 You are now live. Great. Okay, ladies and gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure to introduce our next speaker for today. James Irvan, after a career in the shipping industry, retired and then indulged in his twin passions of genealogy and the history of the Orkney Islands. And he has published several books in Africa Guard, edited several others, and he also runs one of the largest surname DNA projects on Family Tree DNA, the Clan Irvan DNA project. And because it is such a large project, James is probably one of the most experienced wide DNA project administrators that is around today. And today he's going to talk to us about the wide DNA of this Scots-Irish diaspora and what it tells us about the Irish people living in Ireland today, the Scottish people living in Scotland today, and of course the immigrants, immigrants who went off to America and various other places around the world that carry the Irvan name. So please give a very warm welcome to James Irvan. Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As you'll tell from my accent, I'm English. Born in England, very proud of it. But I was actually brought up just over there. I learnt my first experience of family history on the Hollywood Hills and I can see them from here. So this is coming home from me. My maternal side was Scots-Irish, but that's coincidental. It gives me the background, but I won't be talking about that today. But it's just lovely to be back. And my uncle and brother-in-law both worked here on Queen's Island, so it's really coming home. Right. I'm going to talk about family name projects, but specifically Scots-Irish and very specifically Irvan. And I hope whilst I often think that family history, one's own family history, is rather like some Hollywood photographs, there's nothing more boring. But I hope you can pick up, if you're interested in your own surname, the parallels and the lessons that may be relevant. And that's what I really want to get over this afternoon. So I'll be using my surname study, our surname study as an example. For those of you who are confused, it is very confusing. And even surname projects now, I'm not just drawing on YDNA, but we're drawing on autosomal a little bit. I had to broaden my horizons of it, but I was very blinked on this. But particularly SDR tests and SNP tests I'm going to talk about. Don't ask me what this time for, I don't know. You don't need to know. Y chromosome, for those who aren't with this, only goes down through the male line like the surname. And it's those differences that become so interesting. This is a new slide that I picked up on the way of a couple of weeks ago by Mike Walsh. And it shows you at the bottom, the conventional family tree, the first bottom couple of inches, conventional family tree. And you can actually follow several surname lines back in your own ancestry. You can go to your father's mother and then follow her paternal line back or your father's mother's father. So we actually can search quite a few surname lines. And they all go back to the genetic atom, and I'll come back to that later. The goals of a surname study used to be looking for paternal cousins and breaking down brick walls. That's still relevant. But I actually, in my experience, had relatively little success for those. But that has been more than compensated by the amount I've learned about our surname through genetic genealogy that I never dreamt I didn't know. Like a lot of things in life, you end up with more questions than answers. Well, I'm ending up with answers, finding out the origins of the surname, and it's very interesting how it's spread. And we're now able to actually link some paternal genealogy into the DNA. I'm getting an overlap, which is perhaps what we're all seeking unconsciously. And I'm now actually getting some overlap and hope to get more. Surname classifications. Debbie's done a textbook on this, and there are all sorts of ways you can do it. The first thing bits to me are the bottom two examples. Some surnames are hereditary, most of the ones we deal with today, but if you go back a thousand years, it wasn't quite as clear-cut, and people had second names, they're sometimes called binames, that they might have for a generation or two and then would drop. And you have this transient situation, even for three or four generations, there might be a second name. And we're getting into that gray area, and it gets quite interesting. The surname study is going to be very diffuse, and it'll be interesting, there's lots of things to learn. If you're a single-source surname, like Kurt or Euston, then you only have one ancestor, and it's all very neat, and everybody with that surname is going to be related. But most of us are somewhere in the middle, a fellow called Gleason here at the front and myself, and we're very lucky that we're sort of a bit of both, and it's a gray area, and you'll see why that comes up later on. Just a little bit about our surname, it's a Scottish surname, but it's also found in England, Ireland and America. Our project was founded now 13 years ago, we're up to 460 members, by no means the biggest at that level. A very strong American bias, 98% of those are Americans, I'll come back to that in a minute, and that's actually very good. They don't bring a lot of ancestry with them, but they bring a lot of money, and that has proved very relevant. I can now show these Americans for their money that 92% of them, I can say not only they say, maybe we came from Ireland, I can say yes, but before that you came from Scotland, I can tell them the county, and in some cases the actual parish that paternal ancestors came from, and they think this is fantastic, and it's very rewarding. Two thirds of this 460 belong to one family, so I've got 300 people who are all related in the surname ERA, which is the biggest group, I think, of any surname study, and it's a privilege to have that data to play with, and I'll be drawing on that. So we're now beginning to big Y