Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2015 12:40:00 -0230 (NDT)
From: David Pike 
To: pike-dna-l@rootsweb.com
Subject: Pike project news



Hi everybody.

It's been about nine months since the last email bulletin for our project. 
Clearly I haven't been able to maintain the same level of frequency for 
writing updates as I used to.  As for why, it's largely due to the many 
competing demands for my time that come from my job, from my role as 
President of the Family History Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, from 
family crises, etc.  And retirement is still about 20 years away.



Anyway, let's try to catch up a bit, first with a feature that Family Tree 
DNA has made available to each project.  As part of a new look to how they 
display projects on their website, they have given each project an 
"activity feed" that has a social media feel.  Ours can be viewed here: 
https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/pike/activity-feed

This gives us a great way to come together, post queries, provide answers, 
share photos and family stories, etc.



FTDNA also displays the Y-DNA and mtDNA results for our project on the 
FTDNA website, but I still direct people to our own page where we have 
organised people into genetic family groups and have also tried to provide 
some additional details when possible: 
http://www.math.mun.ca/~dapike/family_history/pike/DNA/index.php?content=results.html 
People may have experienced some trouble accessing this page in the past 
several months.  There is a bug somewhere in one/some of the servers, 
which has sporadically resulted in access to the page being forbidden. 
The bad news is that this bug still has not been found (so a fix is still 
not in sight).  The good news is that when it happens, it usually only 
lasts for a few minutes, so if you click "reload" after a few minutes then 
the webpage is likely to load just fine.  This issue is affecting my 
entire website, so trust me when I say that it has been a source of 
frustration for me.



Another item on my list of things to mention is that there is an 
ever-growing collection of resources to help people educate themselves 
about various aspects of genetic genealogy.  Maurice Gleeson has been 
actively recording DNA presentations and putting them online at 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcPhbETNSaXAb0I_yMGqHYg and 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HQSiSkiy7ujlkgQER1FYw and 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnW2NAfPIA2KUipZ_PlUlw

There are also several books now on the market, many of which are listed 
here: http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Genetic_genealogy_books  Those by Richard 
Hill, David Dowell and Emily Aulicino are probably good starting points, 
although I confess that I haven't actually read their books myself (but I 
have met each of these authors at FTDNA's annual conference for project 
administrators).

There are also a number of online blogs that continue to be useful, such 
as http://dna-explained.com/ and http://www.thegeneticgenealogist.com/ and 
http://genealem-geneticgenealogy.blogspot.ca/



Okay, so turning to developments with our project, there are seven new 
results since our last email bulletin, of which I'll mention a few in this 
message.

Chronologically, kit 356132 is the first of these new results.  As yet 
though, this participant in our project remains anonymous and has not 
provided lineage details for our website.  So for the time being all that 
can really be said is that he tested 67 markers and was found to be a 
strong match with our "Group 11".  This group now as three members in it, 
the other two of whom can trace their Pike lineages back to Virginia in 
the early 1800s.



Next are kits 364447 and 365488, both of whom are also anonymous.  They 
each tested 37 markers, and although they do not match each other, I have 
placed them both into our "Group 17".  Kit 364447 is a strong match with 
Wayne (kit 131347), whereas kit 365488 is a strong match with the majority 
of the members of "Group 17".  To clarify a bit, in Group 17 we now have 
eleven participants (including 365488) who all match each other very 
closely, and then two others (Wayne and 364447) who stand apart from these 
eleven.  On paper, Wayne traces back to some of the same ancestors as the 
other members of Group 17, which is why we've included his results in this 
group.  That is, there is a familial connection, although the DNA results 
are telling us that that something is not as we would at first expect. 
As it happens, Wayne's father was born as a Pike but was subsequently 
raised by an adoptive family.  With these two latest test results, it 
appears that what may have happened is that Wayne's father likely took his 
original Pike surname from his mother, who may have been unwed at the 
time.  So while there is indeed a Pike family connection, the Y chromosome 
that Wayne carries would have come from his biological grandfather, who 
evidently wasn't a Pike male.



Another new result is for kit 381062 (also anonymous), who tested 37 
markers.  However, his closest matches within our project are not close at 
all:  there are 14 or more differences between their results and those of 
kit 381062.  So for now, 381062 as been placed into our collection of 
Ungrouped results.



As I said, there are other new results, but rather than try to detail them 
all at once, I'll save the rest for a future email message, one that I 
will try to not be so tardy about writing.



