Since I wrote my last post (“James Has a Haplogroup!) there have been some updates to our family group. First of all, we have not one, but two new relatives in our haplogroup likely descended from James Sr. — one (“M”) has established his line back to Moses Sr., son of James Sr.; the other (“JM”) is a descendant of Morgan J. Wilson of Henry County. I believe Morgan was a grandson of Moses Sr., but there isn’t a solid paper trail to establish that linkage. However, JM has a Y-DNA profile that puts him in the same haplogroup as me, “M” and other match who is also believed to be a descendant of Moses Sr. (through John Culpeper Wilson). Unfortunately, once again, as with John Culpeper, we only have circumstantial evidence of a direct connection to Moses, but the DNA evidence is mounting.
The other recent development is the appearance of a new, much more distant relative that breaks up the block of equivalent SNPs above James’. Since this new person isn’t close enough for ftDNA to consider us a match, I don’t know anything about him or his family tree. His appearance did break up the block of 21 equivalent SNP’s and reduced the number of variant SNP’s in our line to 14. This means that our common ancestor with this gentleman was born about 14*83=1162 years ago, which probably preceded the use widespread use of surnames. According to his entry, he believes his most distant known ancestor was born the UK. That doesn’t really help our search all that much, since we don’t know how far back this ancestor was nor how accurate his estimate is.
As a result of this new tester, our remaining haplogroup has a new name: R-FT76449. Since ftDNA doesn’t know which SNP in our block of 14 occurred first, it just assigns the name of one of them to our current haplogroup. The old name, R-FT75629 (which used to be the name of our block), was assigned to the new tester since it is the name of the block still common to both of us. I’ve included a screen shot of the block tree below to help make this clearer. What is significant to our group is that as new relatives get tested who have a common ancestor that is even closer, our block of 14 SNP’s will be broken up further yet and we will be assigned another new haplogroup name selected randomly (as far as I can tell) from the remaining variants of our group.
