies today. Lydia, would have stood in this very spot to bury her mother. We don’t know when Phebe died, but we do know that Lydia herself either died in 1817, or left Greene County in 1819. So she too could be buried here.

For the benefit of anyone trying to find this cemetery, look for the high tension wires and pole, where the little balloon is located, above. The cemetery is within a few feet and is very overgrown, although Stevie placed a lovely marker so that it will never be lost again. It would somehow be fitting if they were Scottish with the beautiful thistle blooming right by the stone.

You can see the edge of the power wires behind the stone.

When I say it’s overgrown, I mean as tall as a person, but the field stones are there, hidden underneath. Only your similarly crazy cousins will do things like this with you!!! Love my cousins!

This is the land where Lydia lived as a child, before she met her future husband, William Crumley (the third), as viewed from the cemetery, a location she surely visited far more than she wanted. That was the pioneer life – the cycle of birth and death was often repeated.

There might have been a problem brewing in the neighborhood, because we know that William Crumley (the third’s) family was Methodist. His father, William Crumley (the second) was one of the founders of Wesley’s Chapel Methodist Church.

Stevie Hughes, the primary Brown researcher for our Greene County Browns believes that the Jotham Brown family was Presbyterian, in part because two of Jotham’s son-in-laws, Christopher Cooper and William Stapleton, signed a petition in 1785 to establish a Reformed Church of Scotland in Botetourt County, Virginia. That’s pretty telling.

If this is the case, we don’t know how this clash of religions was resolved, but it apparently was, because on October 1, 1807, Lydia Brown and William Crumley (the third) were married. David and Jotham Brown, Lydia’s brothers, were her witnesses. Also signing was William Crumley, although there is some question as to whether William Crumley (the second) or William (the third) signed the bond, because it appears that William Crumley (the third) may have been underage, having been born about 1789. In which case, both William and Lydia were about 18 and probably starry-eyed in love. They probably could have cared less which church they attended, if any. A fourth man who signed for the marriage license, James Gibson, is a complete mystery.

We don’t know exactly where Lydia and William lived, but we know they lived nearby because three of William (the third’s) siblings married children of Lydia’s older brother, Sylvanus Brown.

Within a year or so, they did what newlywed couple of that era did, they produced a child, John, born about 1808. William would follow and then Jotham on October 23, 1813, but then the War of 1812 would interrupt their lives. William Crumley (the third) would march off to War leaving a wife and a 3 month old baby, along with two toddlers at home. Lydia must have been terrified that he would die.

William enlisted on January 10, 1814 to serve until May 23rd. Instead, he was discharged, too ill to fight, arriving home on March 28, 1814. Lydia must have been a combination of thrilled to see William and horribly worried about how sick he was. I wonder how he got home.

In the first decade of their marriage, William and Lydia had 5 children: John, William, Jotham, Sarah and Clarissa, born on April 10, 1817.

But then, as they say, is when the trouble started. Now, the ancestors weren’t even aware of the trouble. They didn’t have a problem. The trouble is ours, caused by them. In fact, they are probably all collectively chuckling at us.

One of two things happened, either Lydia died right after Clarissa’s death, or she didn’t. It has been assumed by researchers, for a very long time, that Lydia died and that in October of 1817, William (the third) married Betsey Johnson, Lydia’s cousin, because the signature on the marriage bond for the 1817 marriage bond, below, looks nearly identical to the 1807 marriage bond for William (the third) and Lydia Brown (above).

The problem is that the 1807 marriage says the groom is William Crumley Jr., who is William (the third) who was likely underage at that time and could not sign for himself, and the 1817 bond says the groom is William Sr., who is William (the second). In neither case does the signature itself reflect Jr. or Sr. If these bonds are accurate as stated, then Lydia did not die and William (the third) Jr. did not remarry. Instead, the wife of William (the second) Sr. died and William (the second) Sr. is the William who remarried.

Lydia, instead of being present at her own funeral, was once again pregnant and went to her father-in-law’s wedding. Big difference, wouldn’t you say? But now you understand the problem. We don’t know if Lydia was busy getting buried or busy at a wedding, pregnant for my ancestor. Phebe, named after Lydia’s mother, would be born just 5 months and 7 days after the wedding between William Crumley Sr. and Betsey Johnson.

Because neither William Crumley the second or the third had a will, nor did Lydia or Betsey, we have had to retrofit the Crumley children by virtue of family history, opportunity, location, process of elimination of other parents, and in some cases, naming patterns. Not fun.

Therefore, Clarissa is believed to belong to Lydia and William (the third) but she did marry in Greene County in 1834 instead of in Lee County where her parents had been living. However, we know these families kept in close contact. They only moved about 50 miles away and there was a main road between Hawkins County Tennessee and Lee County Virginia, where they moved to, and Greene County, Tennessee, where they moved from. Other parent candidates for Clarissa have been eliminated.

The next child is Phebe, my ancestor, born on March 24, 1818 and she does live, marry and die in the Hawkins/Claiborne area of Tennessee where it borders Lee County, Virginia. There is very little question about whose child she is. Furthermore, her name is Phebe, Lydia’s mother’s name, and if Phebe belonged to Betsey Johnson, Betsey would have been several months pregnant when she married William Crumley in October of 1817. That means if Lydia died giving birth to Clarissa or shortly thereafter, in mid-April, William would have gotten Betsey pregnant in June, just two months later, and married her in October.

The problem is that we have a lot of variables here. Is Clarissa really Lydia’s child. Did Lydia die in 1817? Did Betsey Johnson marry William the second or William the third. Is there any possibility that Phebe is really the child of Betsey Johnson and William (the second) rather than Lydia and William (the third)?

If Lydia died, then we have the answer to the questions, but I don’t think she did. One reason is that the child born in 1818 is named Phebe, after Lydia’s mother, and the two following children, respectively, name a child Lydia and Jotham, so it certainly seems like Lydia would be the most likely candidate for the mother of all of the children of William Crumley (the third.)

So let’s move forward with the assumption that Lydia lived. If so, then she moved to the border of Lee and Hancock County in 1819 or 1820. William Crumley (the second) purchases land there in 1819, but in the 1820 census, it’s William Crumley (the third) and family who is found living there, probably on his father’s land.

By 1830, William (the third) and wife, according to the census, have moved to Pulaski County, Kentucky but by 1840, they are back in Claiborne County, Tennessee, the neighbor county just south across the state line from Lee County, Virginia.

The last known child is Aaron, born about 1821. Lydia would have been 31 or 32 at that time, so it’s unusual that they had no more children. Either some died or there are children unaccounted for, which is entirely possible since the Hancock County records have burned. In 1845, Hancock County was formed from parts of both Claiborne and Hawkins County, Tennessee.

Lydia’s children begin to marry, with John marrying a woman named Mahala in 1828 followed by Jotham marrying Ann Robinette in 1834. Clarissa also marries in 1834, but in Greene County to George Graham. In 1838, Belinda (or Melinda) married James Hurvey Davis in Claiborne County. In 1845, William married Becky Malone in Greene County. In 1844 Aaron married Mary Ann Scofield in Lee County, followed by Phebe marrying Joel Vannoy in Claiborne County in 1845 and then the last child to marry, Sallie, also called Sarah, married the widower Edward Walker in Hancock County in 1848.

Lydia is still living in 1840, or at least in the census there is a woman of her age in the William Crumley (the third) household. She may have lived long enough to see all of her children marry. If she did, then she also buried her son, Jotham, who died in August of 1841, leaving a wife and three children, one of whom was named Lydia.

