 Hello, ladies and gentlemen. We now have John Thierry talking about using projects to make more on-road, high-DNA test results. Now, John is a lecturer and teaches at a university in Edinburgh. He is a member of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, which is free to join. Everybody here should join that today. We've got an excellent Facebook group that provides lots of support for anybody that's just done a DNA test. Now, he's also involved in a project researching the fate of Scottish prisoners captured by Cromwell in the Civil War and transported to the Americas. So, using DNA and genealogy, he's working with the prisoners of descendants. And John's going to tell us a little bit about that project, but also tell us more in general about how to get the most of your wide DNA results. So, ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to John Thierry. Thank you very much, Maurice, and good afternoon, everybody. Very nice to meet you all today. I hope you all hear me clearly at the back. Yes, thank you. The signal's getting through. So, I'm going to pick up on a few of the themes that Debbie was addressing in her talk just before me. And this talk may particularly be of interest to those of you who maybe have not yet taken a DNA test, but you're thinking of doing it and you'd like to know how you can gain from it and how you can use the results to further your own research. Or, of course, you may have taken a DNA test in the past and maybe you feel you haven't quite yet extracted the maximum value from it and you'd like to think of some ideas about how you can extend and enhance the use you get from your results. And I'm an administrator or co-administrator of four projects which are all supported by Family Tree DNA. I must stress here that I'm a volunteer. I don't work for FTDNA and FTDNA provide this as a free service to the people who take tests with them. And these are group projects. One here in the middle is a surname project for the surnames Camp and Kemp, which are often interchangeable. That's my mother's surname. And I'm an administrator of the Scottish DNA project. There's at least one other administrator of this project in the room, the very back, Linda, who will be speaking to you tomorrow. And it's a very large project, as you see, very large and that creates certain issues of its own. And I'm an administrator of another surname project. I didn't have room to show it here. That is the Cummings and Cummins surname project, as well as the Scottish Prisoner's Project I'll talk about in the course of the talk. I'm going to try and address how using these projects can assist you in your own research goals. When I talk about genetic genealogy projects, I'm going to talk about one of two things. These were formal group projects, but you can also create your own project. That's how I started in this a few years ago by deciding I wanted to work on my mother's surname and the genealogy of that surname and to extend my understanding of the history of that surname in Ireland, particularly in Cavern, where her family came from. And so your own project can be very small scale, something which you design around your own results to understand them better by testing more people, but doing it in a systematic way. And of course we have these formal institutional projects, mainly supported by Family Tree DNA. There are other things known as groups and some of the other companies, testing companies, Family Tree DNA are the ones that have the most developed infrastructure to support this kind of project-based research and allowing us there to have the very large surname and other projects which I've shown you earlier. So I'm going to begin by taking the first of these, looking at a personal project and talking about my own experience of how I began working with genetic genealogy. So Debbie ended her talk by talking about the fishing trip and so this is one of the simplest kinds of project you can do, essentially testing yourself or maybe somebody else to see what comes out of it. And of course you never know what you might find when you set about your fishing trip. You may catch all kinds of surprises. Then more systematically, on a larger scale, you might have a particular hypothesis that you want to investigate. So for example I want to know whether all the people named Kent and County Cavern were related to each other, so extending beyond just who matches me to look at what are the patterns of relationship amongst one family name in one region. And you may have your own hypothesis, you and another person, possibly with a shared surname or possibly because you may share a striking resemblance with them, you may want to find out whether in fact you are related to that person and therefore the hypothesis-style project can be one way of approaching it. Essentially you're looking for the possibility or the probability of a shared ancestor at some stage in the past. And then more complicated. Again you may wish to go about a more full-scale family reconstruction and that's what I moved to start doing in my research on the Kent and County Cavern in which I was looking for the most recent common ancestor, that's what MRCA here stands for, of not just two people but of a number of lines of a family who no longer believe themselves to be related to whatever folk memory, oral history and documentary evidence of a relationship that may have been had been lost. So therefore DNA became the only way to begin to reconstruct those family relationships. And I'm going to begin by looking at my own fishing trip that I started in genetic genealogy a number of years ago. So I was persuaded against my better judgement initially by somebody I know in Scotland to take a STR test and I tested six to seven markers and then extended that later to the 111 markers. And of course I expected about a few matches, clearly lots of clearies in Ireland, some of them found