How Y-DNA Testing Transforms Genealogy Research

Añadido: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]My name is Bennett Greenspan.

[00:00:01]I've been a genealogist since I was a boy.

[00:00:04]If anyone here would like to see what a young boy's genealogical chart looks like, this is what it looks like.

[00:00:11]Or this is what it looked like in 1965 when my grandmother died.

[00:00:17]We all went to the cemetery, and when we left the cemetery and went back to my parents house that night, a whole bunch of relatives came over.

[00:00:26]I was a 13 year old kid, and I went to all the relatives with the funny accents and started asking them all about their genealogy.

[00:00:35]And so it wasn't, you know, sacrosanct.

[00:00:38]You can see right here that someone said, "Well, I know that she died in 1896 and she was 39."

[00:00:44]And so they ciphered backwards and figured out when she was born and just wrote it on there.

[00:00:48]And when we made a mistake with the name, we'd just crossed them out.

[00:00:51]Nothing special about that.

[00:00:53]But what was special to me was genealogy itself.

[00:00:58]Through the miracles of a website called highschoolyearbooks.com, I'm able to show you what that little genealogist at age 13 actually looked like back then.

[00:01:11]Now, there aren't many people that would show their 13 year old junior high picture, but I guess us genealogists have no shame.

[00:01:20]So let me just give you a little backdrop on me.

[00:01:26]I owned a photographic supply company.

[00:01:29]Y'all remember photographic supplies?

[00:01:31]Those were the things you put inside cameras and took pictures of people.

[00:01:35]We don't do that anymore.

[00:01:36]I saw that coming in 1996.

[00:01:40]And so I sold my photographic supply company in early 1997. And one day my wife came home with me being "semi-retired", and she said, "Well, I just came home from the grocery store.

[00:01:54]Would you mind bringing in the groceries?"

[00:01:57]"No, dear, I would be thrilled to bring in the groceries."

[00:02:00]So I did, and I took the groceries out of the bags, and I put them on the countertop and I said, "Would you like me to put them away?"

[00:02:08]And she said, "Well, if you want to."

[00:02:09]So I opened up the cupboard and I found a disorganized, discombobulated mess.

[00:02:17]The whole peeled tomatoes were on one shelf, the spaghetti sauce was on another, the spaghetti was on yet another.

[00:02:23]I couldn't find the tomato paste.

[00:02:25]I said, "Dear, would you like me to reorganize your cupboard?"

[00:02:28]Now for the men in the audience, I'm going to tell you now that is not a smart thing to say.

[00:02:33]So my wife looked at me, in the way that only a loving, adorning wife can and said, "You need to go and learn how to play golf. Or you need to go pick up your genealogy, but you need to get out of my kitchen," which I did tail between legs.

[00:02:52]I said to her, "Where's that genealogy?"

[00:02:55]She said, "It's in the study, in the white cabinet, bottom shelf in the back."

[00:03:01]And so I went and picked it up.

[00:03:03]I looked through it and saw that there was one line that I hadn't touched at all.

[00:03:09]It was my mother's mothers fathers line, and so it took me about three weeks to find the descendants of the immigrant ancestor.

[00:03:19]In other words, my great grandfather's, six children, of which my grandmother was one.

[00:03:28]I found the descendants of all of those other five lines, and I learned everything I could about them.

[00:03:38]I made a genealogical tree.

[00:03:40]I went and I mailed an 1117 that I had printed out at Kinko's to all the relatives, just because it seemed like the right thing to do.

[00:03:50]And then I entered the name, which was N-I-T-Z, into a database, and I found someone in Buenos Aires searching for the name Nitz.

[00:04:01]And interestingly, they claim to come from the same village that my grandmother was born in, but everyone from that generation by then had died.

[00:04:11]We had no knowledge of relatives in Argentina.

[00:04:16]They had a rumor, a story, that they had relatives in America.

[00:04:21]But, you know, frankly, if you had moved to Argentina and had lived through their inflation and their political conflagrations, you would probably claim that you had relatives in the United States as well.

[00:04:33]So I was looking for that piece of paper that would tie us together with the people in Argentina, and I wasn't able to find it.

[00:04:44]Another paper trail roadblock.

[00:04:47]So the question is, "What was I going to do about that?"