and snip packs, and we're actually, as I said, linking some of this into the conventional family history. So I like to look at surname projects in a broader context than just DNA, and I'm going to go through these seven inputs, because to me you can't really do DNA without understanding something of the background. So I'll be going to the structure of my lecture this afternoon. First of all, traditions, they can be oral or written, and if you think you haven't inherited any traditions, just look in a surname dictionary, and your eyes will be opened at some of the rubbish that academics think your surname is associated with, so it's somewhere to start. Identify them, just think about them, and they all offer hypotheses that DNA can check again. So even before you really get going, you can have some structure to your work, and have to bear in mind that some of your results may be quite controversial, and I now feel comfortable, but I can assure you, early on in my project, it was a political battle. The Irvins were one bit of Scotland, and the Irvins the other bit of Scotland thought my results were absolute rubbish and all the rest of it, and it took a long time to persuade them that, well, it wasn't black and white, but the writing was on the wall, and it's all history now, but it was interesting at the time. We're very lucky. We have actually inherited a very detailed traditional history written in the 1680s. This isn't the oldest copy. This comes from just across the road in the Public Record Office. This is a 1784 version, but actually there as well, I haven't reproduced it, but it's almost illegible, is a 1690 version. It's not the original, it's by his son who wrote this history of the... It's romanticised, but it's a lovely tradition. It is lovely. Unfortunately, it's not true, but this is a good hypothesis, and this is where all the trouble arose when I was finding a lot of it wasn't so. But in a nutshell, it says our surname. Everybody with our surname from Scotland had one ancestor. He started off in Ayrshire by the name of the Tyne Irvins, just 40, 50 miles up there, and they moved to Dumfrieshire and Dumfrieshire branches migrated to Castle Irving out in Cadifa Manor at the time of the plantation. There were sort of second-generation plantation landowners, and then there was a branch up to Aberdeenshire which has got the solid line. It can trace that pedigree right back to 1300. It was a beautiful pedigree, and the assumption was that Dumfrieshire and Aberdeenshire ones were the same family, which was the senior, that was the tricky bit. And then there were other branches, and I thought I was descended from them as well. Alas, I'm not, and so I was disappointed just like everybody else. Now, moving on a bit, population studies, this gives you more background as well. You can read through that list. We won't spend time on it. But for example, in Ireland, we are mapped, this is the 1991 census done by a fellow called Niefsy, and the dots represent the concentration. And you'll see the Irvins, and the spelling doesn't matter, I'll come to that in a minute, but there's a bit out here in Formana, those are the ones I've talked about. There's some in Ross Common that we know about, there's some in Tipperary that I'll come to, and there's some somewhere in Insta, which may be those ones. I can't explain these ones. These ones I suggest are recent migrations, you know, people in the South moving from Metropolis, I'll come back to that as well. That gives you a feel in Ireland of what we're talking about, and of course when somebody signs up to the project, you don't know where they come from, but I can't say, well, I'm not interested in you because you're Irish or you're Scottish or you're American, because, you know, we share a culture if not an ancestry. In Great Britain, the data is a little more ready. Going back to 1880, it's quite interesting, because that's post-industrial revolution, but going back a bit, and you see the data on the right, on the left there, it's fairly scattered. When you anonymise it down to population, you'll see a very distinct grouping around the Scottish borders, and that is a very strong story, so we've got a gut feel, or not a gut feel, we've got some tangible evidence, so that's probably where much of the surname came from. Orkney Islands, quite interesting, you see, that's my little bit, we're not insignificant, but nothing down here at all. So, while it's a Scottish surname, the English bit is obviously the same family. First order. Spelling is very interesting. A lot of people say, of course, we spell our name this way so we're not related to you, and I think in most surnames, you come to recognise pretty early on, even in ordinary genealogy, particularly when you've come from someone like Scotland, and moved on to someone like America, the spelling gets terribly corrupted. So the different spellings, this is the world population count, you can get me off the web, this is my project population, this is the synergy. So I'm feeling fairly comfortable that I'm getting a represented picture. When you take information at random, people will ring in, join up, I don't recruit anybody for this project, they've all come in voluntarily, you run the risk of it being biased for various reasons, and this is reassuring with the bias, there will be some bias there, but it's not too bad. And then you get the most popular spellings, and even in Ulster, in Belfast, around the road it's the same spelling, the pronunciation is different, and if you go down south, the spelling is different. So there are local variants, but they're not a rule, it's just a prevalence. I'm also keen that, and this is something that was touched on earlier in the day when Michael was talking, to get a feel more tangibly about the representation of the project in terms of numbers and where they come from, geographically, I call it penetration, he called it something else this morning, but it's the same idea. And you'll see in the