Lydia died sometime between the 1840 census and the 1850 census. I suspect it was closer to 1850 than to 1840, simply because her husband, William Crumley did not remarry until within a year’s time of the 1850 census, according to the census document. Most men who are going to remarry do so fairly quickly. The census was taken on November 11, 1850, but it is supposed to be taken “as of” June, so William remarried sometime after June 1849.

We don’t know exactly where Lydia would be buried, because we don’t know exactly where William and Lydia would have lived after their return to Claiborne County. However, based on the 1840 census records, they lived beside Eli Davis. Eli Davis in 1829 bought land from Neal McNeal, whose land lay close to Mulberry Creek on present day Turner Hollow Road, half way between the left arrow and Mulberry Gap Church on the map below.

They may also have lived on Blackwater in present Hancock County when Lydia died, because that’s where William Crumley (the second) had owned land and by 1850, William (the third) is found living dead center in the middle of the Melungeon families, neighbors to the Gibson families. Vardy, the heart of the Melungeon community is found on Blackwater Creek. Son John Crumley is also living in the Melungeon neighborhood, which suggests strongly that both John’s wife, Mahala, and William’s second wife, Pqa (sic), are likely from that community as well. The Gibson family is one of the prominent Melungeon families, and remember that a James Gibson signed for Lydia Brown and William Crumley’s marriage license in 1807.

Living on Turner Hollow Road in the 1840s makes a lot of sense, because Phebe Crumley, daughter of Lydia, had to be in the neighborhood to meet Joel Vannoy who she married in 1845. Edward Walker who married Sarah Crumley lived another mile or so down Mulberry Gap road.

On the map above, Joel Vannoy lived with his parents where the left red arrow is located on Mulberry Gap Road and William Crumley (the second) owned land on Blackwater near the right arrow. For both families, this church would have been 4 or 5 miles at most, and possibly closer. However, if William Crumley lived adjacent the Neil McNiel land, then he lived adjacent or at least near the uncle of Joel Vannoy, so it would have been easy for Joel Vannoy to meet Phebe Crumley.

The Mulberry Gap Church is just about equidistant between where Joel lived and the Blackwater community, located in the gap between the two, and people from both areas were known to attend – although Mulberry Gap Church records that early don’t exist. In that day and time, church events were great match-making opportunities for young people.

This picture shows the Mulberry Gap Church, at right near the pole, snuggled into the Gap through the mountain range. This is the only Gap between Blackwater and Mulberry Gap road. Philip Walker took this photo from Mulberry Gap on Mulberry Gap Road.

Lydia may be buried in this vicinity, along Blackwater Road, where she at one time lived. This land spanned the Hancock/Lee County border along Blackwater Creek, where William (the second’s) land is known to have been located.

Furthermore, Lydia’s sister, Mary who married William Stapleton lived on Blackwater as well. We know where the Stapleton’s land was located, just on the Lee County side of Blackwater Creek, between the state line and where the two Blackwater Creeks converge, a couple of miles upstream. In fact, in a very odd twist of fate, eventually, Mary winds up owning the William Crumley land on Blackwater.

Mary, who died in 1843, is buried in the Roberts cemetery, a very small cemetery at the foot of Powell Mountain along Blackwater Road. It’s possible that Lydia is buried there with her sister as well, especially if William Crumley (the third) did not own land at the time that Lydia died. She had to be buried someplace. Mary’s hand carved tombstone is show below, and is located by that of her husband, William Stapleton.

Lydia’s Children

It would certainly be helpful if we knew whether Lydia died in 1817. If she did, then clearly, none of the children born after 1817 were hers. So, let’s divide Lydia’s children into two groups. The first group would be her children regardless. The second group belongs to the wife of William Crumley (the third), whoever she was from October 1817 on.

These children have been assigned to William Crumley (the third) and his wife on a variety of evidence, including the fact that William (the second) and William (the third) relocated from the main Crumley group in Greene County, TN, so any Crumley’s found in Lee County, VA, Claiborne and Hancock Counties in TN are very likely descended from the Williams.

John Crumley was born 1808/1809 in Greene County, TN and married about 1828 to Mahala. He had 13 children including one named Lydia and one named Phebe. He died was living in Lee County, VA in the 1870 census and died sometime thereafter.
William Crumley IV, born in 1811, married in 1840 to Rebecca Malone in Greene County, died in August 1864 in Pickens County, South Carolina. He named one son Jotham. I have always questioned whether he is truly their child, but how else does one explain the name Jotham? Plus, we don’t have any other parent candidates for him – the rest have been eliminated.
Jotham Crumley born October 23, 1813 in Greene County, married on August 14, 1834 to Anne Robinette in Lee County, VA and died on August 22, 1841 in Lee County. Had 3 children and named one daughter Lydia. When you notice Jotham’s birth date and Sarah’s, below, it’s obvious that one family or the other is incorrect and I suspect that Sarah’s is incorrect.
Sarah/Sallie Crumley born September 28, 1813, according to her tombstone, in Greene County. However, her War of 1812 widow’s pension application and census documents place her birth in about 1815. Her name is reflected both ways, Sarah and Sallie, sometimes even in the same legal document. In 1848, In Hancock County, Tennessee, she married widower Edward Walker Jr. who died in 1860. The marriage ceremony was attended by her brother John Crumley, according to a later affidavit. Sarah left Hancock County about 1880 with her two sons, James Hervey and Milton Green Walker, winding up in Cocke County where Greene was elected to the State Legislature the year after Sarah died. She died January 11, 1898 and is buried in Newport, Cocke County, TN in the Union Cemetery – at least now. That cemetery wasn’t opened yet when she died, so her children had her buried and then exhumed and reburied in the new cemetery on the family plot when it opened. She is buried with her sons in “lane 1.” Sarah was a dedicated Methodist, attending the Thomas Chapel Methodist Church in Hancock County when they lived there. In Cocke County, Sarah’s sons owned a hotel near the train station. It burned in 1912, forcing her sons into bankruptcy and destroying all of the family memorabilia including photos and several Bibles. If there was a William Crumley Bible, this is probably what happened to it.

Clarissa Crumley born April 10, 1817 in Greene County, married January 16, 1834 to George Graham in Greene County and died there on Sept. 23, 1883. Buried in the Cross Anchor Cemetery. Had a son named William, but no Lydias or Jothams. Other parents for Clarissa have been eliminated by process of elimination. The mitochondrial DNA of Clarissa’s descendant matches that of Phoebe’s descendant and both match that of Phoebe Brown’s descendant.

Phebe Crumley born March 24, 1818, married January 19, 1845 to Joel Vannoy in Claiborne County, died January 17, 1900 and is buried in the Pleasant View Cemetery in Claiborne County. Had 7 children, but no Lydia or Jotham among them. There is a William and an Elizabeth but those are both very common names.

Belinda or Melinda Crumley born April 1, 1820 in Lee County, VA, married on November 4, 1838 to James Hurvey Davis who died in 1865 in Lee County, VA. He was buried in the Mulberry Gap Church cemetery where he was a deacon and church clerk for many years. When “Malinda” died on September 28, 1905, she was buried there alongside James. They share a stone. They had four children, and one daughter was named Lydia.