[00:04:51]Well, I just put my head down and kind of cried in my beer, so to speak, because I didn't have a solution to the problem.

[00:04:58]And then in August of 1999, I went outside to walk our dog.

[00:05:04]I tend to take long walks, maybe an hour.

[00:05:07]And so late, late at night in August of 1999, I took one of those walks.

[00:05:13]And as I was walking, a little light went off in my head.

[00:05:17]I remembered that there had been a study just the previous year about the Jefferson family, where they had purportedly tied The Jefferson Families Y chromosome to Thomas Jefferson's wife's half sister's child.

[00:05:40]That would have been Sally Hemings's male child, who had a male child, who had a male child, who was available for testing, and a guy named Mark Jobling from University College London, maybe had done a study and he had found a genetic overlap, or connection, between that descendant of Sally Hemings's son and between some of the Jefferson's from the Monticello Society.

[00:06:11]So I said, "Well, why can't I do that?

[00:06:14]Why can't I use the male inherited Y-chromosome to prove that my cousin in California Nitz is related to these people in Buenos Aires?"

[00:06:25]So I went home.

[00:06:27]I read the articles about the Jefferson study.

[00:06:31]I found that there had been another study that had been done.

[00:06:35]That was the study on the Cohanim.

[00:06:37]Those are descendants of Aaron, the biblical brother of Moses.

[00:06:42]They retain within the Jewish religion, the priestly clan.

[00:06:47]And it's passed down through oral tradition from father to son, and son to grandson, the same way the Y-chromosome is passed down.

[00:06:55]So I said, "Well, if I can just find someplace that's selling these DNA tests on that Y-chromosome I could get— I need two. One from my cousin in Argentina, (potential cousin) and one for my real cousin out in California."

[00:07:10]Well, I couldn't find anything on the internet, so I called the author of one of those studies, Dr. Michael Hamer from the University of Arizona.

[00:07:20]And I asked him, "Can I buy a couple of kits from you to prove this?"

[00:07:26]And he said, "Well, we don't do it for consumer purposes.

[00:07:30]We use this for archeological and anthropological studies.

[00:07:35]And I said, "Well, would it work if I found someone that could sell me a Y-DNA test?"

[00:07:41]And he said, "Well, sure, it would work. But I don't know of anyone selling this kind of test anywhere in the world." So, I didn't know what to say.

[00:07:54]And those of you that know me, know that I am rarely at a loss for words.

[00:08:00]But I had no idea what to come back to him with.

[00:08:05]And so I just— And I didn't say anything for maybe 10 or 12 seconds.

[00:08:14]The phone was very eerily silent.

[00:08:18]And then he broke and he said, "You know, somebody should start a company like this because I get phone calls from crazy genealogists like you all the time."

[00:08:30]And I said, "Dr. Hammer, I don't mean to rush you off the phone, but I'm going to write a business plan this weekend and tell you what I would do if I, as a genealogist, had an opportunity to run a company such as this."

[00:08:41]And I got off the phone and I found my wife, and I said, "I know what I'm doing in my next career."

[00:08:48]And she said, "Well, what's that?

[00:08:49]You know, you've been home a year."

[00:08:51]And I said, "I'm going to sell DNA test to genealogists."

[00:08:55]And she just kind of rolled her eyes and just kept walking.

[00:09:04]Let me tell you what we're going to talk about today.

[00:09:06]First, I'm going to show you a very short primer on anthrogenetics.

[00:09:10]We're going to talk about using FamilyTreeDNA's Big Y in conjunction with leads from my Y-DNA match list, to create my own "lineage network."

[00:09:23]We're going to try to answer the question, "Can molecular biology provide any hard evidence from beyond the timeline?"

[00:09:32]Where my ancestors came from, and when?

[00:09:36]And we're going to have a liberal use of displaying parts of my own Y-DNA tree.

[00:09:48]So for those of you that have been involved in biology in college, or have learned some DNA over the last years, we have 23 pairs of chromosomes.

[00:10:03]The first 22 pairs are the autosomes.

[00:10:07]So who's gotten a test, one of those autosomal tests?

[00:10:10]So almost all of you from, you know, FamilyTreeDNA or Ancestry or MyHeritage.

[00:10:15]All those companies sell the autosomal tests.

