This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Author: ksaxe Surnames: McConnell, McConnel, McDonald, McDaniel, Doyle, McLaughlin Classification: queries Message Board URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.mcconnell/2517/mb.ashx Message Board Post: The number of McConnell and McConnel men in the Clan Donald DNA project has doubled to 30 in less than a year! Earlier today the project database was updated, and there are now 600 men with results on the project results tables. Everyone who joins the project has their own unique experience, so I'd like to share something about each of the 5 newest members to give you an idea of the range of possible outcomes and the project's progress. The 26th McConnell member of the project is John McConnell, who was the first McConnell to join the project using results from outside Family Tree DNA. He was tested through Ancestry.com, and his results place him in one of the largest family groups in the project. This group is known as the Dalriadic Scots group, and is related to the kings of the old kingdom of Dalriada. John is the third McConnell in that group, and the three McConnells and two MacConnells in that group match each other more closely than any others within the group, indicating a common ancestor who probably lived about 10 generations ago. John's sister Claudia Mccarley has recently made some paper trail progress on their Ontario McConnell family with the help of another McConnell researcher who saw one of Claudia's posts about John's testing. John has another match who was tested through the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Project (SMGF) and traces his line to Oneida County, New York. This is not very far fr! om the Ontario location where Claudia's McConnell family lived, so Claudia would really like to get in touch with this man's family. Unfortunately, this man has not joined the project or created a ysearch entry, so locating him has not been straightforward. A search of the Oneida County bulletin board for the name McConnell turned up some possible clues to this man's family, including the name of a female McConnell who has been very active in one of the local societies up there. Claudia checked out this society and found that a McConnell male has also been active within the group. She was able to obtain a postal mail address to use to reach one of the McConnells and hopes to hear from her soon. If this approach connects her with John's SMGF match, it will be quite an achievement. Most people who try to contact SMGF participants have had a hard time because SMGF testing is part of an academic study and the privacy of participants must be safeguarded very carefully. SMGF has ! formed a partnership with a Sorenson company called Genetree to help w ith this problem, but their solution is not in place for Y chromosome DNA at this time. The 27th McConnell to join the project is Leland McConnell. He is what is called an in-betweener for his McConnell family. Two family members had been tested previously, but their lines had experienced an above average rate of mutations, and the two were not classified as a match at the 37 marker level. Each of the cousins descends from a different son of the most recent common ancestor of the group. Usually people who aren't considered a match aren't related since the adoption of surnames, but both cousins match Leland more closely than they match each other. When you look at the results for the three cousins, you can see that they all match perfectly on 33 of the markers. On 3 of the remaining markers, 2 of the men match, so we conclude that the matching value is the same as that of their most recent common ancestor, Guien McConnell. So for 36 of the 37 markers, we now have a modal value for their family. Leland matches this modal perfectly. The marker where there is no ma! tch is DYS576, where Leland's cousins John and Robert differ by 3, and Leland's value is in between. This McConnell family has a somewhat unusual haplotype (set of test results), and still does not have any matches within the project. The common ancestor Guien is said to have had two brothers who also immigrated to this country, Robert b. 1720, and Edward, b. 1723, so future matches could come from Guien's line, from the lines of Robert and Edward, from the lines of other male line relatives who may have come to America, or from outside the country. The 28th McConnell is David J. McConnell. His name comes from my New Jersey McConnell family, but his test results confirm my previous suspicion that he comes from a separate paternal lineage (SPL). My great great grandfather's brother Michael McConnell raised a large family of 12 children with his wife Eliza Jane Tillotson, but the oldest child was born about 3 years before they were married, when Michael was only 17 and Eliza Jane was only 18. Furthermore, the marriage record for the couple indicated that she had previously been married to a Morgan. I thought that this oldest son William might turn out to be a Morgan, or even a member of a nearby McConnell family that may have been related, and the latter possibility led me to seek out David and ask him to test. David said that he didn't know much about his McConnell line, and he had had no idea that it might not really be a McConnell line. For me the most surprising thing was that David's results strongly suggest that his! male line is from Eastern Europe! Since I suspect that the SPL dates back to William Henry McConnell, who was born in 1853, this seems like a surprising result to me, because I didn't think that there was a lot of immigration from Eastern Europe up to that point in our nation's history. It's a very interesting little puzzle, because it makes me wonder about things like orphan trains and the fact that in spite of considerable effort, I have never been able to identify Michael and Eliza Jane McConnell in the 1860 census. One