DNA and surname study
APTurner
Brian Sykes, a geneticist at Oxford, conducted a study on
Y-chromosomes from a sample of people with his own surname and found
many who shared the same markers. The technical article appears in
the American Journal of Human Genetics, April 2000, p 1417. Here's
a summary from Reuters.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000404/sc/science_surnames_1.html
aptu...@aol.com (APTurner)
Charles
Thank you for posting this. It is something I think I want to do in
my family one of these days.... to try to figure out my "same-name"
problem! luv, chas
APTurner
Bryan Sykes now has a web site http://www.oxfordancestors.com. He
is currently offering mitochondrial DNA analysis; Y-chromosome
analysis will be available later.
aptu...@aol.com (APTurner)
APTurner
Stan Goodman
On Thu, 1 Jan 1970 01:59:59, aptu...@aol.com (APTurner) wrote:
>
> Bryan Sykes now has a web site http://www.oxfordancestors.com. He
> is currently offering mitochondrial DNA analysis; Y-chromosome
> analysis will be available later.
It's a very interesting idea, although (from the map on the site) it
is mostly concerned with family distribution within the UK.
A good name for the project would have been "OxFam". Unfortunate
that it has alreadt been grabbed.
--
Stan Goodman, Qiryat Tiv'on, Israel
See my interactive family tree (requires Java 1.1.6 or better):
http://www.hashkedim.com
PLEASE NOTE: Please remove the "NOSPAM" to reply.
gen...@NOSPAMhashkedim.com (Stan Goodman)
Stan Goodman
Lesley Robertson
Greetings, and I hope you're both over your virus....
since your absence, the s.g.methods posts have started arriving in
duplicate - is it me, or has the group developed an echo?
Lesley Robertson
[ My apologies! In trying to set up the group for Andrew and Tim to
moderate, I introduced a bug that caused duplicate posts to the
newsgroup (but not to the GENMTD-L mailing list).
I've fixed that bug now. Sorry about the inconvenience! -Mod ]
Lesley Robertson <l.a.ro...@stm.tudelft.nl>
APTurner
gen...@NOSPAMhashkedim.com (Stan Goodman) writes:
>> Bryan Sykes now has a web site http://www.oxfordancestors.com. He
>> is currently offering mitochondrial DNA analysis; Y-chromosome
>> analysis will be available later.
>
>It's a very interesting idea, although (from the map on the site) it
>is mostly concerned with family distribution within the UK.
Yes, but if they give you the actual Y-chromosome "profile," then
any ethnic or surname association could build its own database. I've
seen references to upcoming databases for African-American and
Jewish migration routes.
aptu...@aol.com (APTurner)
William Mills
APTurner <aptu...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>I viewed the article in the April 2000 issue of Am J Human Genetics
>page 1417. One statement caught my eye "Although a few surnames are
>very common in any population, surveys in Britain and Switzerland
>have shown that MOST PEOPLE HAVE AN UNCOMMON SURNAME [emphasis
>added]. 'Sykes' is typical of indigenous English surnames, in being
>of low overall frequency but have marked local concentrations..."
>
>I suspect the USA might not show such an effect of local
>concentrations, but I wonder if the statement "most people have an
>uncommon surname" would still be true.
It depends on what you mean by uncommon. From the 6-million+ name
sample of the 1990 census <http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names>
the top 500 surnames account for 35.2% of the population. The 500th
most common surname in the sample is Atkins, with 0.023% of the
sample. The top 1000 surnames account for 43.4% of the population,
with the 100th surname, Vang, representing just 0.012%. People
named Smith, the most common surname in the US, make up 1.006% of
the sample.
So over 56% of people in the US have a surname less common than Vang
and over 64% have a surname less common than Atkins. However, some
of the less common surnames don't sound particularly rare: Dougherty
and Andersen at 1022 and 1023, Samuels and Denton at 1214 and 1215,
for example.
Bill
bi...@Stanford.EDU (William Mills)