Thursday, July 21, 2016

Haplogroups

Brick walls come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and thickness.  Recently, the use of DNA analysis has produced all kinds of new brick walls.  Looking to your genetic past will often help give new directions for the family search, or solve some types of questions that have come to the forefront.

My own DNA analysis took some time to get to the lab, because I was worried that it might show that all my 50 some years of genealogy would be incorrect.  At any rate, the following table shows that there are a number of different genetic pathways that involves the surname JONES.


The figure begins with the year 2011.  It then shows the percent of each haplogroup that was found in those with the surname JONES and chose to have their Y-DNA analyzed.  Seventy-five percent of those were found to be in the R1b1 haplogroup. [n=275]  This was followed by a number of different haplogroups.  Eleven percent were those of Scandinavia decent, followed in decreasing order by E, G, J, R1a, and Q.

The most recent analysis [2016, n=257] suggest that a number of folks from several haplogroups are new to the JONES surname family tree.  Haplogroups B, N, and O were not present in the 2011 group.  There has been some changes in the percent of the various haplogroups which suggest that there are many other genetic groups that have connections to the JONES surname.  There has been a 14% decrease in R1b1 with an increase in I, G, J, and R1a haplogroups. 

All this to say that the origin of your Y-chromosome may show something amazing. Likewise, not all with the surname JONES have their roots in the same genetic family tree.