Dawn of a new era in the human existence

Perhaps it is the rain outside or just my nearly being 73 years of age, but I have thought a lot about this idea I am about to put to paper.

Religion has played an enormous role in my life and continues to do so. But I no longer attend Church in a frequent manner as I once did (weekly). My reasons for doing so are many and they are not actually excuses but more that I want to see my Church (Anglican) become something that is not going to happen in my lifetime. There is nothing that I can do to encourage my Church to become as I would really like to see it. I want to continue to give to my Church (and I do tithe monetarily) but I have decided that I will transcribe the Church documents and that has become my commitment the past ten years.

Religion has been one of the strongest influences on society and not just for the last 2000 plus years. The Religion of our forefathers stretches way back into the time before Jesus Christ became the voice and the image of the Christian Church. Judaism dates back six thousand and more years and that is the Foundation of our Christian Church. At least that is what I believe.

The Ten Commandments have been the driving force of our Society and how it goes. But the number of people who think religion; who practice religion is dwindling. But the need for the rule of law continues in our society. How best to continue this rule of law when the logic behind some of the laws is beginning to dim and be less apparent in a more secular world?

As Ancestry approached and went past the ten million mark for number of kits processed and the other testing agencies FT DNA, My Heritage, Living DNA and 23 and Me (being the ones of which I am most familiar) are also being well used by testers, I began to wonder where will this rush for testing take us? GedMatch (a great program that I also use) was utilized in the search for an individual who had murdered a number of people and a successful match made with that person now being incarcerated awaiting trial. Without GedMatch this might not have happened.

Could it be that waiting in the wings is a tool that will help to motivate people to stick more tightly to the rule of law as our religious devotion once did? DNA of every living soul on earth would provide law enforcement agencies with a tool that could quickly identify people who have been abused by crime and no longer able to provide that detail to law enforcement. To me that is a definite plus, no more Jane Doe or John Doe waiting to be identified. On the side of the rule of law, finding the guilty would be considerably easier. Individuals would think twice about the commission of a crime; not leaving some trace of one's DNA is very very difficult. Fingerprinting once served such information but it was very limited compared to one's DNA.

The databases are still small but each country requiring the DNA of every infant born within their borders would soon supply all of that information to law enforcement agencies. It would not cripple this fantastic new industry for genealogists as the DNA Bank for law enforcement purposes would be a separate entity. Are there possible abuses? Yes there are potential abuses. The control of such information needs to be strictly monitored and access limited. Who should control such information? There I am still in thinking mode. Dictatorships do not really obey the rule of human law; they have their own agenda and it tends to be basically self-centered and not people-centered.

My thoughts on this cloudy rainy day as I start to feel more used to my new surroundings on the second floor overlooking the gardens instead of down in the basement where I had the TV News on all of my working time keeping me current with world affairs.

Research Program

My research program is in quite a bit of disarray. Not because of recent events so much but I decided to move from my research room in the basement to upstairs so that I would be near to my husband when he is working. I enjoyed my time in the basement; I accomplished quite a bit in that solitude but now that my surroundings have changed I am also thinking of altering my research program and goals somewhat.

As I approach 73 and it will come soon enough I am thinking of narrowing down my focus once again. I still have a couple of items that I do want to complete that are outstanding and that is the Blake Wills I would like to complete the transcription of all of them including the research that I have done around the people mentioned in the wills and blogging all of that information. It is still a large task but hopefully I will get back to that this coming winter. That is my goal with the Blake family aside from the Newsletter that I publish four times a year which is letting me publish some of my transcription work as well.

For the Pincombe one name study I am not sure of my path at the moment. Being contacted by a member of the Australian Pincombe family and most of them in my age group would be my fifth cousins, I would like to have some interesting stories in the Pincombe Newsletter and perhaps I can persuade some of this group to do that. I am also familiar with the American Pincombe family which is related to me and are my 4th cousins. Another group of my Pincombe family, my 3rd cousins (and some are 2nd) are living in various parts of Canada. Many of these cousins have tested their DNA and I find new matches on a monthly basis lately. But again with the Pincombe Newsletter I am publishing my transcriptions which is important to me.

For the H11 group, my mtDNA, I will just pretty much continue what I am doing with the Newsletter. The now nearly 300 members of this group are from all around the world but principally in Northern Europe/North Eastern Europe/Russia as well as the British Isles and Scandinavia. There are a number of H11 people who live in the United States and are principally representative of the 1772 migration from County Antrim to the Carolinas.

