December 2021 Issue of the Newsletter

The VHC Blog

This blog is meant as a discussion forum for participants in the Y-DNA project the Värmland-Hedmark Cluster. The blog will also be used to post news and general information about the project, as a complement to the newsletter that comes out now and then.

The oil painting pictured on the left is from 1924 and shows the ferry across the river Klarälven in Ransäter, Värmland. The artist is Gumme Åkermark (1847-1927). Source: Värmlands Museum (public domain mark 1.0).

December 2021 Issue of the Newsletter

1/1/2022

3 Comments

Somewhat delayed, I can now publish the December 2021 issue of the newsletter. The content of the newsletter can be summarized by listing the headings of its six sections (see below). The issue can be downloaded here.

A New Branch That Connects Frykerud and Gillberga
Two Unknown Fathers Found—Probably
A New Tester in Our Tree
Age Estimations
Telomere-To-Telomere
Some Reading Tips

EDIT: I here add a screenshot of a table that shows the connection between YFull IDs and the number of the testers used in the newsletter. This is in response to a question from Bruno (see below). It does not apper to be possible to put pictures or other things in the comments, so I do it here instead.

3 Comments

Bruno Steiner link

1/6/2022 05:28:33 am

Thank you, Johan, for the tremendously interesting research you engage yourself in!
Is the reason Tester 4 is on an separate branch in YFULL compared to Tester 3 that he didn't take a full 700 test but added the specific SNP-test and therefore is not identified together with Tester 3?
Is it possible to give the YFULL id or is that against anonymity?
Is any of our A!-A8 identical to any of YFULL's green boxes in their tree? Do you feel free to give the YFULL id for all the testers?
One of the targets for the project, I guess, is to be able to identify where A2 and A4 was born and of course the geographical origin for A3.
Is the fact you have found more men tested descendents to A2 than A4 an indication A3 has his origin in Scandinavia and only a few settled on British Isles? Or is number of tested just a result of fewer men tested on the British Isles? Or is it just a matter of the size of family generated by A3 and A4?
Do you know the earliest given ancestors to the branches R-FGC54216* and R-FGC62342?

Johan Lagerlöf link

1/6/2022 11:29:08 am

Hi Bruno. Many thanks for your questions.

• “Is the reason Tester 4 is on an separate branch in YFULL compared to Tester 3 that he didn't take a full 700 test but added the specific SNP-test and therefore is not identified together with Tester 3?” Yes. The likely reason is that T4’s BY-700 test shows that he is positive for the SNP A25847, whereas YFull can’t see whether also T3 is positive for this SNP, as it is not checked by a BY-500 test. (We in the project know that T3 is positive for A25847, as we tested this with YSEQ in the fall 2020, but so far YFull doesn’t base their tree on individual SNP tests – I think that YFull has hinted that this might change in the future).

• “Is it possible to give the YFULL id or is that against anonymity?” Very good point. I thought about this before, but didn’t get time to do it in the December issue of the newsletter. I have now quickly put together a table that shows the relationships. See the screenshot below (hopefully it will work). The information I add doesn’t violate anonymity. Both the numbers of the testers and the YFull IDs are anonymous, and that doesn’t change if I explain how they are linked.

• “Is any of our A!-A8 identical to any of YFULL's green boxes in their tree?” Yes, the structure of the two trees (Yfull’s and the one in the newsletter) are close to identical. I think the issue with T3 is the only exception (and there it should be the newsletter version of the tree that is the correct one).

• “One of the targets for the project, I guess, is to be able to identify where A2 and A4 was born and of course the geographical origin for A3.” Yes, I agree completely!

• “Is the fact you have found more men tested descendents to A2 than A4 an indication A3 has his origin in Scandinavia and only a few settled on British Isles? Or is number of tested just a result of fewer men tested on the British Isles? Or is it just a matter of the size of family generated by A3 and A4?” I would be inclined to say that your last option (differences in family size) is at least a sufficient explanation for the difference in the number of testers between the two main branches of the tree (which we could call the Värmland-Hedmark branch and the Norman-Norwegian branch, respectively). That’s enough to explain what we observe in the data. Whether a branch become big or small (or even dies out) is very much a random think. Statisticians refer to the stochastic process that gives rise to this kind of tree a Galton-Watson process. Francis Watson (incidentally, Darwin’s first cousin) was interested in the likelihood that aristocratic surnames would become extinct. See this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process But the number of testers in different geographical regions could also potentially play a role. Another issue is I have actively tested people so that I could put them in the tree, and I have tested only people that I suspected belong to the Värmland-Hedmark cluster. However, I don’t think I or you or anyone else have managed to make more people do the Y37 test. And the number of testers with an Y37 and belong to the V-H cluster is very large. Probably that is due to that family being large.

• “Do you know the earliest given ancestors to the branches R-FGC54216* and R-FGC62342?” No, I’m afraid not. But I think those two branches and the other ones around them are part of the Bryan(t) project. Therefore, if I’m right about that, the likely geography of the oldest known ancestors should be either the USA or the British Isles.

Johan

1/6/2022 11:44:46 am

I couldn't include the screenshot I mentioned in the comments section. Instead I have now put it in an edited version of the blog post itself.

The VHC Blog

December 2021 Issue of the Newsletter

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Johan N. M. Lagerlöf

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