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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2002-04 > 1017782840


From: "Nancy Custer " <>
Subject: RE: [DNA] Fwd: Y-Line [Viking Project]
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 13:27:20 -0800
In-Reply-To: <JCHBN.020402.144611.RC0@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU>


And, perplexing for us, my husband's DYS 392 value is 13! As I have
said in previous posts, his family surname, Cursiter (his branch changed
to Custer when they arrived in the US) is an Orkney name derived from
the old Norse language meaning "cow pasture".

An unofficial (and generally dismissed by my husband as improvable)
legend says that sons of Robert Stuart, Earl of Orkney (and illegitimate
son of James IV of Scotland) had illegitimate children with daughters of
a Cursiter. Maybe we should reexamine that idea:) Think we can find
some direct line Stuart Royals to join our study? Or perhaps it's back
to the Spanish Armada idea.

Nancy

-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Chandler [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 11:46 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [DNA] Fwd: Y-Line [Viking Project]

Oxford Ancestors apparently wrote:
>1) To indicate if a person is likely to be of Norse origin we look for
>an 11 for marker DYS 392 which you possess.
>
>If a person is not 11 at this position then it is highly unlikely that
>they are of Viking origin...

I must say I'm not impressed. Yes, the value 11 is typical of both hg2
and hg3, which together make up 2/3 of the male population of Norway,
but it's only typical and not fundamental. What's more, 1/4 of the
males in Norway are hg1, which typically has a value of 13. Bottom
line: out of 300 Norwegian samples in the YSTR database, only 190 have
a value of 11 (that's 63%). If you exclude the northern Norway samples
(up in Lappland), the fraction rises to 64%. So, in the methodology
of OA, it is "highly unlikely" that the other 36% of Norwegians could be
descended from Vikings! To top it off, it turns out that 39% of the
samples from Frisia (the place on the Continent where the Anglo-Saxons
are thought to have originated) have the value 11, and the mix of
haplogroups in Frisia as shown by Wilson et al. proves that most of
these 11's are NOT of Norwegian origin.

John Chandler


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