I have a new co-administrator for the Birmingham and Midlands Group. I have done very little for this group as I have moved on from that strong interest in the area as I sorted out my lines that merged in Birmingham. However, he is interested and that is inspiring me somewhat to actually do what I always intended to put the members into the mtDNA haplogroups/subclades. To look at the autosomal results and he is interested in the YDNA. We will see where that leads although I do not intend to be the driving force on that but will assist.

Now my own family history and I continue writing up the descendants of my 2x great grandfather John Blake and 2x great grandmother Ann Farmer. It is an enormous task and I need to do a lot of photography of the fiche in order to insert those images into the stories that I am writing for each one of their children. When I complete John (hopefully by the end of this year) then I will move to Samuel Knight and Louisa Butt (the parents of my great grandmother Maria Jane Knight married to Edward Blake). At the same time for a bit of variety and a place to turn when I hit an impasse (and need a change) I will start working on my mother's families.

Husband in hospital and now home again

Last Sunday night I had to call an ambulance to take my husband to hospital. Three days later and he is improving and finally out of ICU.

Two days on the ward and my husband has returned home. Likely my time on genealogy will be somewhat reduced for awhile as I take on the gardens/lawns. He is doing very well and will soon be back to doing his own genealogy. Although for the moment he is resting a lot.

My audience

My audience always surprises me even if it is bots as some people have said. In the past couple of hours I have had over 400 hits by people living in Russia. It certainly isn't my political views that they are looking at as I rarely publish political posts. It is H11 haplogroup. It shows just how small the world really is. My ancient maternal line finds its resting spot in Ayrshire/Argyllshire Scotland and probably has been there for 8000 years or more but H11 is one of those smaller H haplogroups that has resting spots in specific areas of the world. Likely H11 wintered in the Ice Refuge known as Ukraina and located in the Ossettia/Georgia/Ukraine area from 15 to 20 thousand years ago. From there H11 went mostly westward with some making the great trek through the Scandinavian Peninsula and then across to Scotland and Ireland. Another migration crossed through Poland into Germany, the Netherlands, France and into southern England and perhaps also to Ireland. Another arm of migration went southward into Hungary moving towards Greece and can also be found in Spain. The Spanish arm may have also come south from France. One group remained where they were expanding outward into Russia. But our numbers are small; about 1.5% of H haplogroup but that still numbers in the millions! My H11 project at FT DNA includes quite a few people who live in Russia. I publish an H11 Newsletter quarterly and the latest was just published on the FT DNA website as well as my blog.

H11 Newsletter, Volume 2 Issue 3

H11 Newsletter

Table of Contents

1.   FT DNA Project

2.   Project Statistics

3.   Phylotree

4.   Changes in how a project administrator can view your results

1.   FT DNA Project:

There are now 303 members in our H11 project. Full sequence results are completed on 264 members of the group. Interestingly 212 members of this group have also done Family Finder. Unfortunately it is not possible to visually look at the Family Finder results as that would compromise the privacy of individuals. However, you can look at your matches in Family Finder. 

2.   Project Statistics (yDNA statistics removed):

Combined GEDCOMs Uploaded	47
DISTINCT mtDNA Haplogroups	16
Family Finder	212
Genographic 2.0 Transfers	19
Maternal Ancestor Information	259
mtDNA	275
mtDNA Full Sequence	264
mtDNA Plus	272
mtDNA Subgroups	22
Total Members	303
Unreturned Kits	11

3.   The latest release of the phylotree used by FT DNA was dated 18 Feb 2016:

 

H11 breakdown in the PhyloTree mt:

Within the study group we have members in every sub-haplogroup except H11a5 (and it can be seen in the chart above that the mutation C15040T marks this subgrouping). 

http://www.phylotree.org/tree/R0.htm *

*van Oven M, Kayser M. 2009. Updated comprehensive phylogenetic tree of global human mitochondrial DNA variation. Hum Mutat 30(2):E386-E394. http://www.phylotree.org.

doi:10.1002/humu.20921

4.   Changes in how a project administrator can view your results

FT DNA has upgraded their access to accounts so that the default is Group Access only. If you wish to have your results included in the project then you must grant Limited Access to the Administrator. In the next newsletter I would like to again publish a list of the subclades with reference to the number of members in each of the subclades. I have in some cases further subdivided a subclade on the basis of results.

Any submissions to this newsletter can be submitted to Elizabeth Kipp (kippeeb@rogers.com).