[00:10:20]With that, we look at the DNA that you got from your mom and your dad.

[00:10:25]You can get the percentage tests and it can match you in such a way that sex doesn't matter.

[00:10:33]Doesn't matter if you trying to match a man to a woman using autosomal.

[00:10:38]But those aren't the rules that we employ for the Y-chromosome, or for the mitochondria for that matter.

[00:10:45]Here is your 23rd pair.

[00:10:47]It includes the small, demure Y-chromosome, by the way, according to Doctor Hamer, who I've become quite close with over the years, he tells me that the only advantages of having a Y-chromosome is that it conveys the "Sunday Sports" gene and the "Clicker" gene, but beyond that, half our population seems to live very, very well without having a Y-chromosome.

[00:11:10]So it's not a requirement of life.

[00:11:12]It may be a requirement of ego, but certainly not life itself.

[00:11:17]So what we're going to be talking about is this Y-chromosome, which is passed down from father to son, and son to grandson, in the same way that the Y-chromosome was passed from a Jefferson male to Sally Hemings's son, who passed it on to his son, who passed it on to his son.

[00:11:40]And let me show you what that looks like.

[00:11:45]My great-grandfather's Y-chromosome would have been passed to my grandfather, who would have passed it to my dad, who would have passed it to me, but not to my sister.

[00:11:55]Mitochondria, which comes from the mother, is passed down from my great-grandmother to her daughter, to her daughter, to my sister and to me.

[00:12:06]So that means that the mitochondria, guys, from your mother was passed to you.

[00:12:13]And the Y-chromosome from your father was passed to you.

[00:12:17]Now, let me take you through a few terms that will make this a little bit easier.

[00:12:23]Have you heard the term SNP? S-N-P?

[00:12:26]That's a single nucleotide change, or polymorphism.

[00:12:32]Our genome is made up of some billions of A-C-G-T (nucleotides) and all those chromosomes.

[00:12:42]Those 23 pairs of chromosomes are made up of A-C-G-A-T-A-G-A-Cs.

[00:12:48]But when one of those letters mutates and changes from, let's say, a T to a C, it persists that way forever, seemingly.

[00:12:59]And we can use that as kind of an anchor post to create a what's called a "phylogeny", which is a theoretical construct of how evolution has taken place within a species.

[00:13:15]So, for example, men have a phylogeny on their Y-chromosome.

[00:13:20]I'm going to show you that in a minute.

[00:13:22]But so does a rat. And so does a plant.

[00:13:27]So does rice.

[00:13:28]So if we want to see how closely Middle Eastern rice is to Chinese rice, we would run a sequencing test on both of those species of rice and compare them.

[00:13:43]And then once we know approximately how long it takes for a mutation to build up, we could get an idea that these two rice's diverged a million years ago, 100,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago.

[00:13:57]And we're using the same technology to determine how far more men are from each other.

[00:14:06]So your name might be Smith.

[00:14:08]You might match another man named Smith.

[00:14:11]But we don't know how long ago you and this other Smith actually shared a common male ancestor.

[00:14:18]But as genealogists, we think that's really important.

[00:14:22]We want to know how long ago we were related to another individual who shared our surname.

[00:14:30]Well, that's what we're going to be talking about today, and I hope you'll be able to hear me over this other microphone that seems to be competing with me for your attention.

[00:14:41]What I did is I created a "Lineage Group Project."

[00:14:44]The way a Lineage Group Project works is you look for people.

[00:14:48]It's like a surname project, except the surname project only goes back as far as the surname.

[00:14:54]And most people didn't have names 300 years.

[00:14:58]If you happen to be in England, you may have had surnames for 1,000 or 1,500 years, but even those eventually taper off and you might have been just known, as you know, "John the Butcher's Son."

[00:15:13]And that was your name.

[00:15:15]That's how they knew you in the village.

[00:15:17]Eventually, European governments realized that if they could assign us, not our given names of a first name, but, if they could assign us surnames that they could be able to do two very important things.

[00:15:35]Anybody know what those are?

[00:15:38]Tax you.

[00:15:39]That's exactly right.

[00:15:40]They could and they could draft you.

[00:15:42]So if if they knew who you are, they could come back and they could grab you and, and it would be much more difficult for you to make up a story to either the tax collector or the or the military officer who was coming and looking for recruits.