Photo from Find-A-Grave

Aaron F. Crumley was born about 1821 in Lee County, Virginia. On November 21, 1844, he married Mary Ann Scofield in Claiborne County, TN although she died before July of 1863. Aaron moved to Appanoose County between 1850 and 1852 with his father, William Crumley (the third) and his second wife, Pya. Aaron volunteered for the Civil War draft in Appanoose County, giving his birth as age 41 as of July 1, 1863, unmarried, and born in Tennessee. In 1864 Aaron married Catherine Hopkins in Appanoose County, Iowa. He married a third time in 1876 in Appanoose County to Provy Lockman, but only had children by his first two wives. One of his children was named William and one was named Jotham.

DNA

We decided a few years back to see if we could solve the question about whether or not Lydia gave birth to both children, Clarissa and Phebe, using DNA testing. I described this effort and the variants in detail in the article about Phebe Crumley Vannoy, but let’s summarize here.

I utilized the mitochondrial DNA because it is passed from the mother to all of her children, without any of the father’s DNA. Therefore what is passed to the children is exactly the same DNA that the mother carried. Her daughters pass it on, intact, to their children, but her son’s don’t pass it on at all.

Therefore, if you can find descendants from these women who descend through all women to the current generation, then you can determine what their ancestor’s mitochondrial DNA looked like, and compare it to each other.

We found descendants of both Clarissa and Phebe, and indeed, their mitochondrial DNA does match. We then found a descendant of Phebe Brown, Lydia’s mother, through another daughter’s line, and both Clarissa and Phebe’s descendants match that person as well. Therefore, while it doesn’t guarantee us that this is a mother daughter relationship, what we can say positively is that those three women share a common female ancestor, likely the mother of Phebe Brown, whose mother is unknown.

Phebe Brown has been theorized to be the daughter of Zopher (Zophar) Johnson (Johnston) Sr., also found in Frederick County, Virginia in the 1780s, along with the Browns and Crumleys. I asked Stevie Hughes if she could find a proven descendant of Zopher Johnson’s wife thought all females to the current generation. Unfortunately, that is not an option. Zopher had only one proven daughter, Marsy or Mercy, who married Robert Foster. They had only one daughter whose line Stevie traced for several generations in Greene County before it disappeared.

What their DNA can tell us, aside from matches, is something about where their ancestors originated. Can we tell if they were indeed Scotch-Irish?

Family Tree DNA gives us several tools to use. One tool, the Matches Map shows us where the most distant ancestors of people our participants match are found in Europe. In our case, there aren’t many, and the two we do have are not in the British Isles.

This screen shot is of the most distant ancestral location of the full sequence matches of one of our Lydia descendants. As you can see, there aren’t any matches whose ancestors are in the British Isles, but let’s face it, there are only two matches who know, or think they know, their ancestor’s locations in Europe. So that’s not much to go on.

Now, absence of evidence does not necessarily equate to evidence of absence. We’ll need to wait for more evidence and more high resolution matches before we can make any inferences as to ancestral location of Phebe Brown’s direct matrilineal ancestors.

Another tool is the Ancestral Origins data base, shown below, which tells us the locations that the full sequence matches identify as the location of their most distant matrilineal ancestor. You’d think it would be the same information as is shown on the map, but it isn’t necessarily because lots of people don’t complete the geographic information for the map.

This type of information, of course, can be useful but also suffers from the age-old genealogy problem of people providing information that may or may not be correct. Still, trends can be suggestive and enlightening. Unfortunately, we don’t see any trends here. I’m not using the HVR1 data alone, because it’s not specific enough to be useful. I’m only utilizing the higher resolutions results.

A third tool, Haplogroup Origins, pulls academic data base matching at the haplogroup level into the mix. As you can see, the geography is very broad, so while it’s interesting, it’s not definitive.

The Mystery Remains

So, the mystery of Lydia Brown remains. There is no smoking gun but there is a little bit of smoking DNA evidence that suggests that Lydia was the mother of both Clarissa and Phebe. Still, mitochondrial DNA can’t confirm a mother daughter relationship and no DNA testing can confirm a child/parent relationship that many generations ago.

Where was Lydia between April and October of 1817 – being buried or getting pregnant for Phebe and attending her father-in-law’s wedding?

Most of the existing records have been thoroughly reviewed in Lee County, Virginia and in Greene, Hawkins and Claiborne Counties in Tennessee, but the records of Pulaski County, KY have never been searched. It’s possible that a deed or some other record there might provide the first name of William’s wife.

Be it Lydia or Betsey – it’s an answer and that’s what we need. Of course, if it’s not Lydia, then there are a whole different set of questions that need to be answered, like…what set of circumstances would allow the DNA of both Phebe Crumley’s descendants and Clarissa Crumley’s descendants to match with the DNA of Phebe Brown? But no need borrowing trouble, at least not yet. Heaven knows, we have enough challenges with this line already!

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

Lois McNiel (c1786-1830s), Eloped?, 52 Ancestors #77

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Roberta Estes

Lois McNiel or McNeil, depending on which way which side of the family spells the name, has always been one of my favorite ancestors because of the wonderfully romantic love story associated with her and her beau. Women in the south at that time didn’t have boyfriends, they had beaus.

You see, we have the picture of the cabin she reportedly eloped out of, right out of that top window, into the waiting arms of her true love, Elijah Vannoy.

I was a bit younger when I first heard this story, and I thought it was just about the most romantic story I had ever heard, and it happened right in my own family. I mean, so in love that one would climb out of the upper window, doubtless in the dead of night, drop into the arms of her love, probably in the moonlight, and then dash off to the courthouse to get married. I could literally see Lois, every step of the way, eloping. How romantic!

I could see myself doing that too, well, assuming I could find a young man who was game and who wouldn’t drop me, or worse yet, not show up. Nothing worse than being stood up on your elopement. Lois didn’t have to worry about that – she had Elijah.

Who wouldn’t want to be that much in love? I knew that Lois and I were certainly kindred spirits.

Now, I know that the logical group of my readers are already asking questions…like how did Lois get from the window to the ground? How did they manage to get to the courthouse? Wouldn’t her father go straight there, at dawn’s first light, and be waiting for them when the courthouse opened? Who would have signed their bond, something required at that time? And more logical questions. Damned logic anyway.

Yes, indeed, there are questions and, ahem, issues with this story.

First, this photo was probably taken in Hancock County, Tennessee, given where it came from, clearly after color photography was available, and we know that Lois McNiel and Elijah Vannoy were married in Wilkes County, NC, in 1807 before migrating to the part of Claiborne County that is now Hancock just a few years later, in 1811 or 1812. To the best of my knowledge, no one knows exactly where, in Wilkes County, William McNiel lived, so one certainly wouldn’t be able to take a photo of a cabin in a location we don’t know where is.

So, this cabin clearly could have been the cabin of her parents, William McNiel and Elizabeth Shepherd, in Hancock County, but Lois didn’t elope out the window, because she was already married before the family arrived in Claiborne (which became Hancock) County. Lois and Elijah could easily have lived in the same cabin with her parents when they first arrived in Claiborne County, but any exit out of this window wasn’t Lois getting married.

Wilkes County, North Carolina

Lois was about 21 when she married, born in about 1786 in Wilkes County in the area of the county known as the New Hope District. Her father would not have been back from the Revolutionary War long. Lois was either the oldest, or one of the oldest children.

The Vannoy, McNiel and Shepherd families lived in the New Hope area along the north fork of the Reddies River and intermarried considerably.

This is the land of quaint little churches, hills, mountains and dense forests. This is Appalachia at its best. The Blue Ridge.

