MCCONNELL-L Archives

Archiver > MCCONNELL > 2008-11 > 1227762322


From: "" <>
Subject: [McConnell] One of the Pennsylvania McConnell Families Re: ClanDonald DNA Project
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:05:22 -0000


This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list.

Author: ksaxe
Surnames: McConnell, McDonald, Jones, Doty, Mack
Classification: queries

Message Board URL:

http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.mcconnell/2535.2/mb.ashx

Message Board Post:

Aaron's family is another one of the Pennsylvania McConnell families that I had in mind last night. I think that the investigation using DNA has been very rewarding for them, and I think that other researchers could learn something by following their trail.

As Aaron said, he was able to prove a connection to another McConnell family. That connection had been suspected, but had never been proven. The connection with a McDonald whose line lived in Delaware was a surprise to all. Later on a Jones match showed up, and he is a perfect match for the McDonald out to 67 markers. The family has many low resolution matches. These are men who match well on the markers used in the 12 and 25 marker tests, but are not necessarily closely related. One of the more interesting connections that Aaron left out is the high resolution matches for members of Aaron's McConnell, McDonald, and Jones family members and members of the Doty family of Mayflower passenger Edward Doty. When comparing the results of members of Aaron's family, the closest matches outside the family are the Dotys.

Suppose you didn't know about any of this. How would you find out about Aaron's family? You could certainly find posts by family members on Rootsweb, but if you were interested in McConnell DNA results, you would want to start with the Clan Donald DNA Project website or the database known as ysearch.

You could start with the results page for the Clan Donald project:

http://dna-project.clan-donald-usa.org/tables.htm

There are now 676 men with results on the tables, and they are grouped into about 30 different groups. For the most part, these groups are separate and distinct, meaning that if you are in one group and another man is in another group, you cannot be closely related. There are some exceptions, because some men are in catchall groups. Some of these men may be related to members of other groups. Let's use Aaron's family as an example. If you scroll about two thirds of the way down the results page, you will find a group called the Haplogroup R1b - Yellow green subgroup. The group currently has 6 members, C. W. McConnell, K. D. McConnell, K. T. McDonald, M. T. Jones, G. R. McConnell, and F. Mack.

For tonight I would just like to say something about the information in the first 5 columns of the tables showing the results. The first column is the Clan Donald Code. This is just a unique ID code created for each member of the project. You can use this column to compare the results of a man in the project with the results of other men in the project. To do this, you would just click on the man's Clan Donald code. The tables would be redisplayed with the closest matches to each man displayed at the top of each table, and the differences between each man and the man being used as the basis for comparison would be highlighted. You will also notice some highlighting in the tables when no comparison has been attempted by you. In these cases, the highlighting is showing the difference between the results for each man and the results for others in his group. If you look at the Yellow green group without doing any comparisons, you will find that there isn't much need for highligh!
ting, because the members have extremely similar results.

The second column of the table can be very handy for finding out more about many of the men in the project. Men with DNA test results for their Y chromosome can enter them in a database called ysearch. There they can also enter information about their line, and researchers interested in contacting them can use the "Contact this user" link to get in touch. A good example of a ysearch entry is the one Aaron created for his McConnell relative G. R. McConnell.

You could reach this entry by clicking on the ysearch code next to the name G. R. McConnell, and this is what you would see: (Click)

http://www.ysearch.org/lastname_view.asp?uid=&letter=&lastname=mcconnell&viewuid=VK47K&p=0

If you clicked on the ysearch code for K. D. McConnell, you would see this: (Click)

http://www.ysearch.org/lastname_view.asp?uid=&letter=&lastname=mcconnell&viewuid=N6Q8W&p=0

Note the matching information for David McConnell in the two entries.

If you check out the ysearch entry for the other McConnell in the group, you find:

http://www.ysearch.org/search_view.asp?uid=2D2D3&viewuid=2D2D3&p=0

Ah-ha! This guy is back to William born about 1738.

You can also check out their Jones match in the same way.

You might think that neither of the other men in the group has a ysearch entry, but at least one of them does. He may have created his entry after his results were entered on the tables. I found it by searching for matches for his McConnell cousins in the ysearch database. I won't go into the details of how to do that now, but you can see the McDonald's ysearch entry here:

http://www.ysearch.org/search_view.asp?uid=2D2D3&viewuid=HDHFF&p=1

The third column of the table is very easy to understand. That's where the names are.

The fourth column is labeled "Dist" for distance, or genetic distance. This column just gives the number of DNA locations where a man's results differ from the values being used for comparison. As mentioned before these values are most common values for the subgroup if no one man has been chosen for comparison with the others. Another term for these most common values is modals. If one member of the project has been chosen for comparison, then the results for that man would be used for the comparison. When you look at the tables, you can see that the men in the Yellow green group differ from the modal for their group by only 1, 2, or 3 markers.

The heading for the fifth column is TMRCA, which stands for Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor. This figure is a statistical estimate given in generations. The actual number of generations back to the MRCA may be smaller or larger than this estimate. For this family, the estimates tend to be a little low.

To be continued...

Important Note:
The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list. If you would like to reply to them, please click on the Message Board URL link above and respond on the board.



This thread: