Miscellaneous Welsh Odds and Ends

[msmarjoribanks]

I'm going to post this here, because there is a some Welsh-related content, and because I always check in hoping there are posts here.

We were talking in the FTDNA forum about Big-Y, and both rms2 and JonikW inspired me to try to track down some testers.

I have my matches pretty well sorted into groups (as an American with a good bit of colonial ancestry I have a ton of matches, including reasonably close ones). The goal here is to find matches on my Y-DNA line (surname, sigh, Jones) who I can approach about the benefits of Y testing. I only have the line back to Shropshire, but it could be Welsh and also border area so I'm not convinced it really matters what side of the current border they started on anyway. As I mentioned in the FTDNA thread, we have the line back into the early 1700s (a cousin of mine who is actually a reliable researcher has it back further but I need to check her sources).

My dad's closest Y match is predicted to match my dad about 77% in 8 generations, 95% in 12. (I realize these aren't super reliable.) They aren't surname matches, but that doesn't bother me because Jones, plus the match has a likely NPE in the early 1800s.

I went back to my prior efforts to find likely matches more distant than those of us descended from my gg-grandfather who came to the US. He had 4 brothers, but one died too young to have kids, two had only daughters, and the fourth was supposedly "lost in Australia." (This from cousins in the UK descended from the sisters, who had letters that my gg-grandfather wrote back to England after going to the US.) The man lost in Australia also had the (this will be a theme) unhelpful name of William Jones.

Going back to my ggg-grandfather's family, he had two brothers (John and Edmund). That also seems to have been the generation when everyone moved away from the family farm. My ggg-grandfather was the oldest, and moved to the London area, where he was a draper and opened a store (his wife's family were largely merchants, as well as long-time non-conformists -- I have many UK-based matches on her side, as well as Canada-based ones). His brother Edmund disappears, and since two sisters also went to Australia it wouldn't surprise me if he did as well, but I have no indication either way. His brother John Jones (sigh again) moved to Worcestershire, and is in later years listed as a labourer rather than a farmer or ag lab.

I have a pretty good family for John, but given that the UK is more protective of census records (back farther) than the US, plus the names and movement of the family, so that parish records aren't as helpful as they were for the earlier Shropshire research, I can't trace them forward very well.

So giving up on this for the time-being, I went back to my Ancestry matches and looked at "in common with" matches of my matches descended from my gg-grandfather on this line. This actually picked up a bunch of Jones, but when I looked at them most seemed to be on my Welsh side. (My gg-grandfather named Jones who immigrated from England married a Welsh woman surnamed Humphreys who had a mother, grandfather (obv), and two grandmothers also surnamed Jones.) And even so it's not clear that the Joneses I match who seem to be Welsh are descended directly from them, as they also have a bunch of other matching names (like Davies and Evans). I could probably sort this out and if I had unlimited money (I don't), I could try to start a personal Welsh Y DNA project, but right now this seems like it's probably just going to be a waiting game.

I'm not giving up on this yet -- I need to contact the other relatives with the same surname as the Y-DNA match, at least, but I'm interested in any advice plus maybe starting some chatting on this thread again.

[msmarjoribanks]

That’s right, early migrants could blend in leaving only surname evidence. The descendants of my Derbyshire lead miner ancestor who moved to Flintshire spoke only Welsh within a couple of generations. As you say, it can difficult to distinguish between the Welsh and the Cornish by names. Religious affiliation can sometimes help. Wesleyan chapels in industrial areas of Wales might indicate a Cornish community.

Flintshire is where some of the descendants of my ancestors apparently moved. I've been trying to identify the connection with a Welsh Ancestry match, but he has his family mainly back to Flintshire (some went to England too), and mine left before they moved there (to the US in 1848 and 1851 from towns in Anglesey and Montgomeryshire, met and married in the US). If I figure it out it gets him back farther and tells me more about what happened to some of those in my family who did not emigrate. Unfortunately he's distant enough that we don't really have sufficient shared matches to narrow it down (Ancestry sometimes makes matches lower than they really are too). Thinking aloud, it might be worth contacting him and asking if he's interested in uploading to MyHeritage, where you get chromosomes and where my dad currently is.

[Phoebe Watts]

Flintshire is where some of the descendants of my ancestors apparently moved. I've been trying to identify the connection with a Welsh Ancestry match, but he has his family mainly back to Flintshire (some went to England too), and mine left before they moved there (to the US in 1848 and 1851 from towns in Anglesey and Montgomeryshire, met and married in the US). If I figure it out it gets him back farther and tells me more about what happened to some of those in my family who did not emigrate. Unfortunately he's distant enough that we don't really have sufficient shared matches to narrow it down (Ancestry sometimes makes matches lower than they really are too). Thinking aloud, it might be worth contacting him and asking if he's interested in uploading to MyHeritage, where you get chromosomes and where my dad currently is.