And of course, beautiful streams, carving their way through the countryside, running headlong for the rivers down the steep slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Here, the north fork of the Reddies River runs parallel with Vannoy Road, crossing under Buckwheat Road. Lois assuredly knew this creek well, and perhaps she and her siblings even waded here on hot summer days, splashing in the refreshing water.

In 1810, Lois’s father, William McNiel sold land to Elijah Vannoy, so whether or not Lois eloped with Elijah, with or without her parent’s blessing, apparently her father recovered enough to sell them land in 1810. Of course, their first (surviving) child, Permelia, was born earlier that year. Lois’s marriage to Elijah would last until her death, sometime between 1830 and 1840, in Claiborne County.

Westward Bound – Giving Birth on the Trail

Apparently the McNiel and Vannoy families like stories, because the next story is about their move to Claiborne County in 1811 or 1812. There are two parts to the story. The first part is about the trip being via flatboat and taking two years. That sounds like a tall tale to me, but it was written in a letter and told by Elijah’s daughter, so there is likely some truth in it, someplace. You can read that entire saga in Elijah Vannoy’s article.

The second part of the story is that Lois’s son, Joel, was born during this journey. Whether the family indeed traveled by flatboat, around Florida and back up the Mississippi to Tennessee, or whether they did like every other pioneer family and loaded everything into a wagon and started overland….it’s still likely that indeed, Lois had a child mid-journey. “Aunt Lou” reported that child, Joel, to have been born in 1812, but Joel’s tombstone shows his birth as May 8, 1813. I’ve seen tombstones be wrong, and I’ve seen aunt’s be wrong too…so one way or another, it’s still a good story, and it’s likely to be true or Aunt Lou wouldn’t have said that Joel was born during the journey. She was 15 years younger than Joel, but she would have had first person knowledge of what her parents said about Joel’s birth…and they were there.

I can’t even begin to imagine leaving in a covered wagon, or a flatboat, being pregnant. Those wagons had no shocks and the “roads” were entirely full of potholes and ruts. Those women could count, and they knew at least roughly when they were due. Woman have been “counting on their fingers” comparing birth dates to wedding dates for centuries.

But Lois apparently departed pregnant. Perhaps that’s when the wagon train, or the flatboat was leaving and she had no choice. Women in that time were not exactly always in charge of their own lives. Plus, they were either pregnant or nursing most of their pre-menopausal lives and if there was in fact a group of people who traveled together, there was no convenient time when no one was pregnant, so babies got delivered when and where they decided to arrive. I wonder if the wagons even stopped for the duration or if they just kept rolling and the baby got delivered in the back of a moving wagon, assuming it was not night time when they would have been stopped anyway.

Claiborne County, Tennessee

We don’t know where Lois and Elijah lived, exactly for the first few years they were in Claiborne County, but we do know where they lived in 1825 when Elijah applied for a land grant. In the survey, it says that his land includes the improvements that Elijah had made, which means clearing land to farm and building some sort of house, and that he lives north of Mulberry Creek. It’s certainly possible that they sought out this land and settled there upon arrival in Claiborne County, but didn’t file to own the land for another decade. One had to pay to file and pay to have the land surveyed (one cent per acre) and then pay to have the survey recorded. It was five years from the time the grant was filed in 1825 until it was surveyed in 1829 and then registered in 1830, so perhaps the grant and survey were more of a formality than anything else…albeit an important one…especially if Elijah had died in that limbo time.

I have seen lawsuits about a person filing for a claim where someone else was living. One could call them claim-jumpers, but they were opportunists taking advantage of a multi-year delay or procrastination. Let’s face it, first one to the land claim office wins. It was risky not to file.

In 1830, Lois and Elijah were happily living on Mulberry Creek with their 3 male and 6 female children, according to the census. They had probably lived there for nearly 20 years, and it definitely felt like home. By then, Lois would have been about 43 or 44.

Lois would have used the cool spring waters of the spring found on her land to keep her milk and butter fresh, as the spring water was a consistent 50 degrees or so and was unquestionably the coolest place on their land in the summer. Maybe a walk down to this spring was a respite for her. Maybe she cooled her feet in the stream too, and reminisced about the Reddies River days of her childhood.

Lois’s last child we know of was born about 1825, but since Lois died before Elijah, and the Hancock County courthouse records burned after Elijah’s death sometime after 1850, there is no will – so there is no official list of children. Most of what we know has been reconstructed by family members who were alive in the early 1900s and by documents such as the census.

Unraveling

Things seems to be pretty stable for the first 20 years or so in Claiborne County, but after 1830, things began to unravel.

The next ten years are questionable in terms of what happened in which order.

In the 1830 Claiborne County census, Lois’s mother, Elizabeth McNiel is listed, age 60-70, so born 1760-1770. With her are two males, one 15-20 and one 20-30, likely her youngest two sons, Jesse and William McNiel. William McNiel, Lois’s father, has passed on. There is no 1820 census, so we don’t really know when he died.

It’s certainly possible that William died about the time the family made the move. In fact, it’s possible that he died before they moved to Claiborne, or in route, as he does not once appear in any Claiborne County records, but his sons do.

So Lois may have named her son, born about 1816, William in honor of her father who had recently passed.

Lois’s mother died sometime between the 1830 census and the 1840 census. In 1830, Elizabeth is living just 7 houses from Lois and Elijah. Elizabeth is living beside Neal McNiel, her son, who was granted land on Mulberry Creek in 1818, so we know they are near neighbors to Lois. Unless Elizabeth died suddenly or Lois predeceased her, you know that Lois was with her mother, at her bedside, in her final days and hours.

I’d wager that Elizabeth is buried in the same family cemetery where Elijah Vannoy and Lois McNiel Vannoy are buried. That’s the cemetery we can’t find, of course.

By 1840, ten years later, Lois herself, not yet 55 and maybe not much more than 45, had passed away and was probably buried alongside her mother. Since Lois and her mother both died in the same decade, we really don’t know who died first, or if they both became ill from the same disease and perhaps died about the same time. Lois’s son, William, also died sometime between 1835 and 1839, but we’re not sure when.

Other than possibly William, Lois outlived all of her children, or at least the ones we know about because they lived to adulthood. Based on the birth years of the children we do know about, it looks like Lois may have lost 4 young children, including her first child, born something between her 1807 marriage and the 1810 birth of Permelia. The first child would have died in Wilkes County, the second probably in Wilkes as well, but the third and fourth, in the 1820s, would definitely have been in Claiborne (now Hancock) County and buried on the land along Mulberry Creek. It’s sad that the only hint we have as to the existence of these children is a gap in the “normal” birth timing of the children who lived. However, that’s often the case.

Pioneer women were tough. They had no other choice.

Returning Home

Sometime prior to 1940, several descendants from the Vannoy family decided to take a picnic and go up to Hancock County and see the old homestead where Lois McNiel and Elijah Vannoy lived. Even then, they had to find a “local” to show them where the house was located.

The man in the photo in front of Elijah Vannoy and Lois McNiel’s cabin is James Hurvey Vannoy, born in 1856, who would have been the grandson of Lois McNiel Vannoy. The fact that he is holding flowers makes me wonder if they had located the cemetery at that time.

It’s hard to believe that it has been 75-100 years since this photo was taken, and nearly another 100 years since Lois passed away. We may have lost her grave, but she is still there, someplace nearby, on the waters of Mulberry Creek, near the spring branch that kept her milk and butter cool.

