GENEALOGY-DNA-L Archives

Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2005-05 > 1117040186


From: Robert Stafford <>
Subject: RE: [DNA] Non-paternity - posting Lineages instead of individuals
Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 09:56:26 -0700 (PDT)
In-Reply-To: 6667


It looks like you ended up with about the same number of possible branch-defining markers in FTDNA's 5 and RG's 11. (I couldn't tell if you had eliminated the matching pair on A10 which weren't in red.) Thus, it appears that you might lose some information by not testing RG's markers also, even though CDY seems to be the most critical.

I guess the lesson is that those testing family trees should test as many markers as possible. You never know which one will define a branch. Our earliest (pre-1720) and most useful tag marker was on DYS438, one of the slowest markers tested. It has been critical to our being able to match orphan lines to the right branch. Another family might have a tag on RG's five so-called "genealogically insignificant" markers, yet miss it by not testing. Finding just one realible tag marker to unravel a genealogy makes makes the cost of testing insignificant. We have found three that occurred prior to 1850.

I wouldn't conclude that all the observed mutations on CDY in your project were from a single mutation without, at least, verifying their presence in the progenitor of each line. The possibilities of two or more coincident mutations on such an extremely fast marker are just too high.

We have three matching mutations on DYS439 (rate = .00418). Barring some bizarre non-paternity event, they are independent parallel mutations. Fortunately, they occurred when the genealogies are tight. Otherwise, we would have been completely misled.

Bob Stafford


wrote:
Before I contact my folks, which upgrade do you want them to take? We
switched most of our testing to FTDNA after discovering more useful
mutations in FTDNA's 5 unique markers than in the 11 Sorenson-unique
markers.

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