[00:16:00]So beyond this, I'd like to talk to you before we get into the exciting stuff about a couple of concepts.

[00:16:09]Who here has heard the term Occam's Razor?

[00:16:13]Okay, so basically what Occam's Razor says is the simplest solution is generally the correct solution.

[00:16:22]For example, I live in Houston, Texas.

[00:16:25]How did I get here from Houston, Texas?

[00:16:28]Well, there are several choices. I could have driven a car.

[00:16:34]I could have gotten on an airplane and flown from Houston to Denver, and then from Denver to Salt Lake.

[00:16:41]I could have flown from Houston, maybe up to Chicago, because that's a hub of United.

[00:16:47]And then they would take me all the way out directly to Salt Lake.

[00:16:50]Or I could have just gotten on the airplane in Houston and flown directly to Salt Lake.

[00:16:55]That certainly would have been the simplest solution.

[00:16:59]That's, in fact, how I came and how I'll return to Houston today.

[00:17:04]Also, during the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, people didn't move very much.

[00:17:10]There was nothing like I live in New York.

[00:17:12]But, you know, I was on a business trip.

[00:17:14]I met this girl from California. No, no no, no.

[00:17:17]You might find you might meet a girl who lived five kilometers from you.

[00:17:22]And depending upon circumstances, you might have moved to her's or his village.

[00:17:28]But generally, your DNA didn't spread very much over the time and over the centuries.

[00:17:38]Now, this is a phylogeny, a theoretical construct of how evolution has taken place, within the male.

[00:17:45]So all the males in this room fall somewhere on this tree.

[00:17:50]And we can actually give you a haplogroup, which is a branch of the tree of mankind.

[00:17:57]You can see it's numbered from A to T, and there's some geographical specificity here, which means (it's a fancy way of saying that) if I know your haplogroup, I know the approximate part of the world that your DNA came from or that you actually came from.

[00:18:15]We'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment.

[00:18:20]This is kind of long, and I need to put my glasses on for this, but basically this says that with conventional genealogy, we trace back our oldest ancestor, focusing on when and where they lived and hopefully what village they came from.

[00:18:36]DNA has helped me quite a bit, allowing to show that my Nitz cousin in California actually was related to that fellow in Argentina.

[00:18:47]However, it doesn't tell me how long ago we were related.

[00:18:52]It only tells me, in a binary sense, that we were related.

[00:18:57]But that's changing.

[00:18:58]And the reason that's changing is because we have a product that FamilyTreeDNA called the Big Y.

[00:19:04]The Big Y sequence is about 25 million bases on your Y chromosome, and then matches you up to everyone else in the FamilyTreeDNA database that has similar, that has a similar genome to you on the Y chromosome, meaning that if I have a mutation at a particular place, if you're related to me, you're going to have that same mutation at that same location.

[00:19:31]And population geneticists can estimate how long ago those mutations occurred: 200, 400, 1,000, 5,000 years ago, so that we can get a good idea of how closely related you are.

[00:19:49]Because as genealogists, the first thing we want to know is, "Are you related?"

[00:19:54]And then we want to know, "when you're related," so that we can draw a family tree and we can enjoy, you know, celebrating that we found someone who were related to and when we're related.

[00:20:08]So we'll go on to this next slide.

[00:20:11]This, I mentioned earlier, there's geographical specificity.

[00:20:15]So if I know that your haplogroup N, for example, I know that you're probably from Finland. And if not from Finland, you're from the northern, northern part of Russia.

[00:20:28]If you are a J, you're probably from the Middle East, the Saudi Peninsula, what we used to call (or still call perhaps) the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia. Those people are J's.

[00:20:42]If you are a G, you probably come from what used to be called Soviet Georgia. (The country of Georgia, not the state of Georgia.)

[00:20:51]And if you're a Q, you're probably from Central Asia.

[00:20:59]Although, one branch of Q actually migrated out of Central Asia, maybe 14,000-18,000 years ago.

[00:21:08]And so we find one distinct lineage of Q in the Americas among Native Americans.

[00:21:16]Just a few more. Haplogroup T, which is a "bit player," it's found at very, very low percentages in populations in Middle East. Seems to be, not only from the Fertile Crescent, it seems to be at its apex.

