dna

[William Ewing]

Hi American cousins, hope everyone is well, I am just back from a lovely holiday in the Canaries and thought there would have been at least two or three messages from the group, disappointed; not to worry.

Help; I am totally bewildered by all these results I have received from my dna, according to them I must have proportionately literally thousands of relations in the USA. (assuming most of the results are from the USA) I am a Scots lad whose ancestors came from Ireland around about 1810. and I would be really interested in contacting some of the individuals who are dna cousins. If we are connected as the dna suggests wouldn't it be to our advantage to collaborate information. EG My gggg Grandfather was from Tyrone in Ireland he had a son Samuel a soldier who died in the Napoleonic wars. My gg Grandfather Mathew ( an orphan) then left Ireland with his uncle Robert and came to Muirkirk in Scotland. Is there any information similar with mine which ties in with dna results.

[Martin Ewing]

Hi, William,

Yes, the Y-DNA results are generally confusing to us non-specialists. Fortunately,
we have our Chancellor, David, to guide the interpretation, although correlating
genetics with genealogy seems to be more of an art than a science.

Do you know what your "group number" is and your 2 or 3-letter id code? We can judge
our cousinhood a little better if we know. (I am MS in group 1*.)

My earliest known Ewing (Noble) was born in the US around 1783, but we don't know his
parentage and so can't tie into any of the groups with known genealogy.

I had an interesting research "find" recently. Noble's widow applied for a US
pension on the basis of his military service in the War of 1812. The law providing
for pensions was passed in the 1870's, and she applied at age 90 for it. After an
incredible amount of paperwork, she received her pension of $8 per month and (the
valuable part, I think) a warrant for 160 acres of "bounty land".

In the course of the application, there was a letter from her son explaining that the
widow (Miriam) had, in a period of insanity, torn up the family history records in
the 1850's. What an unpleasant revelation for us genealogists!

(If anyone is interested in what these pension applications look like, I am happy to
share the PDF file.)

Best regards,
Martin

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Martin Ewing
m.e...@snet.net
+1-203-315-5160

[David Ewing]

William Ewing writes asking about relatives in the Ewing Surname Y-DNA Project. He is WS in Group 2* and his results can be compared with others in Group 2 by going to
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/Group2_ResultsTable.pdf

As you can see, WS very nearly matches the Group 2 modal, differing by only one step at CDYa. Furthermore, since the Group 2 modal differs from the Group 1 modal by only one step at DYS 391, WS is only genetic distance 2 from the Group 1 modal. FTDNA reports "matches" based only on genetic distance, so WS "matches" about half the men in the project (and a goodly number in other surname projects, depending on what genetic distance you want to count as a "match"). We have estimated that the common ancestor of all of the men in the large closely related group of Ewings (including WS) lived about 500 years ago. This is interesting, but not too informative for genealogic purposes because essentially none of our conventional records go back that far. There is a really terrific article by Thor Ewing that will appear in the forthcoming February issue of the Ewing Family Journal on where this common ancestor may have been living.

Martin says, "correlating genetics with genealogy seems to be more of an art than a science." This is not really true, but trying to explain the science to "non-specialists" REALLY IS more of an art than a science, and I guess I am not all that good at it. I gave it what I thought was a really good try in Y-DNA Article #18. Any interested person who is willing to spend a couple of hours reading and studying that article and the five references listed there (the whole business only amounts to maybe 15 pages) will understand way more about what counts as an interesting match. You can find Article #18 at
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/Ewing_Y-DNA_Article18.pdf

The bottom line is that on the basis of Y-DNA results alone, WS is equally likely to be related to any of the men in Ewing Group 2 (except those in Group 2a), and even though he may be at closer genetic distance to some of the men in Group 1 than he is to some of the men in Group 2, he is almost certainly more closely related to all of the men in Group 2 than to any of the men in Group 1. There are other considerations, though, such as the place of origin of his earliest known ancestor. We have recently had a new man join the project, Michael Douglas Ewing (MD), who also traces his ancestry to Tyrone. We only have 12-marker results on him so far, and I won't add them to the Results Table until I have all 37 markers, but he will also fall into Group 2*. You can see the lineage he provided at
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/Lineages/MD_Michael%20Douglas%20Ewing.pdf

Warm Regards,

David Neal Ewing

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[William Ewing]

Hi Group

Hope everyone is well, the weather is terrible over here in Scotland. Would you believe it; I received info today I have another match, that's 116 so far, absolutely incredible. Where are they all? Family Tree telling me I have all these close matches. It's confusing me more and more.

