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Subject: [DNA] News item: SOPER DNA project -- everyone please read
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 09:39:23 EST


It's always gratifying to find articles on DNA testing in the popular press
which hint at the excitement genealogists experience (a nice contrast to the
recent items I've posted which are skeptical about the benefits of DNA
testing). If the URL is split, it ends with html.

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/news/stories/20030223/localnews/1042775.htm

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This project could serve as a good jumping-off point for discussing
probabilities. The SOPER haplotype on a 12-marker test appeared to be
relatively common, generating matches with a variety of surnames. It's
probably close to one of the haplotypes from the Y-STR database on Dennis
Garvey's web site:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~dgarvey/DNA/RelGen/YSTR.htm

The matches on the 25-marker test are more tantalizing: SOPER, SOBER, and
BERRYMAN. SOPER and SOBER are obvious sound-alikes. What about BERRYMAN?

The statistics for DNA mutations are based on well-known properties of random
events. We don't have comparable methods for assessing probabilities based on
surname frequency and coincidences of locality & time frame. Intuitively, it
seems like these factors should be quite powerful, but we can only label them
as interesting, very interesting, or very very interesting.

The conclusions have a practical implication -- how much time, money, and
effort should we put into chasing 25/25 matches with different surnames? If I
were Clarisse Soper, I'd want to follow up. Or at least encourage the
BERRYMAN donor to follow up, since the SOPER/SOBER haplotypes reinforce each
other as the ancestral haplotype.

If some of you have had 25/25 matches with different surnames, could you
share your decisions about whether or not to pursue the genealogy? What
factors did you consider?

Ann Turner
GENEALOGY-DNA List Administrator
>http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/other/Miscellaneous/GENEALOGY-DNA.html
DNA preservation kits: >http://www.dnafiler.com

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