To: pike-dna@rootsweb.com
Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 08:57:28 -0230 (NDT)
From: dapike@math.mun.ca (David Pike)
Subject: [PIKE-DNA] Recent Test Results (Msg 2 of 3)


In this, the second email about our project's recent test results,
I want to describe another two results.

The first of these two is for kit 87744, a cousin of Georgia Schoelz.
The 25-marker test results are a perfect match with several of the
members of our project's "Group 2", which so far only includes Pikes
with ancestral ties to the town of Carbonear, Newfoundland.  Pedigree
information for Georgia's Pike line is now shown on our project's
website, which I'll note here hails from Francis & Jane Pike of
Carbonear, where Francis died in 1835 (he was born about 1760).
Francis & Jane's grandson Captain Jimmy Pike and subsequently
Jimmy's daughter Mary and her family lived in "the Pike house"
on Pike's Lane in Carbonear.  It was in their garden that the
gravestown for John & Juliana Pike was (and still is) located.
The stone, now rather eroded and hard to read clearly, states
that John died in 1753 at the age of 63 [or at least I think
that's what it says]... I have a webpage for this stone at:
http://www.math.mun.ca/~dapike/family_history/pike/CemPix/CarbPikesLane/

Meanwhile, back to Francis & Jane, their daughter Julia Pike got
married to another fellow named Francis Pike, also from Carbonear.
We do not yet have a DNA sample from a descendant of Julia's husband,
but with the results from Georgia's cousin we are now half-way
to solving a long-standing question:  were Julia and her husband
Francis related in some way?  Carbonear records prior to 1800
are practically non-existent, so without DNA testing the answer
to this question would most likely be lost to time.

The other of the recent results that I want to discuss in this email
is for Johnathan (kit 63479) who has a genealogical paper-trail that
goes back to James Pike of Charlestown and Reading, Massachusetts.
James' family comprises our project's "Group 6", which I mentioned
in an earlier email is presenting us with a puzzle on account of
several mis-matching results.  Johnathan's DNA results have given
us another piece of this puzzle, but there still remains something
of a mystery here because Johnathan's DNA did not clearly match
with any of the other 3 people with paper-trails that also go
back to James.

To elaborate a little bit, within "Group 6", Johnathan's 12
markers are closest to those of Gilbert (kit 62731), but between
them they differ on 3 of the 12 markers, which is enough to doubt
that they are indeed kin.  The situation we face with James' family
is that it remains unclear what is really going on.  It is looking
more and more as if there is at least one instance of a mistake
in traditional genealogy, but the bottom line here is that we will
need to wait for more test results from other descendants of
James to figure things out.

Meanwhile, however, there is something noteworthy about
Johnathan's DNA.  He has a somewhat unusual marker combination
for the two components of marker DYS-385.  The vast majority
of people have two different marker values for parts (a) and (b),
but Johnathan's two values are both 11.  This raises the possibility
that a peculariar mutation might have happened in his ancestral
line.  Technically, this type of mutation, which can only happen
with markers that have multiple copies (that is, they have
components, (a), (b), etc) is called a "recombinant loss of
heterozygosity" or "recLOH" mutation.  In lay terms, what it
means is that sometimes one of the copies of the marker will be
outright replaced by a duplicate of another copy.  So, for example,
the DYS-385(a) component might duplicate itself and completely
eliminate the DYS-385(b) component.  When this happens, what we
end up detecting in the DNA is that both the (a) and (b) copies
are the same, such as is the case with Johnathan.  So it could be
that in some previous generation in Johnathan's line, the DYS-385
marker was once 11-X (where X could have been pretty much anything)
and then it became 11-11 as the result of a recLOH mutation.
If that X was a 14, then the original 12-marker signature for
Johnathan's line would actually be a perfect match with the very
common Western Atlantic Modal Haplotype (WAMH) that we've also run
across a few times in our project.

As yet though, we really do not know if a recLOH mutation has or
has not occurred in Johnathan's ancestral line, but this too is
something that we should be able to gain some insight about as
more Pikes who trace themselves back to James come forward and
join our project, especially those who descend from Ezra Pike
who settled at Isle LaMotte, Vermont around 1790 (these Pikes
would likely be the most helpful in clarifying whether or not
it is a recLOH mutation that we're seeing in Johnathan's DNA).

- David.

PS:  This morning there appears to be something not quite right
with the web server that hosts our project, so I want to mention
an alternative URL for our project:
http://www.cs.mun.ca/~dapike/family_history/pike/DNA/
This URL will access the site via the web server for the
Computer Science Department at Memorial University, on which
my personal website from the Math Dept web server is mirrored.