to match me, probably a Neil and I in hostages to send them, like half of Ireland seems to be, so I thought in those days. And in actual fact I soon found that 111 markers I had the magnificent total of no matches at all. And when I scaled down to the six to seven marker level I still had no matches. And even though 37 markers, no matches, I was getting worried by now because I think, am I the last of my tribe? Has every old son related to, in the male line, died out or been eliminated in some disaster? So finally I've got a match when you get drilled down to 25 marker level. And those of you who are active in genetic genealogy will know that 25 markers is not really enough to be sure the match you have is that close reliable. And there's a further problem because this person who matched me at the rather distant level of 2 out of 25 had a different name to me. His name was Gorman, and his ancestor was a John Gorman from Cassitipperary in the 18th century. Now at least there's some consolation here in the origin because my father's family also come from South Tipperary and we know we share a very close locality. Of course you have no idea how we're related and that's one of the big questions I haven't yet managed to settle. So no clear matches and just this Gorman. And ultimately the real explanation is that the people I am related to and there are people out there of course who are related to me in the male line have not tested. I suspect because a lot of people who have tested STRs are American. I do not have many people who migrated to the Americas who have also then gone on to test. So I suspect there probably are people out there who relate to me I just haven't found yet. But what I did do was I wanted to know whether because I wasn't related to any other people by the name of Cleary from Tipperary or elsewhere in Munster. So I wanted to know whether in fact there was a degree of relationship to other people with my name in that area. And my father knew some people in Clonmel who he grew up thinking of as cousins. And his family there visited often and regarded themselves as cousins. But once we began to look closely at these two lines we couldn't actually identify what type of cousins there were just vaguely cousins. And so this seemed a very right area for genetic genealogy because with this we can investigate whether or not we actually are related. And we certainly find evidence to prove we're not related if we're not and just disprove this long-held family belief. So this is my line. And I also contract myself back to an 18th century gentleman who came from Killing Butler, closer care in Tipperary. And this tracks down eventually here's my grandfather tracks down to me down here. And the other family were from Clonmel and they can't go back as far. They know that their ancestor was a Thomas Cleary born somewhere in maybe 1825 who winds up in Aadgiha, close to Clonmel in the late 19th century. And there are a couple of Thomas Clearies in my line who could be possible candidates and for example, here we have somewhere here who is known and believes to be the same as Thomas Cleary by my family but actually he's too young. This couldn't be the same man. We know from the marriage history of this Thomas LeCadre same person and we also think we found him in England married but childless. So it's not him, but generation back there's another Thomas here born in 1813 who is the brother of my great-great-great-grandfather and so a possibility there but one slight snag is that we do have the marriage certificate of this Thomas in question. This is his second or possibly his third marriage in 1874 when he was 50 years old. It's like a problem here. So 50 years old at least, well, maybe that's what he was telling her. So it was always possible it could be him but obviously there's a problem here with the dates and so the genealogical evidence is not great. So the question is then, is there actual relationship? Maybe they're a total different family that don't relate to us at all and therefore this belief in cousins was just nothing that was true. It was just really neighbours, cousins in the sense of being neighbours who share a surname. I set out to find a descendant of a line who tested this year. 37 markers and here are the results. This is the result of me, the upper one and the other person down below and magnified here you can see that there are four points of difference between us on 37 markers and three of them are just one-step differences so that's not too bad there's another big difference here which according to the various models you use for comparing differences in STRs we can say this is the step-wise model assumes that each mutation happens one step at a time which suggests we've actually got three mutations here and that would mean that the difference between me and him is six out of 37. On the other hand we could just treat this as being one mutation, one dramatic mutation where a movement of three happened in one go and I don't know if that's likely or possible but obviously there's a big difference here maybe that did happen in just one movement in which case by the infinite alleles model we just call this one mutation and therefore he would be a difference of four out of 37 from me. So that's the data the question is what does it mean? What can I conclude from this result? Am I related to this man or not? What do you think? That's where I put it to the vote How many of you think that yes this is enough evidence to me to claim a relationship to this man? Thank you. Come to the back here, thank you very much How many of you would say no? Is it not close enough? I've got to say it is rather on the edge I think partly because if this is a step-wise mutation one, two, three then this would need to have a number of generations to work through so yes, there may be some similarities but it could also be a long way back So one thing in favour