world, the coverage is a very small sample, 0.16% in my project, yes it's big, but in the total population it's insignificant, but rather like the opinion polls you read in the paper, if you've got a thousand people, it can tell you how several million people are going to vote. And you'll see there's a spread there, Ireland interestingly, very poor. Now we all know that, we all know that if you know your neighbours we came from why spend money proving it, or disproving it even worse, whereas the Americans of course lost signing up, so they're quite high. One of the reasons I'm here today is to try and get that up a bit, because it is a bit worrying. But anybody can play this game, be careful of the numbers, there's lots of uncertainties in that, but the feel I think is important. Now when people join any project, they're invited to say where the earliest known ancestor came from. So here I'm looking at that data, not where they live, not where they originally came from, but their earliest genealogy. And you'll see Don Frischer figuring, which we knew from the general population thing, and you see scattered across the north, fairly even. So we've got something going on here. Bear in mind this is mostly Americans we're talking about. A lot of them can trace their ancestry back to the north of Ireland, very few of them can get back to Don Frischer. So it's beginning to get a picture. Before we do any DNA testing at all, and anybody can play this sort of game. We've signed up the project, I'll come to an analysing that in a minute, but this is what you can do, not even looking at the DNA test result. Now as in family history, I think we're all here mature enough to know that family history isn't just about birth, death and marriages, it's the same in DNA studies. The local history, the migrations in this context, the plantation, the figure's very large, and how old is the surname? Because you're getting back into that era. These are the sort of things you should be bearing in mind. Conventional genealogy is absolutely essential. Of course we're only talking about the paternal side in the surname study. The longevity, how far it back it goes is important, I'll come to that in a minute. Reliability is very important, it's a very difficult task because I can trace myself back to your William of Drum, I'm absolutely certain of it and I know full well from his DNA that it's absolute rubbish. But to tell him all his years of research that he's often paid for professionally is a load of rubbish. You have to be a bit careful how you handle it. And there's a huge amount of data to handle. 460 people's pedigrees is not fun, and then you've got the confidentiality aspect. So managing this is quite interesting. And then the triangulation thing, Maris is going to talk about this, but I've got a private theory that you can use conventional genealogy to triangulate and verify your SDR data. But when you get to SNP data which I want to, it's more reliable that is going to verify your genealogical data through triangulation. So it's a two-way process. Now coming more specifically into the longevity, you'll see that the vast majority of us because it's American and they have trouble they can get back to the majority back to about in the 1700s. And, you know, it'd be nice to go further but they don't. But in fact, we were lucky we've got six lines that go back 41700, one of them to 1300. That's 8%. And we've also got over half that go back before 1800. And once you get into the SNPs bit which I'll come to at the end of the lecture, this is very relevant. The SNPs get down get down that low. You're within one SNP. A SNP is about every three or four generations you get a SNP on average. So even if you can only get back to 1800, the SNPs can reach down that far. Just a couple of examples. This is the pedigree we've got that goes back to 1300. I would say about a fifth of my project thought that they could attach to this. In fact, only six of them do. The first one was the Laird himself and it took me about four years to get him to test. I know him very well but he says, James, even if you pay for it all I can do is lose on it because it comes out not what we think. I've got egg on my face and so have you mate. But eventually I persuaded him. And of course it came out not the traditional way so he said I told you so. Actually he was privately quite happy but that was a different issue. So we tested his cousin and it wasn't a bish. And then we got two more, these two, that one and this one was a project just randomly coming in and saying I've got my pedigree does my DNA back it up and lo and behold it did. So this is triangulation right back to 1500. This one we go back to common ancestor is about 1500 up there. So that was very reassuring that the triangulation was going that far back. We've got two lines that I can't do anything with. This fellow who was an American senator or this one was, but in fact it's not the end of the world because he's covered by this fellow. This fellow has done private research and he's scared of doing a DNA test because he thinks it might prove all his life's labors wrong and he won't test. Well you've got to respect that. It would be nice to have him because it would take it back three or four generations more. And then we've got this fellow, just one of them who says I belong, the DNA says he belong but he's got no pedigree. Only one of them which is quite remarkable. Now the other extreme, the Border Irvings, this is the group that's two-thirds of it, 300 of them. The pedigrees are much weaker. They go back to 1500 and we've got two people who would be the layer, the United States and America domestic issues and the Castle Irving people out in Tramana have managed to test both of them. They match two by 37 with the mode and there's one come off here that matches. So we know those two branches fit together. But that's all we've got on it. This is the fellow that wrote the traditional industry. So he was very biased to these