Genetic Genealogy

Result summary

Results so far: Y - chromosome tests allow us to put Malachowski in the subgroup I-FGC22420 of group of I1.

I1 → I-L121 → I-DF29 → I-Z2893 → I-Z58 → I-Z59 → I-CTS8647 → I-Z61 → I-Z60 → I-Z140 → I-Z141 → I-Y6231 → I-FGC22445 → I-FGC22420 (https://www.yfull.com/tree/I-Y6231/).

Introduction

This was a completely new area for me. The idea is to confirm family relationships and maybe find unknown related persons by using modern genetic techniques, and also try to explain the origin of the family on a scale of thousands and tens of thousands of years.

At first, as always, you have to learn the new terminology - you need to know the meaning of: alleles, base, chromosome, clade, DNA, genetic, haplogroup, haplotype, marker, mutation, paternal line of descent, STR, SNP, Y chromosome, Y-DNA , see, e.g. glossary.

So far, we only have a few test results for Y-DNA, which is DNA in the Y chromosome that only men have. There are two types of tests:

  • STR
  • SNP

STR means Short Tandem Repeats and identifies the repeats of a certain combination of base pairs at specific locations in the Y chromosome. The result of the test is the number of repetitions. These repetitions are inherited from father to son, with a small but not zero probability of change (mutation).

Practically, this means that descendants of the same ancestor can be identified by the similarity of their test results. The more generations away from a common ancestor, the greater, statistically, the difference will be. The more markers included in the test, the more accurately you can estimate the minimum number of generations to a common ancestor.

For bigger time periods researchers using genetics are trying to determine where man was arisen and spread from the point of origin to the whole earth. This can be done by checking of individual mutations (SNP = Single Nucleotide Polymorphism), which occur very rarely, and when such mutation happens a new haplogroup, or its subgroup is created and inherited by all the descendants from there on.

Results

Y - STR

The pioneer here is Kajetan Małachowski, who first made a Y-STR test with 67 markers. One single result is always a bit uncertain (what if ones biological father, grandfather or great-grandfather was not the one who was recorded in the file?), therefore I made a similar test. The result came in portions and you can imagine how nice it was to see that it corresponded exactly with the result of Kaj's test - only the second last group of results generated a difference by one on one position - that is almost perfect compliance.
STR results: Kaj, Kriss, Stanislaw - 1 STR results: Kaj, Kriss, Stanislaw - 2
The table above presents our test results; the one differance (in marker DYS553) is hightlighted.

Even with the only STR results one can usually estimate haplogroup(Kaj was estimated as belonging to haplogroup I1(other designation of I - M253).This has been confirmed in my test: by examinations of SNP called M253.

Haplogroup I1

About this haplogroup see e.g. Haplogroup I1.