of the argument that we may have a close relationship is a particular marker that I carry which is within the first 12 of my markers and it is for those who are familiar with the jargon the marker is called DYS392 and I have a value here of 11 Now most people who are R1B and R2AM will have a value here of 13 and in fact we can look up some very useful statistics online a fantastic site here, put it together a long time ago but there's nothing better so I still use it is Leo Little's list of the frequencies of particular marker values according to certain haplogroups and here we have the data for DYS392 looking along here we have R1B at the bottom and 86% of R1B men will have 13 at this point whereas 0.0% of R1B men have 11 at this point so it's me, I have it I'm probably not the first there are others and that's a few who do but this is so rare that it does seem to be distinctive now we must avoid falling into a trap here when it first began working this three years ago to assume that it's so rare therefore it can only have occurred once in the R1B subclade that I'm part of therefore anybody who shares this marker value will be related to me no, we mustn't assume that I absolutely do know it has occurred more than once and even people who are not too far away from me so I have to be careful with this one STR value on its own but I feel that since the other tester shares this value and he's either 4 from 37 or 6 out of 37 close enough to me with this rare marker value I feel there's enough evidence here to suggest strong evidence of relationship it's all about probabilities I've proven nothing but I've generated some evidence here from the genetics that we are related of course what I can't say going back to my tree is it will not tell me the name of our most recent common ancestor but now I've got something to work on we can go back and see if we can find more evidence that might actually help us tie this down my suspicion is that it's neither of those two I showed you earlier and that the relationship may be at least another generation back into the 18th century but there is a relationship there so here's an example then of how you can put together a very very small project which I ran over a couple of years and it has given me a very used and interesting conclusion and I think this is definitely worthwhile most of you probably have a matching pattern more like this in which you'll find people who share your surname matching you to a certain genetic distance level but also other surnames and of course how you treat those other surnames is a very important question and I'll talk a bit about that later on if I have time so what then constitutes a match it should be somebody who's related to you in the time since the use of surnames began and this is a rather vague definition in the sense that surname use begins much earlier than widespread surname use and widespread surname use in England begins earlier than it does in Wales and also in Ireland as well so what we mean by the surname era can mean anything to do with when surnames are first used and passed on from father to son or when they become widespread enough for us to recognise surname patterns but this we can call genealogical time and that's what we're looking for we're looking for evidence that the DNA patterns we identified are close enough to allow us to conclude that there is a relationship in genealogical time to a certain degree of probability but it is very probabilistic so Family Tree DNA have their own criteria my own personal view is not endorsed by Family Tree DNA but I feel that is a 10% threshold if your number of differences between two people and a test is 10% or fewer then you have evidence of likely matching it with genealogical time but these are the more precise thresholds Family Tree DNA use so I was talking here about a 37 marker test and if we do say 4 out of 37 is the allowed threshold then on one of those models of calculating distance we are matching and if we can conclude that we relate within genealogical time but we still have four differences so maybe this is actually pushing the relationship back even further than I am assuming maybe back into the early modern period or before so these are questions which I need to address now in my own research it is very important to say here that if you test somebody who you think has your surname should be related and you get a result say 5 out of 37 just as with me it doesn't mean that they are not related to you even relatively closely and equally if you test someone and you find that they have a distance from you of 3 out of 37 this does not mean they definitely are related there is one piece of evidence which you must look at critically and assess what other forms of evidence you can find to support that conclusion but there is a phenomenon called convergence in which STR test results can move towards each other and therefore those of you who are likely to be in the very common haplogroup subclade in Ireland N222 for example you will be finding yourselves getting apparently clear matching results of 6 out of 67 for example from people who are actually not your matches because a lot of convergence has gone on within this haplogroup and therefore you need to look for closer scores to be quite sure you have got someone who will be a relative of yours so again the conclusion here is these are guidelines they are not rules you can't say I am 3 out of 37 I must match this person actually that is your starting point to go back to genealogy and find more evidence for why you may well match this person so just make sure I am not blithering on too much length so I am talking about genetic distance I think Debbie May mentioned this in her talk earlier but I mentioned again genetic distance often referred to by those who drop jargon so what we should do is the GD and the GD is the number of steps of difference you have between two sets