[00:21:30]In other words, it's most commonly found in far northern Lebanon.

[00:21:38]Now we're going to get into some of the fun stuff.

[00:21:42]J-FT1 defines my final SNP, my terminal SNP group, that shared with my son and my brother.

[00:21:52]Okay. So here you have me, my son, and my brother.

[00:21:58]So that's all I knew of my Greenspan line up until about six years ago.

[00:22:06]I have no relatives on the planet named Greenspan.

[00:22:10]Now, that's not for lack of trying.

[00:22:13]I mean, I started a DNA company, for God's sakes.

[00:22:16]I was given out, you know, a DNA test to every Greenspan I could find.

[00:22:20]You know who I could find, someone to help hold him down while I scraped the inside of his cheek.

[00:22:26]And I got 70 people named Greenspan to do a DNA test.

[00:22:33]How many of them do y'all think I was related to?

[00:22:37]That's right. None.

[00:22:38]Not one.

[00:22:39]I gave 70 kits away, and all I found were Greenspan's that had the same last name as me, but were not related to me.

[00:22:48]Talk about frustration.

[00:22:50]There was a lot of frustration there because I held out so much hope that I had finally found, you know, someone that would connect with me.

[00:22:59]Unfortunately, that wasn't the case until about seven years ago.

[00:23:04]I was asked to speak at an adoptees conference.

[00:23:09]Adoptees are wildly using DNA testing because they're trying to reconnect with family.

[00:23:15]So as a quid pro quo for me, flying up to somewhere in the northeast and speaking, they let me have a little table.

[00:23:26]I put my FamilyTreeDNA banner out front, and I had my kits, and some guy comes by and says, "We used to be Greenspans, but we changed our name to Greene."

[00:23:39]I said, "Well, la-di-da! Maybe you should— maybe you're related to me.

[00:23:44]Why don't you do a DNA test?"

[00:23:45]He goes, "How much does it cost?"

[00:23:48]Well, I'd been given these kits away, but this guy kind of seemed like a little "smart aleck" a little bit.

[00:23:53]So I said, "Well, you know, it's like $169."

[00:23:56]He goes, "Oh my God, $169!"

[00:24:00]I said, "I'll tell you what. You come back the last day of the conference.

[00:24:04]I'll see if I have any kits left, and maybe we'll negotiate a little bit."

[00:24:07]So the next day he comes down with this kind of grin on his face and says, "I don't need to do one of your tests.

[00:24:16]My brother already tested." And I said, "He did?"

[00:24:19]And he says, "Yep, right here.

[00:24:21]Here's his National Geographic Society certificate."

[00:24:24]And I smiled because our company had the contract and was doing all the DNA testing for the National Geographic Society from 2005 to 2014.

[00:24:36]And so I looked at his results and I said, "Well, you know, it looks kind of similar to mine, but maybe we need to upgrade your sample a little bit."

[00:24:48]So we talked to his brother, got his permission.

[00:24:51]He transferred his results from National Geographic to the FamilyTreeDNA database.

[00:24:57]Then I could figure out, you know, if we had more DNA from him in our storage facility, which we did.

[00:25:05]And I ran him, and, you know, just, there was no smoking gun.

[00:25:12]I mean, he was as close as the closest other Greenspan, which wasn't that close to me.

[00:25:18]And so I was frustrated.

[00:25:22]Eventually our company came out with a Big Y test, and we quickly tested him.

[00:25:28]And I found that STRs, short tandem repeats, are reliable, but they're not totally reliable.

[00:25:37]In other words, they can bounce around a little bit.

[00:25:40]That 15 can go up to a 16, it can go down to a 14.

[00:25:46]And so, I knew he was kind of close, but I didn't feel like he was close enough to be, for me to consider him a real Greenspan.

[00:25:54]So when the Big Y came out, we tested him with the Big Y.

[00:25:59]And surprise, surprise, while my family was right here, his family was right here.

[00:26:06]And the system automatically builds your family tree.

[00:26:11]So I can see that my family all shared this mutation in common.

[00:26:17]His family ultimately shared this mutation in common, but both of us shared this mutation in common, which meant that somewhere between 1760 and 1800, we in fact did share a common male ancestor.

