I’ve just finished reading Ryan Littrell’s book Reunion: A Search for Ancestors, published in 2012. It’s an account of how, following a surprising find amongst old family papers, Ryan set about uncovering the story of his Scottish ancestors. A complete beginner in family history at the time, his interest was purely on his mother’s paternal line, the McDonalds.  He wanted to learn about the clan and whereabouts in Scotland his family originated.

If you have a Scottish clan ancestral line, particularly Clan McDonald/ MacDonald/ Macdonald or simply Clan Donald, then I think you’ll find this book interesting and helpful. It will also be useful to anyone wanting to know more about Y-DNA testing, and how it can be used in genealogy. Alongside this, you’ll see an example of an active Y-DNA surname project, and learn more about how you might be able to use this type of DNA testing in your own research.

None of the above apply to my own family research. For me personally, I realised as I was reading that there was a gap in my knowledge of Scottish history and particularly the Jacobite movement. I’ve since been exploring that, and this, broadly, will be the topic of my next post. Today’s post focuses on the Y-DNA.

After a more general introduction, from Chapter 8, Ryan’s story alternates between his developing knowledge about his own family and the Clan history. Starting with events of around a thousand years ago, the history moves forward in time as Ryan’s own research moves backwards so that at some point the stories meet. The documentary research was hampered by the fact of being spread over several counties in four different American states. At times a professional genealogist was hired to plough through documents in archives local to the places where his family had lived in the States. I did wonder at times why baptism registers were not mentioned. Perhaps they had been used, but they were not included in the account. In the UK, they would have been a starting point for any research prior to 1837.

So it was, really, the way the usual documentary research was used alongside Y-chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) testing that was the more interesting part for me. Used alongside wider Clan history reading, this was key in helping Ryan to home in on his ancestral home and indeed other Y-DNA testers descended from the same people.

How Y-DNA tests work
The main DNA test we use for genealogical research is autosomal. Autosomal testing is useful for finding ancestors and close blood relatives up to around five generations back. Y-DNA is different, and we use it in genealogy for a very specific reason.

Y-DNA is passed from fathers only to their sons. This means every male can be shown to be connected to his father, his paternal grandfather, great grandfather, and so on, right back through time. Passing largely unchanged down the male line, it links back thousands of years.

A Y-DNA test places each tester into a group known as a Haplogroup. Individual Haplogroups are often associated with specific parts of the world. For example Haplogroup E is primarily found in Africa, with some presence in other regions; Haplogroup O is primarily found in East and Southeast Asia. A number of Haplogroups are to be found in Europe. These include Haplogroup R, common in Europe and parts of Asia. At the very top of each of these Haplogroup lines is one man. We will never know the names of these individual men, but each one is the furthest ‘identifiable’ ancestor of every male sharing that broad Haplogroup.

Over time, there are mutations on the Y chromosome. We use these mutations to work out how far back two male testers share a common ancestor. If they both share a particular mutation this is evidence that their common ancestor lived after the mutation occurred. Another way of looking at this is that when mutations occur, a new branch in the Haplogroup occurs. If a mutation occurs for one brother in a family, his descendants will have the mutation but his remaining brothers and their descendants will not.

In this way, as a result of mutations, the wider Haplogroup can increasingly be subdivided, and this enables us to place a tester in ever more specific branches, or Subclades, of the Haplogroup. For example, the Haplogroup R has two branches, or subclades: R1 and R2. R1 is further subdivided into two descendent subclades: R1a and R1b.

Surname Projects
Since Y-DNA follows the direct paternal line, assuming that there have been no adoptions, no elective name changes and no ‘non-paternity events’, the line should coincide exactly with the surname. This has led to the creation of Y-DNA Surname Projects, often run by experienced leaders who may be able to recognise specific branches of the surname based on the very specific subclade as revealed by the Y-DNA test.

It was one of these Y-DNA surname projects that Ryan Littrell joined when he was carrying out his own research. Through them, he learned that the MacDonald clan, also known as Clan Donald, is associated with the R1a and R1b haplogroups. Testers potentially descended from a man named Somerled, who is important in the Clan’s history, are associated with the R1a haplogroup, while The Macdonalds of Sutherland, for example, belong to the R1b haplogroup, specifically the R-FTA93010 subclade.

As his connection to the McDonalds was through his mother rather than his father, Ryan was not able to test his own Y-DNA for this project. Instead, he needed to find a male member of his mother’s McDonald family who was prepared to test. His mother’s uncle was happy to do so, and it was his Y-DNA test results that Ryan worked with thereafter. Working with the surname group, these test results enabled Ryan to connect with a small number of testers whose origins could be traced to a specific village in the Scottish Highlands. Through connections and visits to the area, more McDonald men offered to test and they too shared the same subclade.

Ultimately, this combination of documentary research, Y-DNA testing, reading about the history of the clan and speaking with distant cousins who had grown up in the area, enabled the small group of distant cousins to work out where they fit into the history of the Clan.

You will have to read the book yourself to find out how, but I hope this account has enabled you to work out whether firstly this book and secondly Y-DNA testing might help you in your research.