border people against the drum people up in Aberdeenshire. He was the fellow that he was an interesting character. He was a historiographer to James the 7th of Scotland, 2nd of England. That's official. It's in the Windsor, you know, it's in Great Pucker. He married and then he had a mistress as well and when he died his will was disputed and the son of the 2nd marriage called his father in court and adulterer, a bigamist, a trigamist, a poisoner and a murderer. And he wrote our family history so perhaps we get what we deserve. I've written a biography on him but he hasn't written, he hasn't published it. Right, so here is the family history of the border winds. We've got on the left thinking about solid black lines and the yeses under the first six in black over here. We can trace all those pedigrees down to the present day. So the Dalfriesia bit, the Castle Irving bit and two more bits in Dalfriesia we can trace down to the present day. And then I've got a lot of mentions in the 1600s, another six or seven branches. We don't know how they fit together and ironically we don't have any descendants living today. But we have 300 who have taken DNA tests who were descended from these people but they've got a gap. So the challenge is enormous. 300 people have spent this money and they say to me, why can't you prove it? We're getting there, but it's an enormous challenge. It's coming, it's coming slowly. I'm very privileged to be able to have to be given this challenge. Now autosomal data can help I'm not going to spend any time on it this is what Michelle was talking about and now we'll get on to SDR data. So this is after all that talk I'm now going to talk about DNA proper. There are all sorts of tests I think the 37 marker test is the best one after that I think you're paying a lot more money, you're not getting a lot from it. To me now the important thing is you're getting a predicted haplogroup so this is getting onto the SNP side of things. But before we leave it the FTDNA is matching rules I'm going to talk about and conversions. If you do your DNA test and you haven't done one this is what you actually get download it online, it's not a bit of parchment anymore and FTDNA put it on one of these tables and you've got lots of numbers and what the hell do you do with it I like to put them onto a spreadsheet and handle it my way and I can manipulate it and edit it to bring out the points I want to do and shuffle it and so forth. So you'll see in the big, the top bit the first surname branch these are the border ones I was just talking about lots of identical people you'd think they're all related, this is the first 25 markers we can go up to 37, 67, 111 so the spreadsheet goes way out there it also goes down, this is the first 20 or so people we've got another 300 430 to go on the bottom of it so the spreadsheet is enormous but you can see if you do the colouring from the currents, if they differ you can split them up into families and it's this colourisation that is perhaps the strongest tool it's not a computer doesn't do it, I'll come back to that but you can see the different families but before I go into that emphasise in this point we've got 94% we've got 37 markers or more around 6% haven't got a lot of markers that actually isn't the end of the world my most valuable individual has only got 12 markers and I do feel that the money spent in 67, 111 we're not getting a dividend from at least yet big problem in my project is NPEs, not the parent expected or non-paternal events and it can be all sorts of things if you read the modern books it's all about surrogacy, it's infidelity I think is the most insidious but I would lay my money that a lot of them are quite much more innocuous a woman marries her husband gets killed in a border skirmish let's say in this context quite romantic she's got a young family, she remarries and the young son of the first marriage grows up and takes the son takes the surname of his stepfather nothing wrong with it perfectly predictable and I think a lot of it is that so let's not get too upset about morals and so forth errors in genealogy are part of it all surnames became permanent shades of grey now how do these manifest themselves well in the matching pages you will get sometimes you just get your surname, all the matches are your surname lovely, sometimes you get gobbledygook well that's a different issue we won't go into but quite often in my case we're getting quite a few Irwin's in the Irwin DNA but we're getting the Eliot's surname we're getting Eliot's DNA but Irwin's surname and this crops up quite a bit and you have to be careful of double counting and with one of them you have to be sensitive the other they volunteer the joints there's no sensitivity but NPs have these two sort of facets and if you read Hunter Round it's actually quite predictable in the borders there was a tough hybrid culture if you were on the coach during Thursday it was described slightly less flattering I complained that there was talking about my ancestors in the most erogatory terms but it was a feature of the borders that this surname swapping or whatever you want to call it did go on quite a bit and of course when they migrated then the surnames got a bit corrupted as well so it's a predictable phenomenon but when you come to it about 10% of my project it's got people with our DNA but other people's surnames or other people's DNA and our surname and if you run down those names it's like when I was at school here it's like a school roll call all those Scottish names are quite common here in the north I could say that was a roll call from my class at school here just 10 miles away showing that a lot of the Scottish names here in the north are mixed up and we're getting bells in both ways you see we've got bells with Irwin's surname and Irwin's DNA with Bell's surnames it's a fascinating feature it happens outside the borders it's not unique but I think it's more accentuated in the borders as I was saying the