It's encouraging, in a backhanded way, to know that someone like you, Linda, with so much more experience than the rest of us even says, "Arrg?" by times. I keep looking for somebody to talk to me and tell me what I am seeing, or not seeing, in language I understand. But we're privileged, I guess, to be able to watch a whole field of genetic science developing and we can't expect to understand it all. Not having even high school or undergrad courses on which to fall back is tough for those of us who finished school "a while ago," when DNA was unknown, doesn't help!! If only there was somebody who 'understands it all' but is, at the same time, a real teacher at heart and would start up a website whose main goal was **communication** to those of us wanting to understand, but we can't quite break into the 'in talk.' Then we could ask questions and get answers we understand, and not have to go three years like Diane without any progress. Your help here on this List, Linda, has been the most useful I've seen anywhere. But you're a born-teacher par excellence—that's why! And... a very generous & gracious one. If only there was a Mailing List with a Geneticist-Linda-Merle as admin, then we'd all have something! Right now, I'm dealing with a certain level of concern among men in one project who can't understand why, when they know they are related with super paper trails, they have mismatches. They expected a full match but don't have it and nobody provided them much help after they paid their money and got their results. It leaves them wondering if this DNA thing all it's cracked up to be. I realize they started off with misconceptions and no understanding of the science, and I'm trying to explain it but what do I know!!! ;-) No answers to be had, methinks. Just need to vent sometimes when the List is quiet! Ruth P.S. I be remiss if I didn't say I've found Colleen Fitzgerald's inexpensive little book DNA & GENEALOGY very helpful and one that attempts to get around the 'in talk.' On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 5:57 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi folks, I just got a digest .....two samples: > >>In that subset of 257 there are 139 SRY2627+ which would be 54%. > > [follows up on a discussion on how much Visogothic DNA there is in Iberia] > > And the next guy says: > >>Now....you're not going to tell me 54% of R1b in Iberia is SRY2627+ are you? > > Arrrg! These guys are working on it right now....I usually just want to know what they decide. > > The way it goes then is they publish and post the URL of the paper on the web. The listers > all read it ten minutes after publication, so within 20 minutes the publisher could be debunked and > the rest of us getting 3 digests per hour or more as he/she is totally shredded. But luckily > only a few people can understand any of it so .... However you have to be careful because > the group could come to a completely different conclusion a week later.... > very dynamic. Today you're Irish; next week German. The week after that who knows? > > I delete a lot of it unread. Many publish here: http://www.jogg.info/ > > Linda Merle

Hi Ruth, it takes effort, like anything worth doing, but at least you probably won't get Alzheimers due to the mental activity. You can find some friendly people at ISOGG (www.isogg.org I think) as educating people on this is their bailiewick. You should also search for someone, maybe a project admin, who knows some information. Barra McCain at the Ulster Heritage Project is one, but he's very busy and it is hard to attract his attention. Some pay him a retainer -- and he writes a report that explains what he sees. You can hire others at ISOGG. But my experience has been that it is difficult to even find people to write you a report. So you join lists and ask questions. I don't know if your non-matches are due to one of two situations. The first is 'non-paternity event'. The total non-match. The Indian in the woodpile. People frequently adopted children and in days of yore there was no formal adoption process. In fact just a year ago I learned my aunt wasn't my aunt. According to her death certificate she was born 3 months after my other au nt. My grandparents must have adopted her. No one alive knows the story now. Another famly member did adopt a son, that my mother knew about. The further on back you go the less oral history or paperwork you have, but people did often adopt a child if they had none. Maybe the sister of the wife had 3 sons. The son she gave to her childless sister would inherit a farm. That's what my one relative did: gave a sister a son and he did inherit her farm. Otherwise he'd been in the coal mines. Also you have situations where a child is born out of wedlock and the father's surname is not known. So he has the mother's surname. Or the mother fingered the wrong man as the father. The partial matches are caused by mutations. A woman is born with all her eggs formed but a man creates sperm on the fly, all his life. As he ages the