In this blog post I want to review seven STR-based Y-DNA results for members that have joined the Pike DNA Project since the previous overview that was sent to our mailing list in June 2019. You'll note that I have been tardy in providing updates lately. This past year has been a challenging one for me, owing largely to an ongoing family crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic hasn't helped either.
Not to dwell on those matters though, let me now describe our project's new members' results. As I've done before, I will discuss these in conjunction with the genetic groups of our project rather than in chronological order. The numerical marker values for each person's results are shown on our project's page for Test Results (links that jump to the results of individual groups are embedded in the text below).
Group 1
Within our project's Group 1, we have a single new result, for Colin (kit number B637431) whose Pike lineage traces back to a Thomas Pike who lived in the town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, where he died in 1751. The earliest known record pertaining to Thomas is dated 09 August 1712 when he and his wife Elizabeth baptised their son Henry at Malmesbury. In June of 1713 Thomas was admitted as a commoner/freeman of the Old Corporation of Malmesbury.
Thomas appears to have been the first Pike to reside at Malmesbury. Where he came from is currently not known, but given the presence of a Pike family five miles away at Tetbury it was reasonable to wonder if that might be Thomas' place of origin.As it happens, our project already had a member whose Pikes came from Tetbury, namely Robert (kit 194314). When Colin's Y-DNA results became available, they did not match those of Robert. However, they did match those of our project's Group 1, which has members whose ancestral origins are widespread. Within the British Isles they are as far flung as Cork, London, and Derbyshire, but there is an emerging pattern whereby lots of people in the group trace back to Hampshire and nearby counties. Hence it appears that this cluster has its earliest origins in that area. The two earliest instances that we know of for Group 1 place it at Whiteparish Hampshire as well as at Newbury Berkshire, both in the 16th century.
What this means for Colin and his ancestor Thomas Pike is that it now seems unlikely that Thomas came from Tetbury. We can also rule out connections with the various other Pikes lines whose Y-DNA does not fall within Group 1, such as the families in Devon, Dorset and Somerset that have so far joined our project. Having found a genetic connection with Pike families to the south and east of Wiltshire, that is where Colin can now direct more of his attention.
Group 2
We have three new results that fit into Group 2, for which many members trace their Pike ancestry to eastern Newfoundland, and thence to Poole in Dorset.
One of them is for Fred (kit 910724) whose Pike lineage traces back to a Thomas Pike of Carbonear, Newfoundland. This particular Thomas Pike is also my most distant known Pike ancestor, as shown in my lineage. Fred and I descend from two different sons of Thomas' son Thomas: Fred descends from Moses, while I descend from Henry, such that Fred and I are fifth cousins to each other. So it came as no surprise that Fred's DNA results are a strong match with mine and the other members of Group 2.
Note that Fred and I are not a perfect match on our results though. On markers #51 and #81 Fred has values that have not yet been observed within any other members of our project's Group 2. This indicates that these two markers experienced mutations somewhere along the portion of Fred's lineage that came after the portion shared with me. In this case, since we know when Fred's line and mine separated, we can begin to isolate these mutations. That is to say, we can conclude that they each occurred either with Fred, or his father, or grandfather, ... or 3x great grandfather Moses, but not before that (because before that Fred's line overlaps with those of me and my father Angus, who share the same values on these markers as the remainder of the members of Group 2).
The second new result in Group 2 is for Kevin (kit IN87489) whose father Patrick (kit 504850) had previously tested his Y-DNA. Their Pike lineage traces back to an Edward Pike who was born about 1810, got married in 1829 at Harbour Grace in Newfoundland, and in 1879 was buried at Pinware (sometimes written as Pied Noir in early records) in Labrador. Something that is particularly interesting about Kevin's results is that they are not identical to his father Patrick's results. Looking at the chart of results shown for Group 2, we see that they differ on marker #49 where Patrick has a value of 22 (as do most members of our project) whereas Kevin has a value of 23. This is an example, not just of a mutation happening, but one for which we can precisely pinpoint when it happened, namely with Kevin.