of results so here on this matching list of one of the members of my chem project you can see the GD is given for how the tester matches these people four of them called chem, one called Taylor and this Mr. Taylor actually do know is connected though not as closely as the other chems at another story does it matter if the surname is different and here I think you will get many different answers depending on who you ask I say a match is a match in principle however you need to be skeptical if the surname is different and you need to have a higher threshold of evidence that there may be a connection of course there are what we call the NPE the non parental event in which people acquire surnames that do not match their genetic descent I'm not going to go into those as a complex area of its own and therefore we need to allow for that to happen the Mr. Taylor I showed you just now is without doubt a case of this but if the surname is different don't dismiss the match investigate it and see if you can find evidence that will back up the possibility of relationship there but do beware there can be false positives it's much less likely when the surname is the same and it's much less likely when you test at least 67 markets so there are some principles here on how to go about studying your own DNA surname project begin by researching the distribution of your surname where is it found where is it most populous decide what question you want to ask so it's very important all the fishing trip can be fun to do you get better results if you target your research with a particular set of questions or hypotheses that you want to see whether the DNA can actually answer and when you have done your initial tests don't forget to go back to the genealogical research because what the DNA is doing is giving you avenues to follow up further and the ideal project will use both genetic evidence and genealogical evidence to come to firmer conclusions about relationship and do any work on this kind of project do check on the family tree DNA pages to see whether there is a surname project already existing there are I believe 7, 8,000 surname projects of family tree DNA and it's very likely that all of your surnames will have a project already if there is join it contact the administrator if you're eager you may find the administrator is looking for other people to assist as co-administrators and then you can be brought into infrastructure that family tree DNA offer to support the work of the surname projects if there isn't one set one up it's easy to do family tree DNA will create a web page for you and you can then be the administrator there are many very very good surname projects which consist of a very small number of names very good one of the surname Leadingham in Scotland has only 5 or 6 members but that's because it's not a common surname that surname project has found some very interesting results about the Leadingham's of Aberdeenshire and around so any surname any size can have a project now why do we do this obviously we want to know various things but I think that some very key things to look out for when you join or set up a surname project and I think sharing information is vital listening is the most important aspect of setting up these projects we get nowhere by doing a phishing trip and then not comparing our results with others so it's a sharing of information our results and the context we have that makes these strong there are also special tools for administrators which are available through FTDNA and by third parties you can gain a lot from other pairs of eyes looking at your data pointing out things you haven't missed or not thought of very important if family tree DNA offer a relational database of results which is dynamically checking constantly as all new results come in for new matches and therefore this database depends on all the projects but also allows you to show the results of your members which you can then yourself group and show what the relationships are within those if you're going to join a project I hope you will if you're testing I'd just like to make an appeal for some housekeeping of your own in your family tree DNA site many people neglect this it's a pity but it's very important and crucial to enter your genealogical information there are many empty spaces in projects where an earliest known ancestor will be very very useful and it helps other people to assess the likelihood of whether your results might be connected to them it is very easily in your account by going in to find your personal information where the genealogy is and then entering your oldest known direct paternal ancestor and your oldest known direct maternal ancestor these are mine Thomas Cleary you saw already from my from Rogestown in Tebrari from my previous pedigree my earliest known maternal ancestor was in County Caldera actually I think I've got one generation further back but haven't had to put her in yet so we're still working on this one please do this it's absolutely essential and it's useful if it's in the form name plus a significant date birth or death whatever you have marriage if you don't have either of those and a place and you see here the example for family tree DNA shows the date to the name but they miss off the place and I would urge them actually to change this because places are vital for assessing whether that particular Cleary is the Cleary you may be interested in for example if you have time please add a family tree as well and if you're doing the family finder autosomal testing a family tree is essential a lot of people don't do it but you really do need to put your family tree up so people can investigate where the relationship may be once they're comparing their results with yours there's something else I want to mention here and this is a controversial issue but it's the privacy issue family tree DNA this year changed its default privacy