To: pike-dna-l@rootsweb.com
Date: Tue,  2 Jan 2007 11:25:25 -0330 (NST)
From: dapike@math.mun.ca (David Pike)
Subject: [PIKE-DNA] Exciting New Results


Hi everybody.

I'm back home after having spent Christmas week away with
family.  Beginning about 2 weeks ago, our latest set of test
results began to come back from the lab.

To describe them a little bit, let me start off with kit 61273,
which came back with a haplogroup prediction of J2.  This is only
our project's second J2 result.  However, with 6 differences
(on 25 markers) when compared to Thomas (24941), who was our first
J2 result, it appears that this latest result is for yet another
different Pike family line.  The number of genetically distinct
(meaning unrelated) Pike family lines that we've now found is up
to 22.

The other two recent results are for kits 74703 (Jerry) and
61276, both of which had 25 markers tested, and both of which
came back matching our project's "Group 1" as shown on our Results page at
http://www.math.mun.ca/~dapike/family_history/pike/DNA/index.php?content=results.html
What is exciting is that neither was expected beforehand to match
with Group 1 (or with anybody else in particular either).

Kit 61276's participant has traced his ancestry back to a Noah Pike
who was born in Maine or Massachusetts in the late 1700s.  Of particular
interest with the DNA results though is that kit 61276 came back with a
mutation not yet seen elsewhere in our Group 1.  If the mutation originated
several generations ago, then there may be hope that we will eventually come
across some others who share it.  My real hope is that we'll be able to take
advantage of mutations like this to distinguish the _branches_ of what is
turning out to be a very large and extended Pike family tree for our Group 1.

Jerry (kit 74703) also fits into "Group 1" and he too has a mutation that is
so far unique to him.  Jerry's Pike ancestors spent the past several hundred
years in Cork, Ireland, having come there from Newbury, Berkshire in the
early 1600s with Cromwell's army.  What this means for the Pike family that
"Group 1" represents is that the family has very old origins... we already
knew this from earlier test results, from descendants of John Pike who
emigrated from Wiltshire to Massachusetts in 1635.  But Jerry's results
tell us that there must be even earlier origins than just the 1600s, since
we now have genealogical evidence of two branches of the family tree that
had separated from each other by the early 1600s.

With 2006 have now drawn to a close, let me also take a moment to say a
few words about the status of our project.  We currently have 60 participants
in our project, for whom we have received test results for 50 (for the other
10, the lab is analysing the results for a few, while the other kits are
somewhere in transit between FamilyTreeDNA and the participants).  With
50 test results, we've now identified 22 distinct family lines.  One of these
is our "Group 1" with 17 people in it.  Another 17 people have no matches at
all within our project.  The rest of the results fall into six other groups
of matching results.

A few weeks ago I sent out an email conveying news of some coupons that
FamilyTreeDNA gave to us.  I'm happy to report that we were able to use
all 4 of the Y-DNA coupons.  We were also able to take advantage of several
of the donations to our project's Sponsorship Fund to help recruit additional
new participants... right now our fund has a balance of $94 (of which $40
is already committed), so we are close to exhausting the available support.
Anybody who might wish to help replenish our fund can do so from this link:
http://www.familytreedna.com/contribution.html

On another note, readers of the Family Chronicle magazine
(see http://www.familychronicle.com ) will notice that the February 2007
issue contains an article by Edwin Knights about DNA.  It briefly showcases
five DNA projects, one of which is our Pike project.  The information is by
now a bit outdated though, as I emailed Edwin with our details back in
July, literally from the hotel room that I was staying in while attending
the Pike Family Reunion in Colorado Springs.  And speaking of the
reunion, of the 12 DNA collection kits that were distributed there, 6 have
since been put to use and have been returned to FamilyTreeDNA with DNA
samples (of these six, 1 is currently being analysed by the lab, while the
other 5 turned out to be from 4 genetically different Pike family lines).

In summary, 2006 was a great year for our project, and I look forward to 2007
being equally rewarding.  And with that, let me wish everybody a happy new year.

- David.

PS.  I think that I've managed now to change the configuration settings for
this mailing list, so that the default will be that replies to messages will
(hopefully) be sent privately rather than to the entire mailing list.