DNA and unlocking our family mysteries

The following are my introductory remarks to a recent (and extremely excellent) seminar hosted by the Victoria Genealogical Society.

I have been interested in genealogy since university in the 80s – back when DNA tests and online research didn’t even exist.  My main source of family information was the book:  History of the Allison or Alison Family.  It belonged to my great grandfather Walter, my grandfather Joseph, my mother Joanne, and then was handed down to me while I was in university.

Of course, old-fashioned genealogical research is time-consuming and expensive.  This book is still secondary research and clearly has some bias, so while I trust much of the information, I am not sure I always trust the interpretation.  As a young person, I had neither time nor money to indulge in primary research, however fascinating.

A couple of years ago, however, as my mother was unloading family heirlooms and furniture to move from her home to a much smaller condominium, she brought to me a box of genealogical treasures.  This reignited my interest.  With new methods of electronic research, confirming ancestors many generations back is so much easier from your armchair now.  Something important I learned after a couple of months on ancestry.ca is that not everyone is as interested in accuracy as I.  You must be careful to apply good research discipline even with the convenience of home-based research.  I am still undoing a lot of the information I loaded from other people’s family trees in the first couple of months.

Using the family book and all of the available electronic records, I was able to confirm the family lineage back to Ireland in the 1600s (on the Allison side anyway).  We were Scotch-Irish, and we were farmers in Limavady working for an English landlord.

My book said that a number of branches found their roots at a farm in Lanark, Scotland.  Were we one of those branches?  We were most certainly of Scotch Irish descent, but from where did we hail before Ireland?

Going back from 1652 is difficult if you don’t know where you are going back to.  I discovered that there is a group of people with the surname Allison on Family Tree DNA.  I joined the group, got my uncle’s spit, and sent it in for a YDNA test.  I had an uncle, two aunts, my mother, and many cousins watching over my shoulder as we awaited the results and I continued my research.  I don’t mind saying that I was hoping we would find we hailed from that farm in Lanark. 

It took time, but when we got the results, we could rule out the Allison family farm, probably.  But I did get a match with someone whose ancestor was the mother of President McKinley!  And I am still trying to understand the results.  The more people that join the Allison DNA project, the closer I will get to finding more ancestors and our roots in Scotland.  

Now I am looking at the possibilities of mitochondrial or autosomal DNA to find more about my ancestors using my own spit.  I have had people contact me through the blog and I am certain I could confirm more relatives and broaden my tree with this DNA test.  I am also looking at doing Family Finder to see if I can uncover more information behind a family legend that tells that one of our ancestors was born to a young girl from Hereford and an unknownJew.  I am documenting what I know of this story from online research and family memoires through this blog, but I have found more and more information as I learn better research methods and keep going back to the story.  DNA would provide another key to the truth behind this story.

DNA without a doubt unlocks some of our family mysteries.  Today getting the test is relatively straightforward.  And applying it to your genealogical research is also relatively straightforward.  The more I learn, and the more people who get their DNA tested, the more useful DNA research becomes.  I have found ancestors and made linkages through DNA, and I know that I will be uncovering more family stories as I learn more about our connections through DNA.

Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXdzuz5Q-hs

Finding Allisons and Understanding DNA

Sometimes you take on a particular task and imagine that it will lead you to a particular answer.  This is the case when we embarked on a DNA test to determine how far back we could trace our Allison ancestry.  In the book History of the Allison or Ellison Family (Leonard Allison Morrison), the author tells us that the Allisons from whom we descend come from the lowlands of Scotland.  

In fact, the author goes as far as to say that the Allisons of Limavady made their way to Ireland from the Windyedge farm in Scotland.  However, the chapter that tells us all about our Scotch-Irish Allison ancestors doesn't tell us anything about ancestors further than John Allison (b. 1652 d. 1736).  That information is taken from an Allison family headstone found at the Allison family farm in Limavady.  Interestingly, the headstone is relatively new, and likely was erected by Allisons well after John's death so we can't be absolutely certain about the veracity of the facts contained on it.

Despite exhaustive (armchair) surfing, I can't locate a John Allison born in Scotland in 1652 who later moved to Ireland.  The history of the Scots in Ireland, however, would suggest (strongly) that the Allison family came to Ireland during the Ulster Plantation.  The timing and our family history would support this.  I am fairly certain that this would have been the right timeframe for our family's move to Ireland before their emigration to Canada.  DNA was the only way to trace with certainty our ancestry to Scotland, possibly even to Windyedge Farm.

