A Guide for creating and understanding your
ANCESTRAL PATTERN
Suitable for amateur genealogists and DNA project administrators seeking to identify common factors in family tree members, which may not be identifiable through other methods, this guide provides a brief description of the parameters that can be effectively applied. It gives step-by-step instructions on how to create your own ancestral pattern, or that for your sample, in a way that is easy to follow, with screen shots and descriptive texts that will help to avoid mistakes.
This is a © copyright document written by Nick Austin, distribution other than with the consent of the copyright owner or under license is an offence under international copyright convention.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes v2
First published 12th December 2009
Landscape Studios, Crowhurst, East Sussex TN33 9BY
For personal use of the purchaser
All rights are reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in full or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or any other form and it shall not, by way of trade, or otherwise be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the written permission of the copyright owners.
OGMIUM PRESS
INDEX
Summary of achievable
objectives
The Principles
The
Modal
How to create your own
Ancestral Pattern
Formatting
Processing
Comparing
30 samples
Appendix
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SUMMARY OF EXERCISE and
ACHIEVABLE OBJECTIVES
Ancestral Pattern is a different way of looking at results from genetic testing in human beings. It is a valuable tool in understanding what we are looking at when we see a row of 37 or more numbers displayed across a page, or certificate, after conducting a test to track your ancestors. It is a doorway which we are just going through and expect it will produce many surprises as more and more people understand what it means.
Your Ancestral Pattern or those of the people you administer in your database, is the pattern that each individual carries with them in their Y-DNA and passes on to their offspring. This pattern is family specific since it is inherited. The convention held up until this point has claimed that Y-DNA markers, used by genetic testing companies to produce a “trace your ancestors” type test, called DYS markers, have values that mutate up and down in a completely random way.
This is because when those who have done DNA studies of large databases of DNA look at the values of the markers in those databases they do appear to change in a completely random way. However this is not the case, and I shall demonstrate this shortly. Understanding that these mutations are not random opens the door to many people who have until now met a brick wall in their genetic family research.
Perhaps the average person will not benefit greatly from creating their own Ancestral Pattern, but it will provide insight that has hitherto been missing from DNA family research. Those who are adopted may be able to identify a pattern belonging to their genetic family, which whilst it will not identify the father in a forensic way, may allow the ability for other research to close the gap. Those who wish to know where their family came from prior to the compilation of Census data (appx. 1800AD in most countries) may also be able to identify those who would be shortlisted as possible family members long before that date. Those who suspect connections in historical research, but cannot identify which route to follow, will find the study of Ancestral Pattern a means of narrowing the gap. Lastly, those who are interested in history can use the concept of Ancestral Pattern to identify the path of human development, working the pattern back to its roots. We all know that we are ultimately related to one common ancestor - Ancestral Pattern can open the door to understanding who we are and where we came from.
Ancestral Pattern is carried in a family from father to son in the unchanged part of Y chromosome – its study is the study of individuals, using the observable fact that this part of the DNA mutates according to a set of rules. Those rules are currently not known in absolute terms, but are solid enough to publish. What we can see, if we look at populations as a whole, is what appears to be random movement of markers. If we take my surname AUSTIN and look at the database of Austins held by the Austin/Austen organisation of North America, there is an extensive table of people who have the Austin surname.
This database information can be displayed with the marker details along the top, with the samples detailed in rows in a simple format:
This is a good example of where Ancestral Pattern can assist database administrators and family researchers alike. The Austins of America currently have an unknown patriarch who arrived in the USA, like many American families, very shortly after the first pilgrims arrived on that shore. This Austin American family genetic lineage has developed since 1620, when the Pilgrim Fathers arrived, mostly out of the same stock. It should therefore be easy to identify which branch of the family is which. However, as family researchers know, this is not an easy task, because the DNA appears, in this format, to be random.
However, once the principles of Ancestral Pattern are applied to the whole database of Austins, and a few simple processes are applied, we get the following Austin Family Ancestral Pattern:
Some of these people are from known genetic relations, but some are not. The Family Ancestral Pattern is an actual pattern identified by the red and blue markers of each of the database entries. This pattern on this page suggests two different sources with the top half appearing to originate from one ancestor and the bottom half originating from another, with a few who may possibly not originate from Austins at all.
Austin research is complicated by the fact that the Austin name has changed in the past from Austen to Austin and despite the origins being identified by Victorian experts as coming from Augustinian monks, this is probably not wholly correct. There may be at least two, or even three sources to the name. This may well explain the differences between the three sections of Austins in this display. Finding your nearest match first requires you to identify those who match your Ancestral Pattern and then to locate the nearest match from the numbers displayed in each cell.
If, on the other hand, we look at another family, for instance Adams, using data from the public database known as Y-search, we see a very different family pattern:
In
this instance three of the markers identify the family samples with
the other red markers identifying individual strands. You will also
notice that all but one of the samples is null on one of the markers,
effectively making a fourth identifiable strand against any other
samples.
In order to understand what we are looking at it is
important to first understand the underlying principles of Ancestral
Pattern.
The concept behind Ancestral Pattern is explained in simple terms along the following lines:
Each male human being produces a Y chromosome that is passed from one generation to the next. A small section of this chromosome, which does not change, is used by DNA testing companies. The markers in this section of the Y-DNA are passed on to the offspring unaltered and can therefore be used to track your genetic history. However, occasionally markers appear to mutate. The word “mutate” has been used in the past, because the mechanism for change has not been identified. Strictly speaking it is not a mutation, but an alteration believed to be produced by the copying process failing to copy correctly. I shall however continue to use the word mutation, because this is the term most people use when understanding the change in values that occasionally happens. This document therefore refers to this section of the Y-DNA using the colloquial expression Y-DNA.
It has been assumed that these so called mutations were random and that values moved up or down, because when viewing the whole population this is an observed effect. This is now shown not to be correct in relation to the individual. If markers moved up or down upon a random basis, they would not form a pattern that was identifiable by family. They would change like markers in the population as a whole and produce no apparent patterns.
Patterns are produced that show the markers are in fact moving in unison across up to 67 markers at a time. Even more interesting to some readers will be the fact that large-scale analysis of sections of the genetic database, who have one specific anomaly, such as the recently found L21 marker, can be identified by their own pattern irrespective of the name of the family. As an example, L21 is I believe the marker that identifies the path of the development of an early branch of the Celts. The work I am doing appears to confirm that these Celts were born out of one man in 600BC in Villengen in Germany. The identifying pattern is clearly visible, even though there are countless hundreds of families, each with their own identifying pattern incorporated into the structure of the spreadsheet, where every line is a family pattern, as seen here:
Individuals who have the identifying markers jump out of the screen when presented in this manner, but may not be identified from a family group of any specific surname or geographic locality. This is an incredibly useful research tool for those involved in seeking to find the historical path of human development and migration from our genetic fingerprint.
The conclusion from this observation is that all markers appear to behave in a manner that suggests a predetermined function of their structure. The observed mutations appear to mutate in the direction that the markers last mutated. This is a rule that is not too difficult for the common man to understand. i.e. you got your Y-DNA from you father and his father since the beginning of Man on earth. Each time your Y-DNA mutates it does so in the direction that your father’s Y-DNA mutated – a character of inheritance. That direction can be up or down depending upon how they were received.
As an example, in a 200 generation period the marker called DYS391 may have had a value of DYS391=14. It may get passed to your distant unnamed relative as DYS391=13 and remain at that value until your father passed it to you whereupon you received it at the mutated value of DYS391=12. Eventually you will pass that marker to your genetic sons who will one day pass the same marker on at a value of DYS391=11