The Phillips DNA Project News
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Summer Sale at FTDNA
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- Written by: Nancy Kiser
- Category: Latest
UPDATE:
The ability to join Group Projects is temporarily unavailable. Here is a link to a page where you can order a test kit and then join the Phillips project later.
The 37 marker male Y-DNA test is on sale for $89 plus postage and the 111 marker male Y-DNA test is on sale for $199 plus postage. These are the only tests that are applicable to our Phillips DNA Project and the 37 marker test is usually adequate to identify your Phillips family. Here is a link to a page where you can order a test kit through our project which will guarantee your results will be added to our project. This sale ends August 31, 2025, at 11:59 pm PDT.
Understanding Y-DNA Matches
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- Written by: Nancy Kiser
- Category: Latest
All human Y chromosomes descend from one ancestral person. Since they all descend from one person and then from a few families, and as times goes by those families keep branching out up to the point where we get to our own family nest, it would be natural that when we compare our DNA, the fewer markers we compare, the less unique they are, and the more markers we test, the more unique the whole string of markers is. In other words, to go to extremes, if we tested only one marker, we would most certainly match with millions of individuals that shared that marker for thousands of years. But if on the other hand when we test many markers, we will match very few people that share those same markers. Those would be the ones that are closely related to us.
This is valid when comparing our matches on 12, 25, 37, 67 or 111 markers. The likelihood that we will match other individuals with 12 markers is far greater than matching on 25, 37, 67 or 111. Especially if our family descends from a populational group that came from one or a few prolific families thousands of years ago (which is the case for Western Europe). Dr. Luigi Lucca Cavalli-Sforza, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, in his fascinating book: The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolutions says that the total population of Europe was 60,000 people at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. Now Europe has a population of 300 million people. This increase is almost entirely due to a natural increase in population rather than immigration from other continents. Keeping this in mind it is reasonable that many people alive today in Europe will match with other Europeans from BEFORE the time that our ancestors began the adoption of surnames, and when you match someone who has a different surname your first thought should be that the ‘connection’ is distant rather than recent.
What will a Y-DNA test tell me?
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- Written by: Nancy Kiser
- Category: Latest
- Identify your family’s detailed placement on the Great Family Tree of Mankind
- Discover your surname history and how it relates to other families
- Validate your known paternal line genealogy and get additional clues for research beyond the historical records
- Help expand the tree - your results may enable the creation of a new branch representing a patrilineal ancestor’s genetic signature that you might be able to identify
- In the future, you will be able to see if your paternal line is related to ancient DNA from archaeological remains, and when your common ancestor lived.