[00:26:34]I had found my Greenspan relatives who had changed their name, and I had genetics to prove it.

[00:26:41]So we didn't know where we were from, because my great-grandfather came to the United States running from the "long arm of the czar," and he had been here about 20 years, developed tuberculosis, and died at the age of 44.

[00:26:56]And that's about as much as we knew about him, until, I found these Greenes.

[00:27:04]Now these Greenes are living in Scotland.

[00:27:08]This Greene lives in New York City.

[00:27:10]I guess they ended up going to Scotland, and were going to come on to America, and either found the weather so compelling or couldn't scrape together enough dollars to pay for a ship passage to the United States.

[00:27:23]So they ended up staying in Scotland.

[00:27:26]Matters not.

[00:27:27]What really mattered was that we shared that mutation in common, which was the proof that we genealogists consider sacrosanct.

[00:27:38]I had it. And that was a very, very empowering moment.

[00:27:43]I remember that very, very well, and I'll never forget it, because I had looked and looked and looked for my Greenspan ancestor for decades without any success.

[00:27:56]Now, there's one other interesting piece on here.

[00:27:59]There's this guy named Berel Harold.

[00:28:02]He has no knowledge of a Greenspan ancestry.

[00:28:06]None whatsoever.

[00:28:08]But he comes from the same mutation that appears to have taken place around 1760.

[00:28:15]Well, interestingly, if you know much history of Eastern Europe, somewhere between 1750 and 1810, everybody in Eastern Europe was forced to do what had been done in Western Europe a little bit earlier, which was to take on surnames.

[00:28:35]We've already talked about why the governments wanted us to take on surnames.

[00:28:39]Lots of times people would simply come up with elaborate stories for, you know, to hide their relatives who the government wanted to draft, like, "Oh, this guy died."

[00:28:52]Well, if you had a first name and a last name, it was much more difficult for that individual to be able to hide in the village.

[00:29:00]So I figure that this fellow was on one side of that edict.

[00:29:07]"You must take on a surname."

[00:29:09]And these guys were on the other side.

[00:29:12]In other words, they shared a common surname.

[00:29:15]The reason they shared a common surname is that there was one guy and he was assigned that name in the village.

[00:29:22]This guy may have lived in another village, was assigned a different surname.

[00:29:26]And so even though genetically they're very close, you would have no way of knowing that they were related if it wasn't for, you know, if it wasn't for the DNA.

[00:29:39]Now, I started a little late this morning because I didn't have a full house, and so I'm running a little late, so I'm going to have to move this along a little bit.

[00:29:48]What we did is we went up and I looked at the previous mutation.

[00:29:53]Everyone down here and these two guys share that mutation right there.

[00:29:59]And what I found is that those two guys didn't live in Ukraine.

[00:30:04]They lived in Poland.

[00:30:05]And we were able to date that particular mutation to the late 1500s.

[00:30:11]So from my 1760 here, we're back to the late 1800s.

[00:30:18]And I was even able to go one more mutation up the tree.

[00:30:23]I'm not tall enough to get there, but it points to an individual from Slovakia.

[00:30:29]So from that I was able to draw a migration map for my family, showing that in the 1800s we're here in the in the Yalta peninsula area.

[00:30:41]If you go back to the 1700s, we're much closer to a city called Kyiv.

[00:30:47]If you go back to the 1500s, we were up here, in Poland.

[00:30:53]And then if you go back to the early 1500s or late 1400s, we were down here in Slovakia.

[00:31:01]And this is based on a man who lives in Slovakia today, who's a distant, distant relative of mine, who says our family always lived in Slovakia. Which is another way of saying of saying that he had no clue before Slovakia where his family may have come from.

[00:31:18]But you can see the migration because we're following the SNPs.

[00:31:23]We're following the genetic markers from here, to here, over to here, and down to here.

[00:31:30]So pretty exciting. But it even gets better.

[00:31:36]Not only did we match this guy from here, and here's my Slovakian cousin here, the two Polish descendants, but they all come back to a mutation that took place in the early 1400s that unifies this guy, this line and this whole lineage over here.

[00:32:01]You can imagine where we're going because that's the 1200s.

[00:32:05]That's the 800s.

[00:32:06]And over here it's about 200 CE.