If I could ask Lois three questions, I’d ask her if she eloped out a window to marry Elijah Vannoy, I’d ask her if she gave birth on the way to Claiborne County, as the family story says and I’d ask her about that flatboat story of how they traveled between Wilkes and Claiborne Counties.

Lois’s DNA

One piece of information we don’t have about Lois, but could obtain if the right people were to test, is her mitochondrial DNA. That could provide us with information that tells us her ethnic group and where in the world her ancestors might have been from. It could also help us identify those ancestors.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mothers to both genders of their children, but only female children pass it on. Therefore, to test today, one must descend from Lois through all females to the current generation. The current generation can be either male or female.

If this fits your situation and you have already tested, please let me know. If this fits your situation and you have not tested, I have a DNA scholarship for you.

Lois McNiel had the following female children who married and had daughters:

Permelia Vannoy born 1810 married John Baker and had daughters:

- Sirena Baker born in 1839, married Samuel P. Jones and had daughters Mary (b 1857) and Permelia (b 1860)
- Nancy Jane Baker born about 1845

Nancy Vannoy born in 1810 married George Loughmiller and had daughters:

- Mermelia born about 1839
- Mary born in 1844
- Elizabeth born in 1848
- Sarah born in 1850
- Marty born in 1852
- Lyda born in 1853

Sarah Vannoy born in 1821 married Joseph Adams and had daughters:

- Nancy Jane Adams born in 1849, married Franklin Skaggs and had daughters Ann and Lyda
- Rebecca Elizabeth Adams born in 1853, married William Leroy Throckmorton Bee Boren and had daughters Julia, Laura and Sally
- Margaret Ann Adams born in 1857, married John Ward and had daughters Mary, Sarah and Emma, died in Oregon

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

DNA Testing Strategy for Adoptees and People with Uncertain Parentage

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Roberta Estes

Adoptees aren’t the only people who don’t know who their parents are. There are many people who don’t know the identity of one of their two parents…and it’s not always the father. Just this week, I had someone who needed to determine which of two sisters was her mother. Still, the “who’s your Daddy” crowd, aside from adoptees, is by far the largest.

The DNA testing strategy for both of these groups of people is the same, with slight modifications for male or female. Let’s take a look.

Males have three kinds of DNA that can be tested and then compared to other participants’ results. The tests for these three kinds of DNA provide different kinds of information which is useful in different ways. For example, Y DNA testing may give you a surname, if you’re a male, but the other two types of tests can’t do that, at least not directly.

Females only have two of those kinds of DNA that can be tested. Females don’t have a Y chromosome, which is what makes males male genetically.

If you look at this pedigree chart, you can see that the Y chromosome, in blue, is passed from the father to the son, but not to daughters. It’s passed intact, meaning there is no admixture from the mother, who doesn’t have a Y chromosome, because she is female. The Y chromosome is what makes males male.

The second type of DNA testing is mitochondrial, represented by the red circles. It is passed from the mother to all of her children, of both genders, intact – meaning her mitochondrial DNA is not admixed with the mtDNA of the father. Woman pass their mtDNA on to their children, men don’t.

Therefore when you test either the Y or the mtDNA, you get a direct line view right down that branch of the family tree – and only that direct line on that branch of the tree. Since there is no admixture from spouses in any generation, you will match someone exactly or closely (allowing for an occasional mutation or two) from generations ago. Now, that’s the good and the bad news – and where genealogical sleuthing comes into play.

On the chart above, the third kind of DNA testing, autosomal DNA, tests your DNA from all of your ancestors, meaning all of those boxes with no color, not just the blue and red ones, but it does include the blue and red ancestors too. However, autosomal DNA (unlike Y and mtDNA) is diluted by half in each generation, because you get half of your autosomal DNA from each parent, so only half of the parents DNA gets passed on to each child.

Let’s look at how these three kinds of DNA can help you identify your family members.

Y DNA

Since the Y DNA typically follows the paternal surname, it can be extremely helpful for males who are searching for their genetic surname. For example, if your biological father’s surname is Estes, assuming he is not himself adopted or the product of a nonpaternal event (NPE) which I like to refer to as undocumented adoptions, his DNA will match that of the Estes ancestral line. So, if you’re a male, an extremely important test will be the Y DNA test from Family Tree DNA, the only testing company to offer this test.

Let’s say that you have no idea who your bio-father is, but when your results come back you see a preponderance of Estes men whom you match, as well as your highest and closest matches being Estes.

By highest, I mean on the highest panel you tested – in this case 111 markers. And by closest, I mean with the smallest genetic distance, or number of mutations difference. On the chart below, this person matches only Estes males at 111 markers, and one with only 1 mutation difference (Genetic Distance.) Please noted that I’ve redacted first names.

Hint for Mr. Hilbert, below – there is a really good chance that you’re genetically Estes on the direct paternal side – that blue line.

The next step will be to see which Estes line you match the most closely and begin to work from there genealogically. In this case, that would be the first match with only one difference. Does your match have a tree online? In this case, they do – as noted by the pedigree chart icon. Contact this person. Where did their ancestors live? Where did their descendants move to? Where were you born? How do the dots connect?

The good news is, looking at their DNA results, you can see that your closest match has also tested autosomally, indicated by the FF icon, so you can check to see if you also match them on the Family Finder test utilizing the Advanced Matching Tool. That will help determine how close or distantly related you are to the tester themselves. This gives you an idea how far back in their tree you would have to look for a common ancestor.

Another benefit is that your haplogroup identifies your deep ancestral clan, for lack of a better word. In other words, you’ll know if your paternal ancestor was European, Asian, Native American or African – and that can be a hugely important piece of information. Contrary to what seems intuitive, the ethnicity of your paternal (or any) ancestor is not always what seems evident by looking in the mirror today.

Y DNA – What to order: From Family Tree DNA, the 111 marker Y DNA test. This is for males only. Family Tree DNA is the only testing company to provide this testing. Can you order fewer markers, like 37 or 67? Yes, but it won’t provide you with as much information or resolution as ordering 111 markers. You can upgrade later, but you’ll curse yourself for that second wait.

Mitochondrial DNA

Males and females both can test for mitochondrial DNA. Matches point to a common ancestor directly up the matrilineal side of your family – your mother, her mother, her mother – those red circles on the chart. These matches are more difficult to work with genealogically, because the surnames change in every generation. Occasionally, you’ll see a common “most distant ancestor” between mitochondrial DNA matches.

Your mitochondrial DNA is compared at three levels, but the most accurate and detailed is the full sequence level which tests all 16,569 locations on your mitochondria. The series of mutations that you have forms a genetic signature, which is then compared to others. The people you match the most closely at the full sequence level are the people with whom you are most likely to be genealogically related to a relevant timeframe.

You also receive your haplogroup designation with mitochondrial DNA testing which will place you within an ethnic group, and may also provide more assistance in terms of where your ancestors may have come from. For example, if your haplogroup is European and you match only people from Norway….that’s a really big hint.

Using the Advanced Matching Tool, you can also compare your results to mitochondrial matches who have taken the autosomal Family Finder test to see if you happen to match on both tests. Again, that’s not a guarantee you’re a close relative on the mitochondrial side, but it’s a darned good hint and a place to begin your research.

Mitochondrial DNA – What to Order: From Family Tree DNA, the mitochondrial full sequence test. This is for males and females both. Family Tree DNA is the only company that provides this testing.