matching rule do you match, don't you match the rule of thumb that FTDNA is and I'm quite convinced that 5 and 6 provided the surname is the same they're good matches as well so if you just use the FTDNA tool you will actually be excluding a few not many, a few quite valid matches out to perhaps 7 markers so we get false positives you also get a lot of good matches with different surnames some of them may be NTEs but of course a lot of them are just random matches I'm now Chase Ashley YDNA grouping app that will do all this mechanics for you, just plug in the data and it spits out the answer but it still suffers from this problem of how do you define genetic distance so I prefer genetic distance of 7 or 37 and I used to be very keen on the tip algorithm which is the most sophisticated one unfortunately FTDNA fiddled with it and it's not quite as clear cut but rule of thumb 24 generations is another tool you can use so working out whether you're a match or not is not a science, it's an art and I've borrowed this slide from Morris he's thinking, he hasn't seen it he's sitting up and he'll recognise it but I've tinkered it with it a bit I've got 12 different fields and you have to use a bit of all of them, this is the message that Morris was making before I was full credit to him but of course the most reliable ones did a haplogroup and then if you can do a SNP test that will tell you if you get the level right whether you're in the same surname group but 37 markers are generally quite enough 12 can be enough and you can usually sort it out and the more data you play with the more it becomes clear it's seated at the pants, colourising there's no magic formula it just hits you in the face so going back to that this slide, analysing it a bit further this is the same data analysed a bit further colours for the different families there's just five of them here, out of 40 the top one of the borders ones I include the kit number the next letter is where they live a present, how the surname is spelt the earliest confirmed ancestor the haplogroup prediction the number of markers tested and then I use the top line the top line is the mobile one and these are the genetic distances of the different marker counts and then a tip score and some remarks so you see here we have four of them from Dunfriesha so that's how I know that this big family comes from Dunfriesha it's just that four of them or in practice about eight of them come from there all the rest are scattered all over the place mostly in America but I just know, I'll prove it and crude as that this one, we get the NT so there you've got an Elliott in this line who's got the quite a close match to the Owen's surname but he's got the Elliott the Owen DNA, he's a close match he's got the Elliott's surname here we have Owens who match very closely to the Elliott's so that's the evidence that comes up here we've got a couple of brothers who have a genetic distance of two at 25 I know the mother, she said to me are you accusing me of sleeping with two different men I said no Margaret one's got blue eyes and one's got brown eyes and this is proof of it so genetic distance can happen that's a random event and you can get a distance of two in one family and Bennett Greenspan tells me he's exactly the same so good pedigree there here's an example of a count of five at 37, DNA would say that's not a match, FT DNA tip score of 98% it's very clearly is a match so it would be a false negative with a few excluded this is my branch up in the Orkney Islands you may have heard of Washington Irving the American poet, I find one of his descendants got him tested and he matches me, you can see these numbers compare to Bonchal ones but you can see the kinds are identical so we're very closely matched so I belong to that bit of the Orkney branch now we have some funny ones down in Munster there's two of them this is the guy that you can see his Gaelic surname he was a Catholic he can remember his grandfather speaking Gaelic he knows the parish he came from identical to the parish that this fellow came from completely different and they are Celtic Arish Owens and the reason of the surname is it got anglicized way several hundred years ago I was filthy Brits down there deserve the reputation we've got and the surname got anglicized and it's not Irwin but they've got no Scottish connection at all we've got two families like that and this is my proudest one this fellow comes in with an E it's completely different, it's only 12 markers but it doesn't fit in anywhere I've said to him tell me a bit more about your great grandfather and they said we're proudest punch he was black as the east of space he was a slave, he was emancipated in 1865 but we don't know any more than that and I said I do your slave owner was a narrowing and some of the ones that went from Ulster to America went down to Carolina and I'm sure, well I knew some of them were slave owners so that's how he got his name just 12 markers, interesting story so our project is growing and growing and growing, don't ask me how I don't know how it's happened I don't advertise, I just run a website that I try to do efficiently and it seems to gain a reputation and the numbers just go up and up and up which is very nice but what's interesting is that families, you see the number of families over the 13 years has gone up to about 40 but it's the unassigned the leftovers to begin with they were about 50% you can see that green line is about halfway up and gradually that proportion the numbers stayed steady so now it's only about 9% of the total so 92%, 8% of the total 92% of them, I can put them into one of these genetic families which is very satisfying 40 families but I can fit them into one of them so here's the result as it were 40 different families one big ones, two thirds and that one family from D'Aufricho another 19 families are these NPEs who come from D'Aufricho but let me get it the right way around these are the ones that have the Erwin surname but