[00:32:10]Let me show you how we get there.

[00:32:13]So what FamilyTreeDNA does is they show you on your Big Y page, a little map that gives you an idea of how many people are in the database who share a particular mutation.

[00:32:30]So this mutation right here is shared with ten people. Seven of which are from the Ukraine, two of which are from Poland, and one came from Slovakia.

[00:32:41]Well, that's as of about 1550.

[00:32:44]If we go back, one more mutation to about 1450, you can see that the number of people in Ukraine has gone from seven to nine.

[00:32:55]We have people in Belarus, which is kind of just over the border from Poland or from Ukraine.

[00:33:02]Here's the people from Poland.

[00:33:03]And they had spread out to a couple of other Eastern European countries.

[00:33:08]If we go back one more mutation, we come back to 1200.

[00:33:13]Well we have a surprise. Because people that were related to back that far not only come from Ukraine, not only come from Belarus and a couple other countries, but we've got all these German relatives that we never knew we had.

[00:33:28]Let's go back one step further.

[00:33:30]Let's go back to 800 and let's see what we have.

[00:33:33]The pattern is continuing.

[00:33:35]We still have people in Ukraine.

[00:33:37]We've got more people now in Germany.

[00:33:42]We have people in Poland and then other Eastern European countries.

[00:33:46]So what I'm getting an idea of is that at one time the family was in Germany, but their descendants moved eastward and they moved towards Ukraine and towards Poland.

[00:33:59]Well, we can play this game even further.

[00:34:01]We can go back one more.

[00:34:03]And here's where I had the shock.

[00:34:05]Not only do we have lots of people in the Ukraine, and lots of people in Germany, but all of a sudden, as of 200 CE, it says if we go back to 200 CE, we have a lot of relatives who came from Spain.

[00:34:19]This is like, unimaginable from everything I know about my recent ancestry.

[00:34:27]But arguably 200 CE is not recent ancestry.

[00:34:31]We're going way beyond the timeline, way beyond anyone's oral, memory or when things were written down about folks.

[00:34:42]But we have DNA as an irrefutable piece of truth.

[00:34:48]And so we're following that truth set.

[00:34:50]Let me go one more.

[00:34:52]Let's see what happens here.

[00:34:54]So here is a look at the Spanish branch of the family.

[00:35:00]Remember we have this Central and Eastern European branch of the family.

[00:35:04]And then we have this branch and this branch which breaks in here.

[00:35:10]And so what's interesting is that these guys, this is Spain.

[00:35:15]That's Spain that's cut off. This guy came from Spain, but he knows that his family left Spain because there was this thing called the Inquisition in 1492, and his family was kicked out of Spain, and they ended up going to Amsterdam.

[00:35:32]This whole branch, which is dated at somewhere around 1260, this whole branch is found in Central or Eastern Europe today, which means it's a family that likely left Spain sometime between the 1300s and the 1500s.

[00:35:53]There's good historical evidence and reasons why they left Spain.

[00:35:58]The fact is, they did.

[00:35:59]But then there was this other branch here, and they stayed in Spain.

[00:36:04]The only one who didn't is this guy who went to Holland and then ended up in the island of Curaçao, which was what they called the ABC Islands, which were controlled by the Dutch.

[00:36:16]That would be Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao.

[00:36:19]So I think I can go back one more.

[00:36:23]Here's another branch of that Spanish family, and you can look Spain, Spain, doesn't know where it came from, Spain, Spain, this individual right here who shares a common ancestor in about 1300 with this other Spanish guy.

[00:36:41]He's from Bulgaria.

[00:36:43]Bulgaria is one of the sites that that Jews went to after they were kicked out of Spain in 1492.

[00:36:50]It wasn't just Turkey and Morocco, but it was also Bulgaria.

[00:36:57]Well, we found a guy from Bulgaria.

[00:37:00]Here's a guy whose family went to Turkey, and here's a guy, a cousin of his from back around the 1100s who stayed in Spain.

[00:37:11]All of these guys stayed in Spain or went to one of the South American countries, have lived as Catholics for 500 years and had absolutely no knowledge that that if we went back a thousand years ago, they were actually ethnic Jews.

[00:37:29]So I thought that was pretty interesting.