Autosomal DNA

Y and mitochondrial DNA tests one line, and only one line – and shoots like a laser beam right down that line, telling you about the recent and deep history of that particular lineage. In other words, those tests are deep and not wide. They can tell you nothing about any of your other ancestors – the ones with no color on the pedigree chart diagram – because you don’t inherit either Y or mtDNA from those ancestors.

Autosomal DNA, on the other hand tends to be wide but not deep. By this I mean that autosomal DNA shows you matches to ancestors on all of your lines – but only detects relationships back a few generations. Since each child in each generation received half of their DNA from each parent – in essence, the DNA of each ancestor is cut in half (roughly) in each generation. Therefore, you carry 50% of the DNA of your parents, approximately 25% of each grandparent, 12.5% of the DNA of each great-grandparent, and so forth. By the time you’re back to the 4^th great-grandparents, you carry only about 1% of the DNA or each of your 64 direct ancestors in that generation.

What this means is that the DNA testing can locate common segments between you and your genetic cousins that are the same, and if you share the same ancestors, you can prove that this DNA in fact comes from a specific ancestor. The more closely you are related, the more DNA you will share.

Another benefit that autosomal testing provides is an ethnicity prediction. Are these predictions 100% accurate? Absolutely not! Are they generally good in terms of identifying the four major ethnic groups; African, European, Asian and Native American? Yes, so long at the DNA amounts you carry of those groups aren’t tiny. So you’ll learn your major ethnicity groups. You never know, there may be a surprise waiting for you.

The three vendors who provide autosomal DNA testing and matching all provide ethnicity estimates as well, and they aren’t going to agree 100%. That’s the good news and often makes things even more interesting. The screen shot below is the same person at Ancestry as the person above at Family Tree DNA.

If you’re very lucky, you’ll test and find an immediate close match – maybe even a parent, sibling or half-sibling. It does happen, but don’t count on it. I don’t want you to be disappointed when it doesn’t happen. Just remember, after you test, your DNA is fishing for you 24X7, every single hour of every single day.

If you’re lucky, you may find a close relative, like an uncle or first cousin. You share a common grandparent with a first cousin, and that’s pretty easy to narrow down. Here’s an example of matching from Family Tree DNA.

If you’re less lucky, you’ll match distantly with many people, but by using their trees, you’ll be able to find common ancestors and then work your way forward, based on how closely you match these individuals, to the current.

Is that a sometimes long process? Yes. Can it be done? Absolutely.

If you are one of the “lottery winner” lucky ones, you’ll have a close match and you won’t need to do the in-depth genealogy sleuthing. If you are aren’t quite as lucky, there are people and resources to help you, along with educational resources. www.dnaadoption.com provides tools and education to teach you how to utilize autosomal DNA tools and results.

Of course, you won’t know how lucky or unlucky you are unless you test. Your answer, or pieces of your answer, may be waiting for you.

Unlike Y and mtDNA testing, Family Tree DNA is not the only company to provide autosomal of testing, although they do provide autosomal DNA testing through their Family Finder test.

There are two additional companies that provide this type of testing as well, 23andMe and Ancestry.com. You should absolutely test with all three companies, or make sure your results are in all three data bases. That way you are fishing in all of the available ponds directly.

If you have to choose between testing companies and only utilize one, it would be a very difficult choice. All three have pros and cons. I wrote about that here. The only thing I would add to what I had to say in the comparison article is that Family Tree DNA is the only one of the three that is not trying to obtain your consent to sell your DNA out the back door to other entities. They don’t sell your DNA, period. You don’t have to grant that consent to either Ancestry or 23andMe, but be careful not to click on anything you don’t fully understand.

Family Tree DNA accepts transfers of autosomal data into their data base from Ancestry. They also accept transfers from 23andMe if you tested before December of 2013 when 23andMe reduced the number of locations they test on their V4 chip

Autosomal DNA: What to Order

Ancestry.com’s DNA product at http://www.ancestry.com – they only have one and it’s an autosomal DNA test

23andMe’s DNA product at http://www.23andMe.com – they only have one and it’s an autosomal DNA test

Family Tree DNA – either transfer your data from Ancestry or 23andMe (if you tested before December 2013), or order the Family Finder test. My personal preference is to simply test at Family Tree DNA to eliminate any possibility of a file transfer issue.

Third Party Autosomal Tools

The last part of your testing strategy will be to utilize various third party tools to help you find matches, evaluate and analyze results.

GedMatch

At GedMatch, the first thing you’ll need to do is to download your raw autosomal data file from either Ancestry or Family Tree DNA and upload the file to www.gedmatch.com. You can also download your results from 23andMe, but I prefer to utilize the files from either of the other two vendors, given a choice, because they cover about 200,000 additional DNA locations that 23andMe does not.

Ancestry.com provides you with no tools to do comparisons between your DNA and your matches. In other words, no chromosome browser or even information like how much DNA you share. I wrote about that extensively in this article, and I don’t want to belabor the point here, other than to say that GedMatch levels the playing field and allows you to eliminate any of the artificial barriers put in place by the vendors. Jim Bartlett just wrote a great article about the various reasons why you’d want to upload your data to Gedmatch.

GedMatch provides you with many tools to show to whom you are related, and how. Used in conjunction with pedigree charts, it is an invaluable tool. Now, if we could just convince everyone to upload their files. Obviously, not everyone does, so you’ll still need to work with your matches individually at each of the vendors and at GedMatch.

GedMatch is funded by donations or an inexpensive monthly subscription for the more advanced tools.

DNAGEDCOM.com

Another donation based site is http://www.dnagedcom.com which offers you a wide range of analytical tools to assist with making sense of your matches and their trees. DNAGEDCOM works closely with the adoption community and focuses on the types of solutions they need to solve their unique types of genealogy puzzles. While everyone else is starting in the present and working their way back, adoptees are starting with the older generations and piecing them together to come forward to present. Their tools aren’t just for adoptees though. Tools such as the Autosomal DNA Segment Analyzer are great for anyone. Visit the site and take a look.

Third Party Y and Mitochondrial Tools – YSearch and MitoSearch

Both www.ysearch.org and www.mitosearch.org are free data bases maintained separately from Family Tree DNA, but as a courtesy by Family Tree DNA. Ysearch shows only a maximum of 100 markers for Y DNA and Mitosearch doesn’t show the coding region of the mitochondrial DNA, but they do allow users to provide their actual marker values for direct comparison, in addition to other tools.

Furthermore, some people who tested at other firms, when other companies were doing Y and mtDNA testing, have entered their results here, so you may match with people who aren’t matches at Family Tree DNA. Those other data bases no longer exist, so Ysearch or Mitosearch is the only place you have a prayer of matching anyone who tested elsewhere.

You can also adjust the match threshold so that you can see more distant matches than at Family Tree DNA. You can download your results to Ysearch and Mitosearch from the bottom of your Family Tree DNA matches page.

Answer the questions at Mito or Ysearch, and then click “Save Information.” When you receive the “500” message that an error has occurred at the end of the process, simply close the window. Your data has been added to the data base and you can obtain your ID number by simply going back to your match page at Family Tree DNA and clicking on the “Upload to Ysearch” or Mitosearch link again on the bottom of your matches page. At that point, your Y or mitosearch ID will be displayed. Just click on “Search for Genetic Matches” to continue matching.

Get Going!

Now that you have a plan, place your orders and in another 6 to 8 weeks, you’ll either solve the quandry or at least begin to answer your questions. Twenty years ago you couldn’t have begun to unravel your parentage using DNA. Now, it’s commonplace. Your adventure starts today.