Curiously, this value of 23 on marker #49 has also been found in the results for me and my father (kits 23996 and N21510). And since my 5th cousin Fred who is mentioned above has a value of 22, it must be that this marker also mutated along my father's line, somewhere between him and his 2x great grandfather Henry. What I want to point out here is that marker #49 has mutated on two separate occasions, in two different parts of the greater family tree of our Group 2.
Parallel mutations such as this can cause confusion when trying to interpret DNA results. For instance, because Kevin, my father Angus, and I all share the same value of 23 on marker #49, it looks as though the three of us should belong close to each other on the family tree. But that's a conclusion that relies on the mutation having happened only once, which in this case it did not. Having test results from as many Pikes as possible helps to sort out situations like this. So too does having results from the advanced BigY test, which I'll say a few words about towards the end of this blog post.
The last of the three new results for Group 2 is for Alex (kit IN69253), whose Pike/Pyke lineage also involves Labrador, and Carbonear before that. Specifically, Alex traces back to a Nathaniel Pike who was born about 1809, likely at Carbonear where he married in 1837 and had three children baptised in the 1840s. Nathaniel is one of a few Pikes from Carbonear who moved to Red Bay in Labrador at about this time. Incidentally, Red Bay was awarded UNESCO World Heritage Status in 2013 in recognition of the whaling station established there by the Basques in the 1500s.
As yet we do not know how Alex and his ancestor Nathaniel are related to the other Pikes of our Group 2. One interesting observation about Alex's DNA is that he has a distinctive value of 29 on the 21st of the Y-DNA markers. Up until now we had only seen a value of 30 for this marker in our Group 2. With just the one instance of the value of 29, we cannot yet say whether it is a recent mutation or if it has persisted for several generations of Alex's line.
Group 6
Peter (kit IN32180) has limited knowledge of his paternal ancestry. His father Lawrence was born in 1913 in New Zealand to Irene Scottow Phillips, but who Lawrence's father was is not known. Peter tested 111 STR-based markers and his strongest matches are with the members of our project's Group 6, some of whom match on as many as 107 of the 111 markers. Although our project includes some Pike lines in New Zealand, we have not previously found any Pikes from Group 6 there. So the task now is to try to find some branch of the Group 6 family (many of whom trace back to a James Pike who lived in Massachusetts in the 17th century) that was in New Zealand around 1912.
Group 7
John (kit number 929521) traces his Pike lineage back to a John Pike who was born in North Carolina around 1795 and died in Alabama in 1852. Two other descendants of this ancestral John Pike have previously joined our project, and their results are a close match to those of newcomer John. As we've seen in other examples, the match is not perfect. In this case we see that John has a distinctive value of 18 on marker #32, whereas all other results within Group 7 show a value of 16. Coupled with the knowledge of how John's line fits into the family tree, forming a branch with only three generations, we can determine that a mutation has taken place on marker #32 within the three most recent generations of John's line.
Incidentally, Group 7 also contains a member with an ancestor Phillip Pike who settled in Maine in the very early 1700s and who is believed to have come from Manchester in Lancashire. As yet we do not know how John's line in North Carolina and Alabama is connected to this other line.
Group 10
James (kit number 285064) descends from a William Peak who lived from 1825 to 1882 at County Down, Ireland. James' DNA results strongly match those within our project's Group 10, many of whom have the surname McPike or a variant thereof. Of those members of Group 10 who have traced their ancestry to the British Isles, so far all have traced back to Ulster.
The BigY Test
In the past year our project has also had several members receive results from the advanced BigY test, which analyses not just the standard 111 STR-based markers but also several million SNP-based markers on the male Y chromosome. STR-based markers can occasionally have parallel mutations (as we noted above in Group 2) as well as back-mutations (such as when a mutation has the effect of reversing a mutation that occurred on the same marker a few generations earlier in a lineage), and these can make it difficult to reconstruct family trees. SNP-based mutations are far less prone to these issues, and so they are a powerful tool in determining how the branches of a family tree belong together on the tree.
I'm very excited about the BigY test, its utility for showing the structure of family trees, and also the potential that it has for estimating ages of trees and their branches. I will be showcasing the BigY test in a subsequent blog post.
