DNA almost perfect match (General)

by Richard Hulan , Friday, June 22, 2012, 17:21 (4541 days ago) @ admin

There have been several references to the "appreciation" threads about the late David Watkins as a form of tribute to his leadership. I agree that that has been consistently excellent; although I joined recently, and had almost no direct personal interaction with him, I have used the archived messages here, and any number of linked sites and tools. This is a truly useful site, and he deserves a world of credit for getting it up and running -- from West Australia.

One of the uses to which it could still be put, as David proposed a bit over three years ago (in this thread), would be as the gathering mechanism for a Forest of Dean Y-DNA project. This type project is typically associated with a surname. It often uses Y-DNA to sort the several lines that share a name, especially a common one (such as Smith, Brown, Johnson) that must represent a great many founders -- each of whose direct male-line descendants would visibly group together, in such a project. There are also large and useful projects organized by haplogroups (typically for deeper and somewhat more anthropological study of related populations), and organized by geography (as would be the case with a Forest of Dean project) for groups of surnames having a considerable degree of shared family history.

Since I am personally interested in a Forest of Dean family (Hulin, of St. Briavels and vicinity), I have hoped that such a project would be set up. My preference would be for the American company, Family Tree DNA (FTDNA), because it has a very large database of tested persons whose male lines are from the British Isles. But DNA is DNA, and the project could be based somewhere else, with genealogical comparisons possible as long as the records are accessible by the public. This is not the case with a number of companies; nor with specific privately funded projects such as the People of the British Isles (currently working with autosomal DNA rather than Y-DNA), or the Genographic Project (which has a huge database, but of lightly tested samples given with a promise of anonymity -- making them virtually useless for genealogists).

Speaking of the People of the British Isles project: if any of you will be in London between July 3-8 (rather soon, at this writing), that project will have a display at the Royal Society's "Summer Science Exhibition," on the topic of Genetic Maps. The Forest of Dean population was specifically targeted in this large project (over 4,000 samples of DNA from British rural dwellers, all four of whose grandparents were born in the same area). This is a work still in progress, although most of the samples have been taken. I believe they are currently drawing samples in Yorkshire, and photographing the faces of the people who have already been sampled. Here is a large scale preview of the genetic map of the UK they have been drawing:

http://sse.royalsociety.org/2012/exhibits/genetic-maps/

Wouldn't you like to know what the dark blue color stands for, on that map? I would. Somebody, please go see the exhibition, talk to the people staffing it, pick up their literature, take digital photos of their captions -- and share that with the rest of us.