possibility is that they moved around that time and they were missed in the census. Now I have other possibilities to consider, like the fact that I expected to find William with them and he may not have joined the family until he was older. The Eastern European origin makes me think that I should have looked a little harder for them in places like New York City and Newark, where they would have been more likely to come across a child with Eastern Europe! an ancestry. As you might expect, David has no McConnell or Morgan mat ches, and it's possible that he will never have matches within the Clan Donald Project, but he should find matches in other projects as more men with Eastern European backgrounds are tested. The 29th McConnell is actually a McConnel with one "l", Daniel McConnel. Daniel is new to both traditional and genetic genealogy, and started out with some knowledge of his father and grandfather, but no knowledge of earlier generations of his McConnel family. I've been able to help Daniel with his great grandfather and great great grandfather using the census as he has worked with an older member of his family to help fill out more recent generations of his tree. Daniel's family has moved around a lot, with recent generations having lived in California, Texas, Colorado, and Idaho, but earlier generations have lived in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Daniel does not have very close matches, but his results do show some sort of connection to a McDaniel and some McDonalds in the project. This connection may or may not predate the adoption of surnames. Because Daniel is just starting out with his genealogy, he has a lot of work to do, but by combining traditional and gene! tic methods right from the start, I think that he will catch up pretty quickly. Right now, we have his line back to William and Nancy McConnell, who were both born in Ohio about 1815 and were enumerated in Wayne County, Iowa in the federal censuses of 1860, 1870, and 1880. I also found them in two state census enumerations, but have yet to find them in 1850. The 1880 census says that William's parents were born in Pennsylvania. The 30th McConnell member of the project is Jerry McConnell. Jerry was recruited by his third cousin Robert C. McConnell to help him learn more about the haplotype of their most recent common ancestor, Jacob McConnell, who was born about 1825 in Ohio. Robert, Jerry, and two of the other McConnell men in the project are related to the clan chiefs. This group of the clan chiefs is the largest classified group in the project, with 78 members, and it's also the group with the largest number of McConnell men, excluding the catchall group for R1b men who haven't been classified into a particular family group. Robert and Jerry share a very unusual value on the marker known as YCAIIa. This is good news, because that means that their most recent common ancestor, who is the son of their earliest known McConnell ancestor John, almost certainly had the same unusual value. Reasonably close male line relatives very probably also had that value, and if descendants of those relatives are te! sted, they will probably share the unusual YCAIIa result, so it will be very easy to pick up on their relationship to Robert and Jerry. This is important because there are so many distant cousins for members of this very successful male line that it can be hard to distinguish between the nearer cousins and those more distant cousins whose lines have experienced similar sets of recent mutations. It's very interesting to see how the statistics for the McConnell members of the project and the project as a whole match increasingly well as the project grows. For a long time, we have known that about 30% of the men in the project are members of one of 3 royal lines, the Clan Chiefs line, the Dalriadic Scots line, and the line linked to Niall of the Nine Hostages. Right now that percentage is an exact figure for McConnel(l) men in the project. 9 of them are members of one of these groups. We are also seeing some other groups including McConnell men emerge within Haplogroup R1b. One group matches a modal haplotype known as the Leinster modal or Irish Sea modal. These men are currently listed in the R1b Yellow table, but you can expect to find them in their own subgroup soon when Doug McDonald does new network charts and creates new subgroups. This group is somewhat similar to the Niall of the Nine Hostages group, because knowledge of old Irish genealogies has been combined with genetic information to link men to a chiefly line. A number of men who match the Irish Sea modal have surnames or even family histories that link them to the chiefs of a tribe called the Lagin. Many of the men matching the modal are from southern Ireland, but others may be found with lines from further north or across the Irish Sea in Scotland or England. Some of these men probably descend from tribes that are believed to have been related to the Lagin and lived in these other areas. Th! e Irish Sea group as a whole is very interesting and includes men of many different surnames. While exploring this group, I learned that one of my more mysterious female ancestors from Pennsylvania may have been a member of one of the Doyle families within it. You can find out more about the Leinster modal by visiting John McLaughlin's Leinster Modal webpage at: http://members.aol.com/Lochlan4/leinster.htm There are also other family groups within the R1b Yellow group of the project, and we can expect Doug's upcoming mathematical analysis to classify some of them into new subgroups, too. Those who would like to learn more about the Clan Donald DNA Project may visit the project website at: http://dna-project.clan-donald-usa.org/ Kirsten Saxe, McConnell researcher Important Note: The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list. 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