settings in the accounts and many new testers do not know this and even though they may wish to let their results be publicly viewable they haven't changed the faults settings in their account and therefore their results are hidden from the view of most people so I would recommend this full control of the privacy and access to your results but in the interest of sharing information I would persuade you to use settings similar to these this is the default setting for who may view your most distant ancestor and really what is the point you know who it is what's the point of no one else being able to see it but you so you can go into your account and you can change it so that project members of the projects you join will never see your most distant ancestor I would think I wish there was another setting that allowed us to open it up to everybody because I think this really is used information there's no real reason to keep it secret unless of course you have a particularly sensitive family adoption issue or something else that doesn't give you a good reason to keep this private and then who may view your DNA results in projects you may choose anyone project members so again there's a more restricted setting project members will be able to see your results but again I would urge you to make them visible to all people because you may get someone coming along with your surname saying will I match? will there be people who might come from my part of wherever in this project oh yes there is I'll go and test so by opening this to anybody you're actually potentially attracting new testers who might match you so that's the housekeeping side then and there are four general types of projects of family tree DNA and I'll come back to what they are in a moment but there are project pages for all of these projects this is the new look family tree DNA groups pages which I've been using this year quite attractive and on the web page we can put contextual information and here for example we have a link well first we have the administrative addresses even addresses but the other administrator Andrew Kemp who set up this Kemp project has been building a one name study for the Kemp surname for a number of years he's registered the name with the Goons and he has this database here which he's assembling and collecting every family line of Kems that you can find with the supporting genealogical information so what you have here is something probably not perfect but it's a bit more reliable I think than the kind of trees for example and we're now trying to find a way to link this to the project so people can move directly click between the two and move from pedigree to the project or from a lineage in our project to the relevant pedigree so the two will then support each other that's something which we're working on at the moment and this of course is your standard results page this is the lineage of the Kemp of Kavan as you see I've now tested 13 or 14 people this is over the last 3-4 years and this is the colour eyes view which lets you see where the differences are within this group and again there are a few scattered around some of which are significant because when several people share a particular marker we have evidence here of branching I'm also administrative of the Scottish DNA project it was a geographical project and here I have an example here of a recent innovation family tree DNA introduced this year which is the activity feed now I know that there's very much many administrators don't really like these there's again a discussion about how useful they are and many projects don't use them they often have their own Yahoo lists or Facebook pages so there are other forums in which people can discuss results the project but I actually like this it's a massive project and the few administrators do not have time to answer all the queries that we are receiving and the great thing about this is there are others who are also project administrators elsewhere and a lot of members who know a lot about genealogy DNA, Scottish clans Scottish family history and so members answer questions to other members and therefore information has been shared through this medium and I think there's a great innovation we chip in occasionally but we don't have to answer a query because there are many people who share their own information and again creating something of buzz around the project there's really a passive listing of results there is this active discussion of what the results may mean going on around it so before we have a project I mentioned earlier then surname projects are self-explanatory I'm going to run through the other three first and then if I'm allowed to carry on speaking about Morris I'll show you a quick case study of a surname project we might run out of time before we get there the Apple Group projects I think are essential for all testers we all have a Apple Group the deep level marker or SNIP which a deep ancestor of ours an ancient ancestor thousands of years ago had as a mutation and passes on to all of us so the Apple Group which may have appeared somewhere around about here and I think now the current thinking has made me further east I believe has a particular marker which identifies it and then divides as other markers appear the R1A group identified by a marker M207 which all of them carry that all inherited it from their distant ancestor so the Apple Group projects work at this kind of level and below at smaller groupings subgroupings within these to track the shared deep ancestry of all the members I recommend all testers to join one of these as well as joining the surname project we're all given a predicted Apple Group when we test and we can then try to confirm that by taking a SNIP test to see whether the prediction is correct and if we join the Apple Group project we can receive a lot of expert advice from some of the finest minds the most active people