likelihood of a mutation goes up. So his sons may not match 100%. Over time these mutations accumulate. Each marker mutates at a certain rate -- some fast, some slow. Some are very unstable (I learned on the list). There are statistical averages, used in creating software like at ftdna to calculate matches, but every family's dna mutates at its own rate. Some have fast mutating DNA and some slow. My one client's mutates fast. He doesn't 'match' according to statistical software at Ftdna, his own known cousins! This is why you need to do both genealogy and DNA -- need both. Need to study the DNA and see how fast or slow it moves, too, which you don't know when yo u can only afford to test one person in the family. For all you know that man may not represent the family DNA due to a NPE (non paternity event). Thanks for the lead on the book, too! Have you tried Newbie DNA? http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/other/DNA/DNA-NEWBIE.html I had one client whose DNA results were very late. Finally FamilyTreeDNA explained that his one marker was so weird that they had rerun the test 3 times. Then they had to have their geneticist look at it. He said it was one really wild marker. This guy is in the large Campbell group that seems to comprise most Campbells in Virginia and PA, at least. But for this one wild marker. Whatever happened to make such a wild mutation? We don't know. Apparently it happened between eastern PA and western though. It was comforting to know that they consulted with the geneticist. Linda Merle ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ruth McLaughlin" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, April 8, 2010 7:43:11 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [S-I] Sample posts from the genealogy-dna list It's encouraging, in a backhanded way, to know that someone like you, Linda, with so much more experience than the rest of us even says, "Arrg?" by times. I keep looking for somebody to talk to me and tell me what I am seeing, or not seeing, in language I understand. But we're privileged, I guess, to be able to watch a whole field of genetic science developing and we can't expect to understand it all. Not having even high school or undergrad courses on which to fall back is tough for those of us who finished school "a while ago," when DNA was unknown, doesn't help!! If only there was somebody who 'understands it all' but is, at the same time, a real teacher at heart and would start up a website whose main goal was **communication** to those of us wanting to understand, but we can't quite break into the 'in talk.' Then we could ask questions and get answers we understand, and not have to go three years like Diane without any progress. Your help here on this List, Linda, has been the most useful I've seen anywhere. But you're a born-teacher par excellence—that's why! And... a very generous & gracious one. If only there was a Mailing List with a Geneticist-Linda-Merle as admin, then we'd all have something! Right now, I'm dealing with a certain level of concern among men in one project who can't understand why, when they know they are related with super paper trails, they have mismatches. They expected a full match but don't have it and nobody provided them much help after they paid their money and got their results. It leaves them wondering if this DNA thing all it's cracked up to be. I realize they started off with misconceptions and no understanding of the science, and I'm trying to explain it but what do I know!!! ;-) No answers to be had, methinks. Just need to vent sometimes when the List is quiet! Ruth P.S. I be remiss if I didn't say I've found Colleen Fitzgerald's inexpensive little book DNA & GENEALOGY very helpful and one that attempts to get around the 'in talk.' On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 5:57 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi folks, I just got a digest .....two samples: > >>In that subset of 257 there are 139 SRY2627+ which would be 54%. > > [follows up on a discussion on how much Visogothic DNA there is in Iberia] > > And the next guy says: > >>Now....you're not going to tell me 54% of R1b in Iberia is SRY2627+ are you? > > Arrrg! These guys are working on it right now....I usually just want to know what they decide. > > The way it goes then is they publish and post the URL of the paper on the web. The listers > all read it ten minutes after publication, so within 20 minutes the publisher could be debunked and > the rest of us getting 3 digests per hour or more as he/she is totally shredded. But luckily > only a few people can understand any of it so .... However you have to be careful because > the group could come to a completely different conclusion a week later.... > very dynamic. Today you're Irish; next week German. The week after that who knows? > > I delete a lot of it unread. Many publish here: http://www.jogg.info/ > > Linda Merle ------------------------------- 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