To all interested in Beatty history: It has been quite a while since I have issued a progress report to this list. The science behind our Y-chromosome tests has been advancing, our database has grown, and with it our ability to solve the Beatty puzzle has improved. The testing requires special skills and advanced equipment so it is necessary that a big organization do the actual work. We have chosen Family Tree DNA of Houston as our testing company. They contract the lab work to the University of Arizona in Tucson. FTDNA has become the premier company doing this kind of work and now has over 750 Surname Projects active. The test results for a single man are completely useless -- the value is in comparing with other men to get a clue as to how closely they are related. Comparing two men can be useful, but it is far better to be able look for patterns in the results for a large group of men with the same surname. We now have 32 test results (from 29 BP2000 lineages) in the Beatty database, and some significant conclusions have been reached. Four more Beatty samples are in the lab and several test kits are out but not yet received in Houston. All our tests so far are of the 25 marker variety. The data returned by the lab for each sample is a set of 25 numbers, which is referred to as the man's haplotype. FTDNA recently announced that they are prepared to do 37-marker tests, however our group does not have any of these results available yet. Our set of 32 test results are representative enough to lead to the conclusion that about 3 out of 4 men named Beatty are descendants of a man we call Adam, who lived in Scotland about 25 generations ago (500-700 years). The testees at present fall into 6 unrelated family groups, but five of them have very few members. There is good reason to believe that the Beatty surname was originally adopted in more than one place. It is now clear that these alternate origins have supplied much fewer modern Beattys than Adam. One simple way for a new family group to get started is for a man, unhappy with his life, to visit a cemetery, select a new name and move to a place where he is unknown. We have no information on how often this has happened, other than it didn't happen to the descendants of Adam. Some specific genealogical conclusions are: 1. A large fraction of Beatty men are male line descendants of the man called Adam. 2. As a result of some selective testing organized by Les Beaty, L-241, representatives of L-13, L-20, and L-241 are descendants of Francis Beaty who died in North Carolina in 1773. A result of this is that we have deduced the haplotype of Francis. 3. A representative of L-98 was found to exactly match Francis. This tends to confirm a conjecture that an L-98 ancestor, James, was a brother of Francis. James died in Pennsylvania in 1777. 4. Representatives of L-199 and L-351 (Group C) were found to be related to each other, but unrelated to any of the other men tested. 5. Representatives of L-2 and L-3 were found to be not only descendants of Adam, but also descendants of another more recent common ancestor. Statistically, there is a good chance that this most recent common ancestor is recent enough to be identified. More testing and research are needed. 6. We have Beattys with 8 different haplotypes slightly different (one mutation) from Adam. They are descendants of Adam but with a recognizably different haplotypes. This opens many possibilities for new testees to get hooked in the larger picture. 7. We have tested men with 6 different spellings of the surname, living in 3 different countries. We have found no way to relate either spelling or country to long-range ancestry. Tests have not been done on some of the more rare spellings. More detailed information, including the data tables, is available at our project web site www.BeattyDNA.org. You can join a special discussion list for this project by sending an e-mail to GenMatch-subscribe@yahoogroups.com . Valuable conclusions tend to pile up as the size of the database grows. Please consider organizing a test for a member of your lineage. The testee must be a male named Beatty, but others may do the organizing and pay for the test. While females can't take this test (because they have no Y-chromosome), a test of a brother is almost as good. We have several instances of a female sponsoring the test of a father, brother or cousin. It is quite reasonable for groups within a lineage to pool their resources and share the information. --Earl Beaty, L-13 Group Administrator Beatty Surname Project