involved in genetic genealogy so a lot of the research into ancestry the cutting edge is done by the Apple Group administrators and they can give advice to other people so I recommend join your Apple Group project and even if you're not particularly interested in deep ancestry yourself knowing your Apple Group is a very important tool in making sense of your own results even for your own genealogical research so here we have some of the things the Apple Group administrators produce this is the heat map of the L21 the major in Ireland at least and Scotland and Wales Apple Group or South Apple Group of R1B with a majority of males in this room if you're Irish you'll be a member of L21 as am I as are you and so on and here we see the distribution based on the research of people in Apple Group projects they also build trees Apple trees are trees coming down starting from the mutations and deducing the deep family tree of all the people who have further mutations and many of the Apple Groups produce excellent trees, beautiful trees informative trees, there are many different types my own prize for the most beautiful tree of 2015 goes to Ian McDonald administrator at the R1B U106 project who produces fantastic tree with an amazing contextual report on the possible history of the U106 clan Apple Group often associated with the Germanic peoples it's common in Scandinavia in Germany, the Netherlands common to in England and of course there are some also in Ireland and Ian began his report by saying everything in this report is wrong we just don't know how wrong and that of course is the point about much of this research it is speculative, it is probabilistic but all the same people like Ian put together a deep history of descent going back here into the Neolithic I want to say very much about geographical projects, I've mentioned a run of the Scottish DNA project and what we're trying to do is we're trying to build up a representative picture of the most common forms Apple Groups and subclades of DNA in Scotland and there are some which are associated with Scotland a discussion about a group called L1065 whether they may be some of the Pictish people in Scotland or not the DF41 group is associated with Royal Stuart household and there are others of particular interest in Scotland and so we're trying to build up a representative picture of Scottish DNA and it's also very useful for strays people like me who don't have lots of matches how do we fit in if we don't have people that we're obviously close to in our Apple Group projects when they find that at the regional level there may be things we can discover I'm also a member of the Munster Irish project and we had a very interesting talk about that yesterday even though my Apple Group wasn't mentioned and Maurice mentioned earlier the Scottish Prisoner's project which I'm an administrator of and I did speak about this last year for those who were present a year ago so I won't talk a great length about this but this is what I call a heritage or a cultural heritage project in 1650 Scotland at Dunbar on the coast in which I think it's fair to say the Scots snatched defeat for the jaws of victory Cromwell's new model army surrounded and they came off their defensive position and allowed Cromwell's cavalry to smack them and destroy them in the space of an hour it was a devastating defeat for the Scots and some of the numbers that arose out of this are quite shocking this is the location of the battle the Scots were here on a hill overlooking the English trapped in the town of Dunbar desperately trying to give enough ships in to get their men out of Dunbar and the Scots came off the hill in the morning and became sitting targets for the well-organized Cromwellian cavalry and many of the survivors possibly as many as 5000 prisoners were marched to Durham Cathedral as prisoners and again the numbers are quite ever-set in 10,000 prisoners half of them were wounded and Cromwell released them so there were no longer a threat to him so the fit ones were then marched on the Durham sort of 4,000 here about 1,000 who believed to have escaped en route and many died en route because there wasn't food they needed and so when they reached Durham the dying continued now also from the flux as we referred to probably dysentery and to believe that 1,700 died in Durham alone so these bodies must be buried somewhere around Durham the survivors were not returned to Scotland they were transported most of them across the Atlantic we know that 150 sailed to Boston in 1650 on the ship the Unity and we know a year later another 300 approximately captured from the Battle of Worcester when the royalist army of Charles was defeated in 1651 followed them we know about these people these are the ancestors of the group I'm working with but there are many others we think some may have been sent to Virginia and indentured in the Virginian plantations some may have been sent to European wars to fight as mercenaries and many of them may have been barbeded by many of the despossessed from the Cromwellian wars in Ireland in the 1654s and the ones were barbedoed but probably not have faced a very good fate because the conditions were pretty well close to slavery worse in some respects again that's a controversial area I'm going to some worryingly may have been sent to the Gulf mines of Guinea you can imagine they would never have come back so what we do know about is one to went to the Americas because there are good records for them and of course the story took a new twist this month, last month when an answer from Durham University revealed the discovery of 18 or possibly as many as 28 skeletons were buried beneath the cafe at Durham University Library and the Durham archaeological team investigating this are certain that these are the origins of some of the buried prisoners all of them are male they're all aged between 16 and 25 most of them tell us