How wide do you cast your net?

[Alexander Bisset]

True but it depends on the scope you set yourself. My advise is if you COMPLETELY IGNORE the Guild of One Name Studies, which seems to be an exercise in making money for little/no return, then you simply set your own goals. There is nothing to say that you can't start simply be recording what you have in specific villages. If you take the attitude that if you come across more info for your surname that you will add it without specifically tracking down that info you gradually build up a better picture without formally engaging in a one name study.

My own ONS is almost entirely geographically restricted to NE Scotland. I am well aware of significant centres of my surname elsewhere but I choose to focus on one area for now. If I followed the Guild of One Name Studies or worse subscribed to them I'd be bound to doing a worldwide project which I simply don't have the time for, and to be blunt have little interest in pursuing. So I'm not suggesting that you fully embark on a ONS but instead that to further the Y-DNA project you keep an open mind on any surname data you come across as it is likely to be useful to the Y-DNA in future.

The project of course with Y-DNA is that it tends to be a terribly static field. After the initial burst of info once you take the test yourself it fairly soon settles down to a waiting game almost entirely reliant on others taking the test. Whilst you can encourage others to take the test it can be a long slow process as sadly many people are suspicious of motives etc. Meantime you can be picking up snippets of info that may help in future when you get more testers. The frustrating thing about Y-DNA testing is that even when someone new tests and you've waited the seemingly endless process of awaiting the results they can very frequently be disappointingly inconclusive. Which often leads to chasing paper trails trying to find a link even supposing the person testing has actually done sufficient research of their own.

So I'm not suggesting a full ONS only keeping hold of extra snippets of info during the endless waiting periods Y-DNA research typically involves. You never know adding extra bits of info may well turn up a link to another person who can take the test.

 

[peter]

There is nothing to say that you can't start simply be recording what you have in specific villages.

I do family reconstitution as a matter of course if I'm going through parish registers on microfilm, but only DNA can tell me whether the connection I'm looking for actually exists.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Indeed Y-DNA can tell you a connection exists, however it cannot tell you how it exists or where the variation occurred without testing lots of individuals who have long since died. It's like knowing the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. It still doesn't help if you don't know what the actual question is. Y-DNA is a guide to possible links, you still need paper records, sadly though just as often people find that actually they aren't a "insert surname here" actually they are a "insert non paternal event x great grandfather's surname here".

DNA is at best an aid to research it is however far too blunt a tool as short of having a universal database as it is essentially an extremely watered down version of the Lost Cousins matching system. With the Lost Cousins matching you are entering data and require others to enter but you can enter hundreds or thousands from multiple lines and so can make lots of matches when others from that line enter their hundreds/thousands of people. With Y-DNA its the same sort of waiting for others to test rather than enter data to a website except you are dealing with a dramatically smaller sample size of a handful of individuals on only one line.

Red said last week 1 in 10 entries on Lost Cousins made a match. With Y-DNA its nearer 1 in 100,000 or one in a million will match, even less when you consider the data is spread across multiple companies and often the people testing don't know or don't give any info on their line. So you have to chase down other candidates you do find from paper records and get them to test (and of course agree to pay to test) and that takes ages. Joe and myself have got 27 males to test for the Bisset DNA project over the last 8 years and only 6 of those have a vaguely close match to my & Joe's line. Sadly it's a long slow process, initial excitement yes, longer term a disappointing waiting game.

I had that excitement when Joe the first tester and myself the second actually matched and quite close match only 1 variant in 37 with the same surname there's a 99.99% chance we are related but despite extensive paper info we have no match going back at least as far as 1684 so are stuck. Of the others that are relatively close matches one traces lineage to Edinburgh area 200 miles away but is a close match another hasn't provided any info on their tree so you wonder why they bother testing in the first place, and the other two are from known paper records in Joe's line but vary more from him than I do. All very inconclusive and that's with a reasonable 27 people tested. Some that are known (paper records) males in my line turned out to have radically different Y-DNA. Similar story from the one individual who was known to be from the historic branch that can trace back to 11th century that stayed in NE Scotland again radically different result.

 

[peter]

Alexander, it's likely that the aim of your project is different from mine. I'm trying to determine the origins of my surname, so I'm not particularly worried about who the common male line ancestor is - for the purposes of my project all I really need to know is whether there is one within in the past 600-700 years, ie since ordinary people started acquiring surnames. If it's possible to identify where the connection is, that would be great, but in most cases it won't be.

If the parish registers for Suffolk ever become available online then it will become more practical to research using records, but the key events are likely to be in the 14th and 15th centuries, before parish registers began, so DNA will still be key.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

I can understand you have different objectives. I'm just not sure how DNA can show you the "origins of my surname" unless you have paper records to say where the ancestors of the people who have tested came from. If the info you have from DNA testing has revealed a geographical component I wasn't previously aware of I'd be interested to know more. At present I'm just stumped as to how you can hone in on a geographical area without reference to paper records.

 

[peter]

It's fairly straightforward: for the purposes of my project there are three types of Y-DNA matches: matches with people who have the same surname, matches with people who don't have the same surname as a result of a NPE, and matches with people who don't have the same surname because the shared male ancestor was before the surname existed. It's the third type of match that will tend to indicate the geographical origins. Since the surname is thought to have originated in either Suffolk/Norfolk or Derbyshire it should be fairly easy to determine which it is.