Interestingly, I came across an Allison family DNA project (through Family Tree DNA).  To join the project, we needed to find a male relative with the surname Allison.  I was somewhat affronted that my DNA wasn't good enough, but the science of chromosomes explained why (at the same time my 17-year-old was learning why in Biology - should have asked him!).

Basically, males have chromosomes only from the father.  Females have a mix of both mother and father.  So if you want to trace the lineage from your surname (using traditional western naming conventions), male ancestors give the best DNA results for common comparison with others with the same surname.  This is called Y-DNA testing.

Fortunately I am (currently) seeking information about the Allison family so I had an uncle and a couple of cousins to choose from (all of whom have the Allison surname).  Uncle Bill volunteered his saliva for this purpose and we were accepted into the project.

The next thing I had to decide is how many genetic markers to test.  You can test as high as 111.  I understood that 67 markers would be best for the Allison DNA project, so that's what I ordered.  But what does that really mean?  Y-chromosomes have patterns that repeat (technically repeating nucleotides called short tandem repeats or STRs).  

Essentially you are comparing these patterns to other people's patterns.  The number of repeats of a pattern is called an allele.  The markers all have names (not like "Fred" or "Nancy", more like "DYS393", which stands for identification number 393 of the YDNA unique Sequence, which is a more practical name than Fred or Nancy, but harder to remember).  Certain markers are considered particularly useful for geneologists.  So when you order a test of, say, 67 markers, your results tell you how many repeating patterns you have for each of these markers.  Then you get to compare your results to other people to whom you may be related. Here are the results of our DNA test:

 And Voila! We now know our Allison genealogical roots... or do we?

Like so much science, it turns out that what you learn through genealogical DNA searches is the likelihood of whether or not you share an ancestor with someone else.  Without someone else to whom you can compare your DNA, it pretty much just a list of numbers.  Fortunately we have a whole lot of Allisons, Ellisons, McAllisters and other variations who have had their DNA tested.  That's what makes the test useful to us to understand how closely we are related to those others with whom we share a surname (or variation).  There are mutations and other changes that mean that the more differences you have with someone else, the further away your shared ancestor is likely to be.  There are a lot of possibles and maybes in this work.  Again, the Allison DNA project is what makes this test useful to us.

Another thing we learned through the DNA test is our haplogroup.  The haplogroup is like the backbone of your ancestry.  I imagine the further back you go, the less exact the science, but essentially you can find yourself, using DNA, as part of a large group of people who can trace their ancestors to a particular group that left Africa together.  The founders of Family Tree DNA have done research and created a map on how haplogroups found their way out of Africa around the world. We can see how closely we are connected to other Allisons through whether we share the same haplogroup.  The Allison haplogroup to which we belong is called R-M269.  

So now that we have the results, our haplogroup and our Y-DNA markers, what do we do?  Well, we share and compare those results to other people to see where we share ancestry.  Then we see whether their information sheds light on our information.  The more closely we are related (the number of markers which match perfectly) the more likely we share a common ancestor within recent generations.  We can trace our direct Allison lineage pretty well back several generations.  We are looking for lineage back to the 1600s.  It is also interesting to find more recent branches of the family tree to see what happened to distant cousins, uncles and so on.

I took our results and imported them to Ysearch, a database of genetic test results.  I searched for results with the same surname comparing our genetic markers, and here is what I got (our results are ZZ632).  Check out the Scottish results, which include Windyedge Farm!

User ID	Last Name	Origin	Haplogroup	Tested With	Markers Compared	Genetic Distance
FFJUC	Alison	Unknown	Unknown	Family Tree DNA	-	-
2CR4J	Allison	Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland	Unknown	Family Tree DNA	67	29
ZZ632	Allison	Limavady, Canada	R (tested)	Family Tree DNA	67	29
9MCAV	Allison	Windyedge Farm, Cairnduff Estate, Scotland	Unknown	Family Tree DNA	25	15

The genetic distance column refers to the number of mismatches in the comparison.  Mismatches are due to mutations.  Mutations happen over generations.  The more mutations, the further away our shared ancestor.  We are looking for someone with a common surname with fewer than a genetic distance of 5.  So even though we share an ancestor with Windyedge Farm Allisons, they could be closer to 1,000 years ago than 500.  That's just one person though, and one brief search.  Name variations, more searches and more work will help us understand even more.

I have not completed a search of the data, but already I have found a link to an Allison cousin who was President McKinley's mother!  There is loads to discover and more to come.  Stay tuned!


Sources:
DNA image: http://www.clanstrachan.org/genealogy/articles/reading_y-dna.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_DNA_test#STR_markers
http://www.moonzstuff.com/dna/distance.html