My client, whose ancestral male line surname is Drumgoole from Louisiana, had tested his autosomal DNA along with 111 STRs at FTDNA and asked me to help him determine who his closest male line relatives where, and whether I could give him insight into which West African group his male line ancestors may have belonged to.

First, I asked my client to upload his autosomal DNA tests from FTDNA (Family Finder) and Ancestry DNA to the free Clade Finder tool developed by myself (Hunter Provyn) and Thomas Krahn of YSEQ.

The Clade Finder output showed not only two positive SNPs at the E-CTS246 level, but that he had negative SNPs in both downstream lineages E-CTS10935 and E-Z5991. The negatives are important because they help us rule out which lines a man cannot descend from.

In this case, upon further inspection, I noticed that the FTDNA tree shows an additional split in the YFull-defined E-Z5991 line that YFull has consisting of 97 SNPs. A man who did not indicate where he traces his male line to (or even his own birth location) ended up being positive for Z15234 plus 38 additional mutations, but negative for the remaining 64 mutations defining E-Z5991. If you may have noticed that 38 + 64 does not equal 97 that is because these SNP counts come from two different trees, FTDNA’s and YFull’s, and are based on a different set of samples and using a different methodology regarding which SNPs to use.

Where are samples in E-Z15234 from and what is their ethnic group?

Of samples tracing back to a location and ethnic group within Africa, E-Z15234 has so far only been found in western Gambia among members of the Jola-Fonyi and Mandinka groups.

Ancient Sample “Kiana”

Incidentally there is an ancient sample on the FTDNA Time Tree at the basal E-CTS246/Z906 position named Kiana and dating to 1680-1790 from Charleston, South Carolina and of cultural group Enslaved African American. I don’t know if this ancient sample is actually basal for E-CTS246/Z906 or has no coverage of downstream SNPs (it is common for some ancient samples to be of lower coverage, meaning the true position could be somewhere downstream).

Highly Divergent STRs from all other men in E-CTS246/Z906

Given that my client had tested 111 STRs, there was a very good chance to identify his likely next closest relatives within public projects using STR Match Finder. However, his two closest STR matches occupy different branches of E-CTS246/Z906 that are over 11,000 years distantly related. The 2nd of these matches, Kit Number 920374 circled in yellow, is actually more closely related to my client if we assume that he is somewhere below (or splitting) E-Z15234. From the STR Match Finder visual output we can see that these men have two rare alleles in common unique from the other matches, which may be indicative of descending from E-Z15234. They are DYS717 = 20 and DYS485 = 16. However I’ll note that YFull computes DYS485 = 16 to be ancestral to E-CTS246/Z906.

After reviewing my analysis, which included a recommendation to cheaply test for a SNP at the level of E-Z15234 at the YSEQ laboratory in Berlin, to confirm my prediction, my client elected to purchase the Big Y test. Having already done 111 STRs with FTDNA made this upgrade a cheaper and more convenient alternative than doing a WGS test at another company (Whole Genome Sequencing, a test offered by YSEQ that tests all of your DNA).

So when the result comes in we will learn whether my client is fully-formed E-Z15234 or whether his sample will result in an additional split or new downstream branch. I’ll recommend him to submit his Big Y VCF file to YFull so that we advance the research into his male line origins there as well.

Need Y-DNA Consulting?

I offer Y-DNA consulting services at $50 per hour with a retainer of $100. Contact me by email: hunter provyn at gmail dot com

These posts are the opinion of Hunter Provyn, a haplogroup researcher in J-M241 and J-M102.