MyHeritage is starting to be really useful for Welsh matches as more people have tested and uploaded, so it’s well worth asking your interesting Ancestry matches to upload.

In my experience, it isn’t really the chromosome browser that is most attractive, it’s the absence of Timber, which doesn’t work well on Welsh ancestry.

My best results are from working with matches whose ancestors emigrated. I solved a 3g grandfather brick wall through matches on Ancestry to the descendants of a brother who had emigrated in the 1850s. Luckily there are fewer generations on the American side so I can see their common matches. That research works both ways because I can show my American cousins where their emigrant ancestor was from. I wish I could persuade some of the Ancestry matches on this line to upload to MyHeritage so that I can place some of the UK based fourth and fifth cousins.

[rms2]

msmarjoribanks,

Pardon me if you have posted this and I forgot or failed to see it, but have you done the Big Y-700 for your dad? It seems to me with a surname like Jones you need as much y-dna specificity as you can get, which would give you a way to sort the wheat from the chaff.

[msmarjoribanks]

msmarjoribanks,

Pardon me if you have posted this and I forgot or failed to see it, but have you done the Big Y-700 for your dad? It seems to me with a surname like Jones you need as much y-dna specificity as you can get, which would give you a way to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Yes, he's done Big Y-700, and has only one match, the same guy who is the Y-111 match. For more detail: We have no Jones project matches (which isn't all that surprising given the diversity of Jones origins, of course). We have no Jones matches in Y-25 or higher (only one perfect Y-25 match, Y-37 match, or Y-67 match -- all the Big Y match). My dad has a bunch of Y-12 Jones matches, but that's because he has over 10,000 Y-12 matches (goes down to 26 Y-25 and 3 Y-67).

The Y-67 matches are closely related to each other, but GD 6 and 7 from my dad, and seem to share ancestry to Staffordshire, England (not far from Shropshire). The two other Y-37 matches also seem to be of English ancestry (one has another patronymic name, Nicholson, although not one I associate with Wales in that case), and the other has an English-seeming name and is in Australia.

Re his haplogroup, he's a perfect match for one of the WAMH (thus all the Y-12 matches), but after L21 is in DF63, which seems much less common than some of the other L21 subclades, and to have a variety of European branches, all of which split off in the quite distant past. It would be helpful to have a better sense of the age of the branch he shares with the one match in question, which could be quite closer.

My dad's closest match at YFull (who is also on the Ancestry Y tree, I believe) is of Hispanic background, but TMRCA is predicted at 3500 ybp, and the last subclade we share (R-A7811) predicted to have a formation date 4300 ybp, so that's not wildly helpful. There are French and Scottish branches of DF63 that are even more distant. I think DF63 is rare enough that it's not as well delineated with respect to more recent branches, which is one reason I'd love to recruit more likely testers.

The Ancestry match looks to be quite a bit closer than the YFull match. Exactly how close would likely help (at least as a start) answering some questions. His family is in Sussex in the early 1800s. (I have asked the Y-67 matches to test too, just because I think they could well be DF63 and find the Staffordshire location interesting, but got no responses -- this reminds me to try them again too. They, plus another likely match of theirs, also have a "son of" type name, again of more traditionally English origin.)

[rms2]

He doesn't have a terminal SNP more refined than DF63?

[msmarjoribanks]

He doesn't have a terminal SNP more refined than DF63?

He does, just figured it wouldn't mean much to anyone else.

DF63>BY592>A7810/A7811>FT44983>BY20328>BY74484 -- per FTDNA

YFull says that A7810/A7811 has a rounded age of 3100 ybp (1900-4700) -- that's where the closest match on YFull is.

FTDNA reports only one match (also BY74484), but shows the next two closest (not matches) as A7810/A7811>FT44983>BY20328>BY87194. Those two are from Venezuela and Cuba (oldest known Y-line), and I'm pretty sure the Cuban one is the same as the match at YFull (he turned up here at one point and said he was both).

YFull is assigning A7811 as the terminal now, but identifies the other SNPs, they must not have enough people to make them terminal SNPs yet.

This is what YFull shows for the distant match there (who does not show as a match at FTDNA): R-A7811 BY20331 * BY20332 * BY20328+4 SNPsformed 4300 ybp, TMRCA 3500 ybp

I hope this makes sense.

[rms2]

Well, BY74484 gives you a way to exclude "matches" that are non-starters.

The Welsh patronymic system may affect your dad's results. He may get some fairly solid matches with different surnames.

Time will tell.

I'm not trying to knock YFull, but FTDNA is working wonders with its Haplotree these days. I'm not seeing a lot of good reasons to pester my guys into spending the extra fifty bucks on YFull.