Oh, and congratulations, you’ve just become a DNA detective!

I wish you success on your journey – answers, cousins, siblings and most importantly, your genetic family. Hopefully, one day it will be you writing to me telling me how wonderful it was to meet your genetic family for the first time, and what an amazing experience it was to look across the dinner table and see someone who looks like you.

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

Yamnaya, Light Skinned, Brown Eyed….Ancestors???

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Roberta Estes

Late last fall, I reported that scientists had discovered a European ghost population. This group of people then referred to as the ANE, Ancient Northern Europeans, was a previously unknown population from the north that had mixed into the known European populations, the Hunter-Gatherers and the farmers from the Middle East, the Neolithic.

That discovery came as a result of the full genome sequencing of a few ancient specimens, including one from the Altai.

Recently, several papers have been published as a result of ongoing sequencing efforts of another 200 or so ancient specimens. As a result, scientists now believe that this ghost population has been identified as the Yamnaya and that they began a mass migration in different directions, including Europe, about 5,000 years ago. Along with their light skin and brown eyes, they brought along with them their gene(s) for lactose tolerance. So, if you have European heritage and are lactose tolerant, then maybe you can thank your Yamnaya ancestors.

1.Haak et al. http://doi.org/z9d (2015) from Feb. 18, 2015 “Steppe migration rekindles debate on language origin” by Ellen Callaway

For those of us who avidly follow these types of discoveries, this is not only amazing, it’s wonderful news. It helps to continue to explain how and why some haplogroups are found in the Native American population and in the Northern European population as well. For example, haplogroup Q is found in both places – not exact duplicates, but certainly close enough for us to know they were at one time related. It also explains how people from Germany, for example, are showing small percentages of Native American ancestry. Their common ancestors were indeed from central Asia, thousands of years ago, and we can still see vestiges of that population today in both groups of people.

So, if the Yamnaya people are the ghost people, the ANE, who are they?

The Yamna culture was primarily nomadic and was found in Russia in the Ural Region, the Pontic Steppe, dating to the 36^th-23^rd century BC. It is also known as the Pit Grave Culture, the Ochre Grave Culture and feeds into the Corded Ware Culture.

“Corded Ware culture” by User:Dbachmann – Own work based based on Image:Europe 34 62 -12 54 blank map.png. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corded_Ware_culture.png#/media/File:Corded_Ware_culture.png

Characteristics for the culture are burials in kurgans (tumuli) in pit graves with the dead body placed in a supine position with bent knees. The bodies were covered in ochre. Multiple graves have been found in these kurgans, often as later insertions. The first known cart burial is also found in a kurgan grave. A kurgan often appears as a hill, example shown below, and have been found in locations throughout eastern and northern Europe..

Hallstatt-era tumulus in the Sulm valley necropolis in Austria, photo by Hermann A. M. Mucke.

Additionally, some scientists believe that the Yamna culture was responsible for the introduction of PIE, Proto-Indo-European-Language, the now defunct mother-tongue of European languages. Others think it’s way too soon to tell, and that suggestion is jumping the gun a bit.

Why might these recent discoveries be important to many genetic genealogists? Primarily, because Y haplogroup R has been identified in ancient Russian remains dating from 2700-3400 BCE. Haplogroup R and subgroups had not been found in the ancient European remains sequenced as of last fall. In addition, subgroups of mitochondrial haplogroups U, W, H, T and W have been identified as well.

Keep in mind that we are still dealing with less than 300 skeletal remains that have been fully sequenced. This trend may hold, or a new discovery may well cause the thought pattern to be “reconfigured” slightly or significantly. Regardless, it’s exciting to be part of the learning and discovery process.

Oh yes, and before I forget to mention it…it seems that your Neanderthal ancestors may not be as far back in your tree as you thought. They have now found 40,000 year old skeletal remains that suggest that person’s great-great-grandfather was in fact, full Neanderthal. That’s significantly later than previously thought, by 10,000 or 20,000 years, and in Europe, not the Near East…and who knows what is just waiting to be found. The new field of ancient DNA is literally bursting open as we watch.

I’ve accumulated several recent articles and some abstracts so that you can read about these interesting developments, in summary, and not have to do a lot of searching. Enjoy!

—–

Modern Europe was formed by milk-drinking Russians: Mass migration brought new genetic makeup to continent 5,000 years ago
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3119310/How-white-Europeans-arrived-5-000-years-ago-Mass-migration-southern-Russia-brought-new-technology-dairy-farming-continent.html

—–

DNA Deciphers Roots of Modern Europeans
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/science/dna-deciphers-roots-of-modern-europeans.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=1

—–

Science – Nomadic Herders Left a Strong Genetic Mark on Europeans and Asians
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/06/nomadic-herders-left-strong-genetic-mark-europeans-and-asians

—–

Nature – DNA Data Explosion Light Up the Bronze Age
http://www.nature.com/news/dna-data-explosion-lights-up-the-bronze-age-1.17723

—–

From the European Nucleotide Archive. http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB9021

Investigation of Bronze Age in Eurasia by sequencing from 101 ancient human remains. We show that around 3 ka BC, Central and Northern Europe and Central Asia receive genetic input through people related to the Yamnaya Culture from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, resulting in the formation of the Corded Ware Culture in Europe and the Afanasievo Culture in Central Asia. A thousand years later, genetic input from North-Central Europe into Central Asia gives rise to the Sintashta and Andronovo Cultures. During the late BA and Iron Age, the European-derived populations in Asia are gradually replaced by multi-ethnic cultures, of which some relate to contemporary Asian groups, while others share recent ancestry with Native American

Description

The Bronze Age (BA) of Eurasia (c. 3,000-1,000 years BC, 3-1 ka BC) was a period of major cultural changes. Earlier hunter-gathering and farming cultures in Europe and Asia were replaced by cultures associated with completely new perceptions and technologies inspired by early urban civilization. It remains debated if these cultural shifts simply represented the circulation of ideas or resulted from large-scale human migrations, potentially also facilitating the spread of Indo-European languages and certain phenotypic traits. To investigate this and the role of BA in the formation of Eurasian genetic structure, we used new methodological improvements to sequence low coverage genomes from 101 ancient humans (19 > 1X average depth) covering 3 ka BC to 600 AD from across Eurasia. We show that around 3 ka BC, Central and Northern Europe and Central Asia receive genetic input through people related to the Yamnaya Culture from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, resulting in the formation of the Corded Ware Culture in Europe and the Afanasievo Culture in Central Asia. A thousand years later, genetic input from North-Central Europe into Central Asia gives rise to the Sintashta and Andronovo Cultures. During the late BA and Iron Age, the European-derived populations in Asia are gradually replaced by multi-ethnic cultures, of which some relate to contemporary Asian groups, while others share recent ancestry with Native Americans. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesised spread of Indo-European languages during early BA and reveal that major parts of the demographic structure of present-day Eurasian populations were shaped during this period. We also demonstrate that light skin pigmentation in Europeans was already present at high frequency during the BA, contrary to lactose tolerance, indicating a more recent onset of positive selection in the latter than previously believed.

Abstract

The findings echo those of a team that sequenced 69 ancient Europeans ³. Both groups speculate that the Yamnaya migration was at least partly responsible for the spread of the Indo-European languages into Western Europe.

The report on the 69 ancient remains sequenced is below.

