Tretower Genealogy Research

If you look at some of the markers tested for descendants of William Vaughan and John Vaughan — or the handful of seemingly unrelated Vaughans that match them closely– you will find several DYS values that are rare for R1b Haplogroup men.

I found, earlier this year, a study done that looked at over 3,000 men of Haplogroup R1b (which would include the subgroups).  The chart looked at the percentage of each that had a certain value for each DYS marker.  So if Marker 442 had 1500 men with the value of 12, then 50% would have that value at marker 442.  What the study shows is what the most common marker values for the R1b Haplogroup are.  There are very little variety in the numbers — most values are no further then 4 numbers away from those at the other end of the spectrum for that value.  Since there is such a tight set of values for most markers — and some markers have higher mutation rates than others, so they have more variety– you can calculate how a person’s markers compare with the ‘average’ for R1b.  I looked at the values for our William and John Vaughan, and then compared the “rare” values to the other Vaughans tested in the Vaughan study.  Here are the results:

List of DYS markers that less than 20% of R1b men have:
CDYb =39     20% of R1b
464a =14     15.1% of R1b
CDYa=35     19.9% of R1b
442=11         12.3% of R1b
385b=16         2.5% of R1b
392=15         .3% of R1b

Note in particular, the last two, that is 2 POINT 5 percent: 2.5% and even rarer, POINT 3 percent .3%  That is an extremely rare value for R1b.  All of our Vaughans that match close (including those other Vaughans that match DNA but are not of William or John’s line) share these values, all have the 392 value of 15, so it is NOT a recent mutation.  And all of these values are NOT shared with the other Vaughans.  In other words, only our Vaughans and those who match close to them have these values, no other Vaughan line has 392 as 15 at all, only our guys and the ones who are close genetic links.  What this means is that the 11 Vaughans in the study that share these values obviously share a common ancestor.  It looks very likely that the rest of those in the study don’t share a common ancestor, or at least not one for over 1,000 years.  The above values can be thought of as the defining values for our block of Vaughans — William and John descendants, Thomas H. Vaughan’s line, James Vaughan of Laurens Co. SC, Wilson Vaughan of Hawkins Co. TN, Ben Vaughan of Calboun Co. MS and Matthew Vaughan, the probable son of William and Elizabeth Shields Vaughan.  These men all come from a common line, and the rare marker values confirm this.  If our Vaughans all had the ‘common’ values for R1b like most of the other 3,299 men in the R1b study, it could be a coincidence.  But William and John’s DNA has a few places that is rare enough that less than one in 500 R1b men have this value.

I hope someday that these rare markers will help us identify who William and John’s ancestors were.

Eddie Davis