Is there realy a connection between them all? are they all members of the Ewing Family Association.  

Very confused

William Ewing

[David Ewing]

Hello, everyone.

Really, the question is what does "match" mean? And the problem is that it means a lot of different things. Family Tree DNA gives participants options about what sort of "matches" they want to see. You can choose to see only matches with men of your same surname or with all of the men in their data base. You can choose to ignore matches on the shorter marker panels, as I have done with 12-marker matches, because they are basically useless. For the rest of this email, let's just talk about 37-marker matches.

FTDNA reports not only exact matches, but also "matches" with men up to genetic distance four on the 37-marker panel, which means that they are still calling it a "match" if you match at only 33 of the 37 markers. I actually count 120 "matches" on William's FTDNA Results page, but this includes many different partial matches at both the 25-marker and 37-marker levels. What is more, many of the men shown as 25-marker matches are also shown as 37-marker matches, and these are counted twice in the total. In fact, he has no exact 37-marker matches; he has four 36/37 marker matches; twelve 35/37 matches; twenty-seven 34/37 matches; and, sixteen 34/37 matches.

What does it mean to have a perfect 37-marker match? According to the FTDNA "TIP" report (which you can get by clicking on the little icon to the right of your matches), a perfect 37/37 marker match means that there is an

83.49% chance of a common ancestor in the last four generations
97.28% chance of a common ancestor in the last eight generations
99.55% chance of a common ancestor in the last twelve generations

If you have a 34/37 match, the corresponding numbers are

3.38% chance of a common ancestor in the last four generations
24.48%...eight generations
54.32%...twelve generations
77.29%...sixteen generations
90.18%...twenty generations
96.16%...twenty-four generations

But consider that I (DN) have a perfect 37/37 match with GW and we know from our conventional genealogies that we do NOT have a common ancestor in at least the last nine generations. This "prior knowledge" changes the calculation, so that we have

83.49% chance of a common ancestor in the last twelve generations
97.28%...sixteen generations
99.55%...twenty generations

All of the Ewings in the closely related group (Groups 1 & 2) have lots and lots of matches, because there are a lot of us and all of us have a common ancestor who probably lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, something like fifteen generations ago. Ulster Scots are doggone lucky if we can work out our conventional genealogies back as far as seven or eight generations. You can see that the results we get from genetic distance give us high levels of confidence only at a much deeper time scale than that. This is why I have said again and again that getting our panties in a knot over genetic distance and FTDNA "matches" is a big mistake. This is not how the Y-DNA project is going to help us with genealogy. Instead, it is going to help us when we correlate conventional genealogy with Y-DNA results and when we pursue "off-modal matches," which will help us work out relationships among branches of the family. Genetic distance cannot do this.

Again, let me recommend that every interested person read and study
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/Ewing_Y-DNA_Article18.pdf
and the five references listed there, including
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/ModalHaplotypesDiscussion.pdf
While you are at it, have a quick look at
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/GD-BarDiagram.pdf
which will show you how we divided our participants into groups based on genetic distance--the men in Groups 3, 4 & 5 are not related to those in Groups 1 & 2 in anything like a genealogic time frame, though those in Group 3 probably have a common ancestor with those in Groups 1 & 2 a thousand years ago, those in Group 4 probably have a common ancestor with Groups 1, 2 & 3 several thousand years ago, and those in Group 5 probably have a common ancestor with the others maybe thirty thousand years ago. You can learn even more about how the Groups are constituted by reading
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/Results_Intro.pdf

And William, you can figure out who among your matches is in the Ewing Project by going to your personal page on FTDNA and limiting match results to members of the Project. You can also go to our webpage,
http://www.ewingfamilyassociation.org/DNA_Project/index_Y-DNA.html
click on the "Results Directory" link at the top right of the page, and access the conventional lineages of nearly every participant in the project. The men you are most likely to be closely related to are all in Group 2, and their results can be seen in a very tidy table at
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/Group2_ResultsTable.pdf
which is also accessible from the Results Directory, as are all of our Results Tables and Relationship Diagrams, and a wealth of other information.

Warm Regards,

David Neal Ewing

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