something about the ages of the typical soldier some of them was young as 13 from announcers of the skeletons they would have been the younger soldiers two of them are in their 30s only out of 28 none of them show signs of deaths from battle trauma or injury so again backing the belief of the starvation and the dysentery carbon 14 dates them to the dates when the battle may have occurred and most of them are from Scotland or Northern England according to isotopic analysis of the skeletons but there are three that showed signs of having grown up in Europe possibly from the low countries or Northern Germany including one of the two older males so again possibly mercenaries fighting the Scots army organising commands of troops and so on so we have asked the Durham team if they're going to take ancient DNA they said it's very expensive we don't know and we do know that the skeletons will be reburied at some stage in a ceremony in Durham and the group I'm working with America are very hopeful that some ancient DNA will be taken from us but at the moment that's not certain but DNA is the way in which the group of America are trying to make connections with their own ancestral relative in Scotland so here is a page from the DNA project grouped according to descendants or believed descendants of the prisoners and some of these have got pretty good genealogical evidence that they are descended from the person they claim others a bit mixed maybe and unfortunately the surviving records of Scotland in the 60s and 50s are very poor there was a period of great disruption and there's very very little I was hoping at one stage the records of the Scottish church the Kirk sessions may help us identify some of the people who were sent into the musters but I don't think that's likely and so in a way DNA seems to be all they can hope for but just before I came on this trip one of the members told me who's researching the descendants of Alexander Bow that she had one of her people had matched with a man who's got documented ascent named Bow to Larburton Stirlingshire whose ancestor left Stirlingshire in the 19th century so again there's a pretty firm connection with Scotland there her person matches this person at 2 out of 67 so it's looking very encouraging that the first person has found their first Scottish connection through this project which you will be investigating further so again the dream of most of the members here is to find matches who are Scottish or who've got a clear genealogical relationship with Scotland so far most of them are finding matches who are also American believe themselves to be Scottish but haven't yet been able to demonstrate that they actually are so do I have time to talk about I think what I'll do is I'll wrap up but I'll say that if you are going to conduct a surname project as I talked about earlier there are other things you can focus on do focus on the genealogy it's very important to do the two in tandem and secondly it's very important also to bear in mind there are lots of tools and utilities around there which can help you to interpret but if you're new to it then try and get the advice of a project administrator until you become more familiar with it yourself and think about the right questions you can ask in order to get meaningful answers that a DNA project can give I'll show just two slides really I've tried to mention and research the name Kemp in Cavern I'm also interested in Kemp's from Limerick and I do know about Kemp's in Cork and one of my very early questions was whether the Cavern and Cork Kemp's are related to each other as a hypothesis which I could falsify and the hypothesis was a Cork and a Cavern Kemp's are related to each other as one family and using DNA I could immediately falsify this because we see that Cavern Kemp's are R1A kind of a Scandinavian looking wide DNA there whereas the Cork Kemp's are R1B U106 and look a bit English if anything so immediately falsify the hypothesis that these two family groups related to each other and this is how I'd recommend going ahead with your own genealogical research ask questions that DNA can answer make hypotheses that you can disprove if the results are not how you want them to be and this way you can build a body of evidence that the relationships you are trying to find are likely to be there but do bear in mind to build a very probabilistic exercise so thank you very much for listening I'll stop now and allow you to ask me any questions if there's still time a question here from Mark Morgan great presentation so my question is I'm kind of astray according to your terminology so although not quite as severe so I have no matches of 111 markers at 67 I have 8 or so but none of them have the same surname the closest is 5 so I'm wondering if you and you mentioned the bias that most of FGDNA data is American but you can also argue that so many people immigrated from Ireland in the 1800s to America or Canada and it was strong but it's a pretty good proxy of most parts of Ireland so do you have a theory about strays that explains what type of people were strays maybe they got wiped out by from 116 to 800 I think yes it's a good question and funnily enough we were talking about this very question last night at dinner and I think that there's no tiger person who's a stray I think it's purely since DNA mutations are random and of course to extend survivability of people across history is not random but can be almost random and so I think you will have lines that die out and you will have families that bush and have lots of male lines we're talking about YDNA so lots of male lines where the Y chromosome will be passed down many lines along with the same surname I know that from my study of my mother's family the Kemp's Academy there were a lot of male branches if you go back through generations but a lot of them had large families with lots of daughters and there are now far