Hi Dan, thanks for your response. I hope a few Browns take you up on your offer a kit. The one thing we did on the McCamish/McAmis project in addition to what you are doing is use a targetted approach. Ie we identified men we wanted to test and offered them kits. This is a very small project, so we were able to target. We tested a couple known descendents of the immigrants to make sure we were not looking at an NPE. Then we sought out and tested a man in Belfast and one we eventually found in Australia. We were able to offer both more genealogical information than they already had. So you might try this -- ie target a lineage, like maybe the one that it appears most Amercian Browns come from, and attempt to prove or disprove theories about their origins by selectively testing men in that area. It was easy for McCamishes since there were only two places where I found them. Still, surely at least one Brown lineage has a theory on where they came from specifically? (I hope). Yes, the founder affect does create a bottleneck here in the new world and probably Australia as well. However once the founder is discovered -- hey, just think of all the mysteries you'll resolve. I was involved in the Campbells -- they are all related too. 67 markers still doesn't give enough differentiation to sort them out much. I have a client: yup, he's one too, but no paper trail to any of them, and the families where he was living never named him in their wills. Or loaned him money to buy his land in the late 1700s. Despite the commonality of DNA he is a singleton. However we're in the infancy stage of doing this so maybe in two years or five you'll solve a few of these problems. And we'll find the Campbell-emiting village in Scotland that is responsible for the North American infestation of pea-pod Campbells. There were several lines of McCamishes in early Pennsylvania. Everyone has wondered if the three brothers in Virginia/Tennessee were related. The theory that the 3 bros came from PA can't be proven -- no evidence and wills in fact seem to disprove it. We were contacted by a descendent of the one family (Franklin Co area) earlier this year and have DNA test in progress for him. I suspect he is related just because that family used the same first names as the 3 bros and their cousins in Ireland. They all moved to Ohio in the early 1800s. Some of the Tennessee families did too but settled in different counties. I checked 23andme today -- I have hundreds of matches now, some sharing 2 segs of DNA. I guess I'll try to make contact a few at a time. Most of my dna comes from central Scotland and the border area -- and that's where most of these matches seem to be, but often they got no genealogy in the Old Country, so it's not too useful, actually. Still no substitute for old fashioned genealogy! I was talking to my dad today about the health results and he had to agree there were few surprises in my health panel. I guess that means we have a good family medical history and that 2 to 3 generations back is all you really need to get an idea of where your health risks are. However I have a gene that makes you have a reduced pain threshhold. I suspect that's from my mother who could never get enough medication to stop her pain when she had knee replacement surgery -- and this contributed to her demise. I guess I'll take a print out with me and wave it in their faces if I need surgery <grin>. Linda Merle ----- Original Message ----- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, May 31, 2010 6:24:49 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [S-I] DNA Lessons Learned -- Brown & Knox In a message dated 5/26/2010 10:30:44 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: >> Can you tell us about your Brown and Knox DNA studies and what insights they have produced, esp. in Ulster << Hello Linda and all! Apologies for the delayed response. But at least the Holiday Weekend gives a chance to work on my message backlog! The Knox project is too small, with only about 30 participants, to generate much in the way of lessons. We do have one member in Donegal, but that participant's test came via the most circuitous and serendipitous of routes when an American genealogist, not a Knox descendant, happened to visit the participants' Donegal home with a spare DNA kit in hand. Moreover, the match hasn't yet led to any useful clues about the genealogies of the 14 USA Knoxes who have the same 12-marker DNA signature. The Brown project, now with almost 650 participants, has undergone a more instructive set of experiences. But I regret to report that the two main lessons with respect to the British Isles are both negative: Lesson One is simply a reinforcement of what you, I and other "old hands" already knew, namely that it's extremely hard to generate participation from Europe. Last summer the Brown project had what I thought was a clever way to recruit, when FTDNA had a booth at the International Gathering of Clans in Edinburgh. Our project raised enough money thru members' donations to finance 22 free tests at 37-markers for men born in Scotland or Ireland, and FTDNA's representatives not only displayed a poster with our offer but also handed out a snazzy publicity pamphlet designed by one of our very talented members. Then another member, who was attending the "Gathering" simply as a tourist, took copies of our literature to the Clan Broun and Clan Lamont tents and also distributed pamphlets at various other places. Results of this effort: Exactly one request for a free test kit! Next, we posted news of our offer on various Rootsweb mailing list and other places. And two project members living in Scotland passed out pamphlets to unrelated Browns with whom they were acquainted. After about six months, these efforts resulted in our mailing out five more test kits, including one to Ulster. One of these five kits is still outstanding, while four kits were returned for lab work. The current status of our "free offer" is that we still have 16 prepaid kits available. So if anybody out there has ideas for recruitment, please do let me know. Any and all thoughts will be appreciated! Lesson Two is that even when we have test results for men born in the British Isles, matches are going to be quite rare, perhaps at a rate as low as of 1/5 the "match rate" we're now seeing among North American participants. This disappointment is something we SHOULD have expected on purely theoretical grounds. I plead guilty. But then nobody is perfect! The problem we're now seeing is that from among about two dozen project members born in the British Isles (eight in Scotland, one in Ireland and the rest in England), a mere two men have experienced "out-of-the-blue" (i.e., unplanned) matches with Browns in North America. By contrast, almost 2/3 of our North American participants have found such unplanned, out-of-the-blue matches. In short, we appear to have run into what population geneticists call variously a "serial founder effect" or a "migratory bottleneck." This explanation has been used by the scientists to explain, among other biological phenomena, why there is so much more genetic diversity among Africans than among the humans of other continents. Think of it this way: In Africa 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, there were probably thousands of Y-chromosome haplotypes. Then modern humans left Africa to settle the rest of the world. But probably just a few hundred souls were successful in making the full journey. So the migrants may have populated Asia and Europe with as few as 100 or 200 Y-chromosome DNA signatures. Now fast forward to the 1600's and 1700's in the British Isles. I suspect there were thousands of unrelated families who carried the Brown(e) surname. Let's just assume the number was around 2000. But when big-time migration to North American got underway, it simply wasn't in the cards that every Brown family would partake of the opportunity. Let's assume about 1000 unrelated Brown families sent members over to the New World, which would mean there were something like 2000 unique Y-chromosome haplotypes for Browns back in the Old Country, but only about 1000 unique Brown haplotypes that made it across the pond. Then as the population of Browns segued into the 1800's and 1900's, many of the Y-chromosome lines for Brown families either "daughtered out" or just plain "died out" -- leaving us today with some fraction (less than 50%, I suspect) of the original male-Brown DNA signatures that had successfully traversed the Atlantic. The pessimistic conclusion I draw from this analysis is that no matter how many men in Scotland, Ulster and elsewhere eventually have genealogical DNA tests, the number of Transatlantic brickwalls that come down as a result is likely to be underwhelming. Last but not least, a brighter note: Nothing I say above is the least bit applicable to a prospective DNA test that's carefully "planned" so as to provide evidence bearing on a specific genealogical hypothesis. On the other hand, that's a worthy topic for another day's discussion! Best regards, Jim Brown (James Armistead Brown, Jr.) Administrator, Brown DNA Study Administrator, Knox DNA Project http://brownsociety.org http://knoxgenealogy.org ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message