I do, however, want to say a few words about the "Big Y" test.  As a 
reminder, it analyses SNPs (the type of marker that is used for defining 
haplogroups and their subgroups).  The test's coverage is on the order of 
10 million SNPs on the Y chromosome, and I believe it has the power to 
identify how branches of a family tree fit together, even in the absence 
of historical records.  As wonderful as this is, the downside is that the 
test remains sufficiently costly that only a handful of our project 
members have taken it:  so far only 5 have received test results:  two in 
"Group 1", one in "Group 2" and two in "Group 20".  Below I'll discuss 
those in "Group 1", which are for Roger (70909) and Larry (129135).

Roger and Larry both descend from John Pike who settled in Massachusetts 
in 1635.  In particular, Roger descends from John's son Robert, and Larry 
descends from John's son John.  Previous SNP testing by descendants of 
John Senior has confirmed that the family's major haplogroup is R1a 
(although a developing trend appears to be to simply say "R" and not 
immediately refer to the R1a subgroup of R).  Moreover, the SNP named L664 
had previously been found to be present.  The present state of knowledge 
is that the L664 SNP is used to define the subgroup R1a1a1a, which is 4 
branches beneath R1a in the current ISOGG SNP Tree: 
http://www.isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_HapgrpR.html  Again, referring to trends, 
the lengthy letter-number-letter-etc notation is being phased out, and a 
designation such as R-L664 is becoming more widespread (here it refers to 
the subgroup of haplogroup R that is defined by the SNP named L664).

The SNP named L664 is one that FTDNA discovered a few years ago.  To use 
some of the wording that is used when they describe the results of "Big Y" 
tests, it is a "known" SNP.  That is, it's one that has been previously 
discovered and named.  In contrast, SNPs that are newly discovered when 
people do the "Big Y" test, namely those that have not yet been studied 
and named, are termed "novel".

Roger's "Big Y" test results reported a total of 36,286 "known" SNPs that 
were detected on his Y chromosome.  Some of these match those of the 
standard reference that is used and others differ from it.  Among those 
that differ is L664, which is reported as being "Derived" (i.e., it is not 
the same as the root of the human Y SNP tree) and so it corresponds to a 
branching point in the tree.  In this case it's a branching point that has 
previously been identified and placed onto the Y SNP Tree.  As it happens, 
Larry also has 36,286 "known" SNPs, which makes sense:  we would expect 
that Larry and Roger would have identical values for each SNP that 
pre-dates their common ancestor John, and as yet there aren't any "known" 
SNPs that are particular to only some of John's descendants.

But that's where we start to look at the "novel" SNPs.  Roger has 148 (of 
which 146 are reported with "High" confidence while 2 have "Medium" 
confidence) whereas Larry has 140 (137 "High" and 3 "Medium").  Tools to 
work with these SNP results are still emerging, but one thing that we are 
able to determine with relative ease is that Larry and Roger have 128 
"novel" SNPs in common with each other.  Some of these 128 SNPs that Larry 
and Roger have in common may pre-date the L664 SNP, in which case they are 
ancient SNPs that simply had not been previously discovered.  Others of 
the 128 may have arisen after L664 came into being, but prior to the 
adoption of the Pike surname by the family, in which case they are SNPs 
that all Pikes in Group 1 should carry.  And then there are those that 
arose after the Pike name came into use, including those that arose after 
the birth of John who settled in Massachusetts in 1635.  It is these SNPs 
that are really interesting to us for genealogy, for they are SNPs that 
truly mark branches within the Pike family tree, and only people in those 
branches should carry those SNPs.

Now comes the hard part:  identifying just what those SNPs are, and then 
trying to determine what branching points in the tree they each correspond 
to.  This is where a lot of work remains to be done on several fronts. 
On the one hand, the tools to compare and analyse these test results are 
still being developed.  For instance, just identifying the 20 novel SNPs 
that Roger has but Larry doesn't (and the 12 SNPs that Larry has but Roger 
does not) is not yet automated by FTDNA.  These very SNPs are the ones 
with greatest potential to correspond to branches within the Pike tree, 
along the line from John to Roger (and separately, along the line from 
John to Larry).  Note that Larry and Roger are each eleven generations 
after John, so at first glance it looks as though there may be (on 
average) about one or two new SNPs arising with each individual birth. 
If this is so, then there is some real genealogical power to be had from 
the Big Y test.


- David.