[00:37:32]Kind of rocked my world a little bit.

[00:37:36]So, in this study, I focused on the where and the when solely through the father's direct mail line and where the paper trail doesn't exist.

[00:37:47]I cautiously try to substitute any evidence gleaned from the Y chromosome mutation dates, combined with my distant cousin's knowledge of the villages that they came from.

[00:38:02]So it's not just a matter of if we're related, it's where we were related and when we were related.

[00:38:12]And everyone can do this now, I just I have a friend in Houston, Texas.

[00:38:17]His name is Schreiber.

[00:38:19]And so he took a Big Y test.

[00:38:22]He matched one man named Schreiber, the common ancestor predicted at 1270.

[00:38:30]And so these guys have been writers or have been copiers, as evidenced by their surname.

[00:38:39]And now they know they share a common male ancestor 750 years ago.

[00:38:44]And you can't do this without interrogating the history book that's written into each of our cells.

[00:38:57]A few statistics on my project.

[00:39:02]Of the 170 men I match at FamilyTreeDNA at the Y-37 level, I've convinced, pushed, begged, or paid for myself 130 of them who have agreed to do this. In branch one, which I'm from, there are 78 members and we have 52 of those mutations.

[00:39:24]And on the Spanish branch there's 48 members.

[00:39:28]Of which there are 40 unique mutations.

[00:39:35]Now, one thing I found that was interesting, but maybe a little disturbing, is that we did a DNA test on my son's father in law.

[00:39:49]Okay?

[00:39:49]My son's wife's dad.

[00:39:53]He's in this branch.

[00:39:55]I'm in this branch.

[00:39:57]Our common ancestor was about 200 CE, so it's not like there's, you know, it's not like it's too close.

[00:40:04]But it's a very unusual historical anecdote that I can share with you.

[00:40:13]And so, "How did I do this?"

[00:40:15]Well, first of all, FamilyTreeDNA provides you with the list of all your matches, and their email addresses.

[00:40:24]I started at the Y-37.

[00:40:28]From there, I sent out emails to all these folks who were on my list.

[00:40:35]I tried to establish credibility.

[00:40:38]I told them who I was, I sent a picture of me.

[00:40:42]I sent them my cell phone number, and I said, "Call me, because all I want to do is talk about how we are related.

[00:40:50]When you send out those letters to recruit people, not many people are going to reply.

[00:40:56]If you send out the letter a week later, you will get more replies, because a lot of people look at emails and they're busy and they just skip over them.

[00:41:05]But once they get it again, it kind of acts as a memory jogger.

[00:41:08]And I send out those letters four times a year, and I just keep sending to people until they write me back and say, "Don't send me anything," or they write me back and they say, (which is more common) "Tell me about this.

[00:41:24]What are you doing?

[00:41:24]I didn't read it very carefully."

[00:41:27]So as I say, repeat it monthly or quarterly.

[00:41:32]Once you've tested so many people that when you test a new person, if he always attaches to an existing node, you've probably hit critical mass and you don't need to, you know, keep testing within your project anymore.

[00:41:48]And that's kind of where I am.

[00:41:50]I haven't put a new node on the tree, probably for the last ten or 15 samples that I've gotten in.

[00:41:58]So I've gone from 110 to 130 and haven't gotten any new SNP data.

[00:42:04]Everybody's fit onto an existing SNP, so I've probably reached critical mass.

[00:42:09]If someone contacts me and says, "well, I'm sorry I didn't get back to you when you sent me those 49,000 emails.

[00:42:18]I'd like to do it."

[00:42:20]I'm inclined to to work with them, but scientifically, we don't need them anymore.

[00:42:27]We've squeezed as much interesting information out of the Y chromosome as possible.

[00:42:32]If you look at your FamilyTreeDNA page, you'll see your Y-DNA match list.

[00:42:38]You can just click on anyone's name.

[00:42:40]It'll open a little sub window.

[00:42:43]There'll be an email address there.

[00:42:45]You can copy that email address and add it to your, to your list of people that you're trying to recruit who haven't responded to you yet, to, send them out an email. And to accomplish all of these things, all it takes is a swab.

[00:43:04]And with that, I end my presentation for today.

[00:43:07]I'm heading for the airport real quick, but I'll be happy to take a question or two.