I don't have Erwin DNA they have bell or BT or arms from DNA they have D'Aufricho ones I've talked about the opening ones I've talked about the two Irish ones some funny German ones, the one African one 8% leftovers so we've got 40% and that's a breakdown of the conventional analysis with a good a well-administered well-administered surname project you should be able to get something like that for any project not many process it that far but if you don't feel you're getting the service and you're admin, you can do it yourself with a bit of help so the old family, traditional family tree has been shattered the four crosses have shown that the relationship doesn't exist but we've got a lot more coming in here than we expected and the diaspora bit most of them live in America 76% live in America of those the biggest chunk can place themselves back to Ireland obviously a lot of them can't place themselves anywhere but 86% of them came from Scotland so this is summarizing the migrations that have happened and the migration from Scotland to Ulster would have been in the 17th century I'm pretty sure and from Ulster to America in the 18th century 1840s, 1850s migration doesn't figure I think that was mostly Catholics from the south I think from the north there was much less migration certainly in our project that's born there now but the STR data is going back five years or so we have this huge this is the STDLA print out the world families one is a little more illustrated but you'll see here a huge number and this is the top half of it absolutely identical so I thought they all must be closely related and if you look at all these guys on that particular marker they must be closely related it turned out to be very misleading with hindsight and it's now more relevant to say look, that one, that one shows a sign of relationship but these markers are unstable we thought they were God, but they are actually quite unstable and the reason they're unstable is convergence and again, credit to Morris I think it was who really drew our attention to this convergence problem this is my simplistic explanation you start off with one kind of, from a particular marker after five generations it may have wandered one or two one way and after another two generations it may have wandered a bit further but the wandering is random and that line and that line when you look at it today it's identical with the line that's come straight through so you're getting an identical picture today but they've come to this point through different routes and you can't tell that that's happened if you just look at the mass of that it's about 22% if everything was equal 22% of your appellant matches are misleading there's been convergence those numbers I think fit the real world so my gut feel is that if you go back 10 generations 20% of your results suffer from convergence this is very controversial whether that number's in the right ballpark or not but nobody's proved it to be a different one now we're going on to SNPs this has all happened in the last five years I could spend all afternoon trying to explain it, it's very complicated there are all sorts of different tests you can take advice you can spend $17 up to $800 and even more on SNP tests they give you, they're very valuable but you can throw a lot of good money away so it's complicated and I'm not going to this afternoon I'm going to show you what we can do with it rather than how you get there one of the problems we have is a different way just different labels everything in yellow is just a different way of describing a simple thing an L21 they can describe any of those ways an L55 which is our private one even more ways are illustrated all those things mean the same thing well to a beginner that's just so confusing it's beyond belief and when you're amateur like myself just learning trial and error it was very confusing and I don't think there's a simple answer it's an unregulated industry and different companies do things different ways and we also use things like novel variant and known SNPs and private SNPs SNP is SNP and you lecture in Scotland of course it means something different that's a problem we don't quite have here but I'm not going to go into what it stands for single, something or other nuclear yeah but I won't pretend to understand it let alone pronounce it but it is confusing and then there are all sorts of manifestations about the three different types of SNP tests and how they're different from STR tests if you think of STR tests the other ones that are like the leaves on a tree then SNP tests are like the branches and the twigs or if you want to be cynical like me STRs are yesterday's news and SNPs are tomorrow's news and I forecast quite sincerely to the annoyance of a lot of my colleagues that in five years time SNPs, STRs will be history maybe exaggerating but certainly that's the way I see it going going back to this tree that I showed at the beginning not quite sure what this bit is and how it's cropped up but never mind but the numbers on this side I wanted to talk about up here if we go actually this goes back to 50,000 years ago in fact the oldest mankind genetically is another 100,000 but this is a slide by Mike Walsh he's saying approximately 420 SNPs back that far so most of us in this room have 4,500,600 SNPs that are we have inherited of those all but 7 on average will be before the surname ERA so from my point of view if we're not talking about ethnicity I'm only interested in those last 7 you pay $500 for your big wide test you get $600 SNPs but they don't tell you which are the ones that are in the surname ERA and that's a huge problem for all of us to handle it's getting easier but again the computers can't do it it's all sorts of complications but it's so exciting when you do get there now you can see trees like this on the web this is the L21 so this is within the R haplogroup it's halfway down that tree I was showing you and it goes down to about surname ERA is about here