fewer direct male lines carrying that particular Y chromosome if I had my own immediate family there was only one left and so lines do die out and I think there's two things really I think in history in the past there are many more DNA lines that have died out but also if you're comparing colonial America with Ireland or England or Scotland there's a lot more variation here than there will be in America because people who migrated to America carried a subset of DNA that existed in Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales and so over time there's always been more variety in the aisles some of those lines will die out I think many more lines haven't been tested and clearly I was the first person to send in my male line going right back to probably the year zero who'd take the DNA test that doesn't necessarily mean there's no one else in America or Australia or anywhere or Ireland who will also match me because what you can do is take the project approach so having not having any matches I've now began to look for them I'm looking for them in Tipperary because that's where the family comes from I have found one since then who tested and tested years ago, I can't contact him he's American, so there is a migrant line in America and I can pursue these to expand my database to have a better image of what my paternal family actually does look like Thanks so much just to give people a bit of information on what to expect from this new DNA test I did an analysis of the back to our past and who do you think you are in England people who have approved about 163 men for the YDNA test 25% of you will not have any matches at YDNA 37 50% of you will have between 1 and 10 matches and 25% of you will have more than 10 matches so it varies a lot depending on what it's a genetic lottery really you could be one of the unlucky ones that has no matches at YDNA 37 so they're really lucky one of those that has lots of matches about 25% of you we have a question here from Don Brazzel Thank you Maris, thanks for the talk John, it was very interesting can I ask the question really because a lot of this depends on people doing the SDR testing and matching that family-clean DNA sort of provide for that the question I'm asking is how difficult how difficult is it to reconcile those SDR matches with matches that you would get from SNF testing big Y testing and the reason I asked that question is that I have found SNF matches subsequently that didn't appear anywhere in my SDR matches and so you know that was extremely unhelpful to me in SDR I wouldn't necessarily say it's unhelpful if you're finding matches then there are matches and there's some there to investigate of course many of your SNP matches may be very very old I don't know how recent those SNPs are or whether it's from a big Y test or just from a SNP panel because a SNP panel, they'll be old but I think those people who are doing SNP testing will also have done SDR testing along so we haven't reached a stage where the first testing to do is a full read of your Y chromosome and you won't know what your SDRs are before them so I think most people are probably doing at least a 37 marker test similarly 12 at least a 37 marker test to have some idea of who they match before they begin to do SNP testing and I think the two need to be done in tandem together and that's how SNPs can become powerful I think on their own than enough even if we begin to read full sequences without doing any prior SDR testing I think we still need the SDRs to help us do the fine branching of trees as we get closer and closer to modern times because most of you, if you're a genealogist you're interested probably in descent within the last 300 years so I think SDRs will remain very important even SNPs also become very important Thank you very much John just to say what I got from the SDR testing was one I mean my paternal history was in Leinster for hundreds of years and I had to come to terms with the fact that we originated in Leinster some time before that and I was a little bit of a shock particularly to my Leinster but the other thing is the SNPs now are approaching sort of documented history now you're talking about SNPs that only occur a few hundred years and it can be difficult to reconcile the SDR results with the very specific quite recent SNP results I think I'll be talking about this in the afternoon but we have found in the project some involved in predictions based on SDR testing being confounded by SNP results but I think that's great, I like that it's a new discovery Very good question, you're going to be talking about convergence to an extent this afternoon So convergence is going to be a that's going to be very very important Other questions to Mr. John One question here I'm No, he's my son Who's dad? We on one of these SDR 19 we have 10 very unusual 10 years ago and nobody else in the day What does that mean? I think on its own it means nothing but I think in comparison with other things it can be useful it sounds like you have a signature marker there and I think IPRO wants to know do you share that signature marker with other Morgans can we identify branches of Morgans on the basis of that SDR change but I mentioned the trap I fell into earlier of basing too much on a single SDR change and with SDRs we need to put together several of them and look for a pattern across more than one to be sure we are finding something that's unique to one branch and I think the signature marker along with other markers will be very important to you Of course the other big marker to look at for is the surname and so you've got two people with the same surname and the same rare marker value that could be very pathos that could be very very descriptive for that particular surname descriptive diagnostic Great well we have to call it because we are going to go into the next topic but please can I ask you to give a big thank you to John Kerr