—–

Steppe migration rekindles debate on language origin
http://www.nature.com/news/steppe-migration-rekindles-debate-on-language-origin-1.16935

The Harvard team collected DNA from 69 human remains dating back 8,000 years and cataloged the genetic variations at almost 400,000 different points. The Copenhagen team collected DNA from 101 skeletons dating back about 3,400 years and sequenced the entire genomes.

—–

Population genetics of Bronze Age Eurasia
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/full/nature14507.html

—–

Dienekes Anthropology Blog
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/06/ancient-dna-from-bronze-age-altai.html

Forensic Science International: Genetics Received 2 January 2014; received in revised form 21 May 2014; accepted 25 May 2014. published online 04 June 2014.

The Altai Mountains have been a long term boundary zone between the Eurasian Steppe populations and South and East Asian populations. Mitochondrial DNA analyses revealed that the ancient Altaians studied carried both Western (H, U, T) and Eastern (A, C, D) Eurasian lineages. In the same way, the patrilineal gene pool revealed the presence of different haplogroups (Q1a2a1-L54, R1a1a1b2-Z93 and C), probably marking different origins for the male paternal lineages.

—–

Dienekes Anthropology Blog
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/06/mtdna-from-late-bronze-age-west-siberia.html

Includes mitochondrial haplogroups C, U2e, T, U5a, T1, A10.

—–

Population Genetics copper and Bronze Age populations of Eastern Steppe, thesis by Sandra Wilde
http://ubm.opus.hbz-nrw.de/volltexte/2015/3975/ (in German)

—–

Eurogenes blog discusses
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2015/03/population-genetics-of-copper-and.html

—–

Polish Genes Blog
http://polishgenes.blogspot.com/2015/05/r1a1a-from-early-bronze-age-warrior.html

—–

Early European May Have Had Neanderthal Great-Great-Greandparent
http://www.nature.com/news/early-european-may-have-had-neanderthal-great-great-grandparent-1.17534

40,000 year old Romanian skeleton with 5 – 11% Neanderthal, including large parts of some chromosomes – as close as a great-grandparent. Previously thought that interbreeding was in the Middle East and 10,000 or 20,000 years earlier.

——

How is this all happening?

The Scientist Magazine has a great overview in the June 1, 2015 edition, in “What’s Old is New Again.”
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43069/title/What-s-Old-Is-New-Again/

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers

Genealogy Services

Genealogy Research

Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy research

How Much Indian Do I Have in Me???

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Roberta Estes

133

I can’t believe how often I receive this question.

Here’s today’s version from Patrick.

“My mother had 1/8 Indian and my grandmother on my father’s side was 3/4, and my grandfather on my father’s side had 2/3. How much would that make me?”

First, this question was about Native American ancestry, but it could just have easily have been about African, European, Asian, Jewish….fill in the blank.

Secondly, Patrick’s initial question is a math question, but the real question is how much of a particular ethnicity do you have on paper versus how much you have genetically.

How could they be different?

Lots of ways.

Oral history in families tends to get diluted and condensed over time. For example, maybe grandmother wasn’t really 3/4^th – because her ancestors were admixed and she (or her descendants) didn’t know it. And how does one have 2/3, exactly, with 4 grandparents. So, the story may not be the whole story.

For our example, we’re going to eliminate the 2/3 number, because it can’t be correct. A grandparent would be 1/4^th, a great grandparent, 1/8^th. In other words, ancestors fractions come in divisions of 4, or 2, but not 3 – because it takes 2 people in each generation.

So, you could have 3 of 4 ancestors who are native, which would make the person 3/4^th, 2 of 4 which would make the person half, or 1 of 4 which would make the person one quarter, but you cannot have 1 of 3, 2 of 3 or 3 of 3, because you have 4 grandparents, not 3.

Math

First, let’s answer the math question.

Math is your friend.

There are three easy steps.

1. Divide Each Generation By Half to Current

Each ancestral generation is reduced by one half, because the DNA is diluted by half in each generation.

So, if Patrick’s mother is 1/8, Patrick is 1/16 on their mother’s side, because Patrick received half of her DNA. With fractions, you can’t reduce the top number of 1 by one half so you double the bottom number.

If grandfather was 3/4, then father was 3/8 on that side and Patrick is 3/16^th.

So, now, add the numbers for Patrick together.

2. Find the Common Denominator

The two numbers you need to add together from the above exmaple are 1/16 and 3/16. This is easy because the denominator is already the same – 16. But let’s say you also have a third number, just for purposes of example. Let’s say that third number is 3/32.

How do you add 1/16, 3/16 and 3/32?

The denominator has to be the same. If you look at the denominators, you’ll see that if you double the fractions with 16, they become fractions with 32 as their denominator.

So, for this example, 1/16 becomes 2/32, 3/16 becomes 6/32 and 3/32 remains the same.

3. Add the Top Numbers Together

Now just add the numerators, or the top numbers together.

2/32 + 6/32 + 3/32 = 11/32

That’s the answer. In this example, our person, per their family history, is 11/32 Native or 34.38%.

Patrick, who originally asked the question is 1/16 + 3/16 which equals 4/16, which reduces to 1/4 (by dividing the same number, 4, into the top and bottom of the fraction), plus whatever amount that “2/3” really is. So, Patrick is more than one quarter, at least on paper.

Genetics

The next question is often, “how do I prove that?” In terms of Native ancestry, the answer varies on the purpose – general interest, tribal identification or tribal membership, etc. I’ve written about that in two articles, here and here.

You can take a DNA test from Family Tree DNA called Family Finder that provides you with percentages of ethnicity, including Native American, as well as a list of cousin matches. They also offer additional testing that may be relevant if you descend from the native person paternally (if you are a male) or matrilineally (for both sexes.)

On the diagram below, you can see the Y DNA in blue, inherited by males from their father and the mitochondrial or matrilineal DNA in red, always inherited from the mother. While the Y and mitochondrial tests give you very specific information on two lines, the Family Finder test provides you with ethnicity information from all of your lines. It just can’t tell you which line or lines the Native heritage came from.

Often, due to admixture in the Native population over the past several hundred years, since the Europeans “discovered” America, the amount of Native DNA is less than expected and sometimes is so far back and such a small amount that it doesn’t show at all.

An individual could well be considered a full tribal member, yet have less than half Native heritage. Examples that come to mind are Mary Jemison, an adopted captive who was European, but considered a full tribal member, and Sequoyah, who invented the Cherokee alphabet. Even the Cherokee Chief, Benge was at least half European, sporting red hair. His mother was a member of the Cherokee tribe, so Benge was as well. Cherokee Chief John Ross, born in 1790, was only one eighth Native.

So, the bottom line. Enjoy your family history and heritage. Document your family stories. Understand that tribal membership was historically not a matter of percentages, at least not until the late 1800s and early 1900s. Your ancestor either was or was not “Indian,” generally based on the tribal membership status of their mother. There was no halfway and mixed didn’t matter.

DNA testing can confirm Native heritage. It can also prove Native heritage in a variety of ways depending on how one descends from the Native ancestor(s), using Y and mitochondrial DNA. Depending on whether Patrick is male or female, and how Patrick descends from his or her Native ancestors, the Y or mitochondrial DNA test can add a wealth of information to Patrick’s family history.

For some people, DNA testing is how one discovers that they have a Native ancestor.

So, how much Indian do you have in you, on paper and through DNA testing?

______________________________________________________________

Disclosure

Thank you so much.

DNA Purchases and Free Transfers