and this is our L55 the fact we're out on the limb of something that I don't understand much more important we're right at the bottom we're a very young SNP the L55 we're very lucky almost by chance it happens to coincide roughly with the level of SNP that is where our surname started so if you're L555 you're very probably an O and we find one exception now which is quite interesting it shows it's just about on the borderline under L555 which I'm going to talk about as complicated as that but this is all the 4,000 years ago 1200 years, 800 years ago what I'm going to talk about now is less than that no I've got one more before we this is the most important slide of the lecture perhaps it starts at Adam and he comes down to L555 and every coloured annotation is one of our 40 branches so I've plotted all 40 branches on one haplogroup tree else it doesn't apply to us this tree would go on forever if you did, but all my 40 branches are on one tree so I can show that the Aberdeenshire ones there it is, Drone Aberdeen you have to go back about 4,000 years so we are related but long before the surname era and our African friend the way over here perhaps not surprisingly and I in Orkney, that's me there right out in the limb the surname 232 and U106 is there but our L555 this is this big group I'm going to talk about down here so again all this is pre-serving the grey bit is Alex Williamson's big tree and that is magic, it's just magic a layman can understand it without any effort at all so if you happen to fit in that bit and of course that is it's probably 50% of the population half of us are R1D in this room half of us will be R1D is it about that, something like that so half of us probably something like that 70% so more than half of us would fit on this and once you've done a snip test you may find where you are on that the other thing is these asterisks that you see scattered around are pack tests and that is the most powerful one for $99 it will tell you where you are on this tree it's magic that one that's the one that's going to replace the 67 and 111 markers very good value for money we've got our private pack tests and I'll come to that in a minute but you'll see them, they're random but they're growing all the time the poor man's big why they cost about $100 and it's a package of about 100 snips and they just bang it through very exciting development in the last three years so next generation sequencing this is probably history now but massive step forward it's much simpler than it was when it was launched but it's still mighty complicated it is value for money but it's still expensive so we now have the pack panel test I was just talking about the mid-level test is very good value for money if it's applicable and the low-level one if you're lucky enough to have one is a much cheaper way of getting there they're expanding and the results are yes-no actually they're covering up shades of gray but when they come out of this test it's yes-no so it's quite simple to analyze so when we want to do the divide up L555 into groups into families what tools can we use and I'm very anxious that people realize that 67 and 11 markers don't help much they will help a bit I was perhaps too extreme but the only thing that really helps you is getting into the pack test or the big wide data Dave Vance is developing a tool that I'm playing with again that helps do it for you semi-automatically but this is quite advanced but it's also controversial which is why I wanted to put it up which test to take if you're interested in what I'm talking about you take a 37 marker test and you stop there and you go to an M269 and then if you're lucky enough you do a U107L2G7 or L555 and some other ones think about going that way it'll save you a lot of money most of my tribe have thrown money at it and spent a lot more with hindsight if we know what we know now we could have got as far as we've got Americans I wouldn't say they throw money at it but they don't mind spending the money but they expect me to give them the answer and it isn't always that simple so FTDNA now do they didn't initially a very good tree so this is the hapler tree those fuzzy things I was showing you this particular bit here's L555 and it's a nice split up it goes way, way back to L21 and Adam literally we've seen 2000 L555 which is about 800 years ago a simple set there and then we've got all these breakdowns so they're separate families a dozen of them there and then these subdivide more another tool you can use is WIFO John Cleary is somewhere around very keen on this I haven't used them very much but if you don't put a lot of data in there's no time for this and I can produce all the answers that WIFO can produce perhaps not as professionally perhaps not as robustly I would argue that isn't necessarily the case but what I do is for free with a lot of sweat but this is the way you can do it without somebody having to do the sweat for you Alex Williamson's big tree, just magic here's the L555 block there's L555 itself but all these snips are apparently identical and as I said we find one in here that comes out and then there's a subgroup there they're all Irwins and that's 12 and I've now got 25 of them and these are all other surnames so we're beginning to get down into the surname era at that level this is what I could have shown you where are we, three years ago on the left are some Irwins that aren't L555 and on the right are some non Irwins that are not L555 but fairly closely related so there would be cousins going back 1500 years and these are my first 12 big Ys much relief and excitement we thought we'd sold everything but we hadn't but it was enough to design a SNP practice and this is my latest family tree of our border Irwins so up here top line is an Irving the first Irving, we don't know who he was and this is his family tree and one bit of it, somewhere around here is Bonchaw and one bit of it is Nassau Irving all the rest of them don't know who they are but you can see we've got into enormous detail and that's gradually coming down all the time so potentially it's terrifically exciting and it's happening almost by the week almost by the day I did that last week but it's it's not quite the way I'm doing that the yellows are technically the issue that have come up was they've redone the big Y and we need to get some more data but it's fringe stuff and you see down at the bottom that's the big Y level these are the tests there's 25 of those, we've got 70 odd pack tests and then I put some SDR data in and some genealogy, that's the SDR stuff and autosomals so if there's a brother I can put him in on this tree so I've got about 140 on that tree of the 300 about half I could now get onto a haplotree even though I can't identify them all here's the bit where on the left on the left you can see Bonchaw and Castle Irving the snips are right down into the conventional genealogy that we've proven so we're getting triangulation with SDRs and the snips and confirming the genealogy but here we've got a big chunk half of what we've got is in this big chunk obviously the pack test wasn't designed properly or adequately so we've got to go back and do more big Ys it's a tedious process and here's perhaps the last channel these snips happen irregularly they don't happen every three generations you can go seven generations and then a couple of them so we can have this one we've got four snips but they may be quite recent and if your genealogy goes back to 1800 then it's a good overlap so that would be Bonchaw or if it goes back here it's not so bad but here if the snips happen earlier and the pedigree doesn't go back so far you've got a gap and here you've got a big gap they're just random examples random variables and we don't quite know how either of them work we know how far back our genealogies go but we don't know how far down the snips come so there's going to be overlaps there's going to be lots of tales of delight but there are going to be some tales that we're going to struggle with we'll get there in the end so this is my summary slide to pull all these thoughts together sort of conceptual what everybody should be trying to do it brings in something I've talked about into one slide but it's academic it's theoretical but it hopefully brings things together what we're trying to do is to bring the papillary down and the genealogical lineages up so they overlap conclusions DNA surname projects can do a lot more than we thought the 737 rule the 437 rule is too restrictive STR tests at the higher levels don't add a lot branches do need big y data but the low level practice will help and in the end everything will help a little bit thanks for lots of people including my wife thank you absolutely for a fantastic presentation and the work that you've done on the urban DNA project is really encourages the rest of us to aspire to the levels that you've managed to achieve in that project and every time I hear the latest update on the project I think wow that's really inspiring it's really showing the rest of us where we should be heading and it's great that you actually have such a wonderful project because it actually allows you to do this incredible amount of work and does anybody in the audience have urban or urban ancestors oh there's one lady there okay and where are your urban ancestors from I'm going to come down with the microphone so we can hear from you West Tarone yes, yeah good well they in the migration for every planter and what happened with the urban and castle they went the planters they bought the land off the planters in 1613 so they were virtually planters but for every planter you needed the history books differ a bit I'm not sure it was 25 or 40 stout and strong men who by implication would be more Presbyterians because that's what we're talking about beneath the surface and loyal let's put it that way and of course unfortunately the motive was to hit the Catholics on the head if they ever got naughty and come 1641 that policy was shown to be rather short sighted but the point is for every landed person who came over the plantation there were an awful lot of people who were not landed they were tenants they had been perfectly law abiding settled well established ones some of them may have been brigands that were kicked out because before we had transportation to America and Australia it was transportation from the Scottish borders to Ulster and the law records are full of them I'm not suggesting in a minute that your ancestors were part of that but they might have been again the majority were probably law abiding and your ability to take your ancestry back as far as you've done is terrific but it's not untypical and you get stuck what I hope to be able to do if you did a YDNA if your husband did a YDNA test is to tattoo into one of those lines on that complicated graph and maybe in five years time I can actually say exactly which bit of the borders he's ancestors came from you haven't you haven't got any surviving male Irvings well could I please say even if you pay for a DNA test get a saliva sample of them and we might pay for it I might pay for it if they've got a pedigree but the saliva you can't replace but it has to be a male Irving and the same applies to any other surname project of course all this has been YDNA I did touch on autosomal at the very end it may help but it's the YDNA that's the core of the project lovely all the same yeah I've seen it in the same legal document I've seen five different spellings in one document I haven't heard of that number on a gravestone but gravestones aren't you know they lie I do know of a gravestone that stated the 31st of February and it was carved about two o'clock in the afternoon after a good lunch on that note I think we have to leave it there ladies and gentlemen, James are in thank you more of that one that was very good we'll mute you thanks for the first time I was impressed and to get through the theory to some extent it was a great task