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From: "David Ewing" <>
Subject: Re: [R-M222] Common markers in M222
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 21:16:19 -0700


Sandy Paterson writes:
"Have a look at The Ulster Heritage site, under the O Cathain group.
Participant no 374, Kit Number 105286 who goes by the surname of Henry, is
13,31,18 at DYS 439,449,456 if I'm not mistaken.

If you take a closer look at the whole group, you'll see that 13 at DYS439
is common. Also, 18 at DYS456 crops up fairly frequently. There aren't too
many 31's at DYS449 but this is a group of less than 40 people. Pretty much
impossible? I don't think so."

Sandy, of course there will be many examples of individuals having one or
another of these markers--parallel mutations are not uncommon. And there are
quite a number of Ewings in this cluster who do not have all four of them.
What I think is "pretty much impossible" is to find a non-Ewing with THREE
of them simultaneously. It sounds like you have found one such, named Henry.
I have actually found also a Smith, a Young and a Hodges (or rather, they
have found me), but all have joined the Ewing project and all are presumed
to be descended from Ewing biological ancestors: we have proof on Smith,
Hodges knows his 3rd great grandfather acquired the Hodges name by being
adopted, and Young's grandmother changed the name of his father to her
maiden surname "after grandpa died" under very confusing but suspicious
circumstances. I should very much like to have a look at Henry's haplotype
and perhaps will be able to do so this weekend--if he otherwise matches the
M222+ modal closely, I will contact him and see whether there may have been
a cross-pollination somewhere along the line.

Actually the most "specific" of the Ewing markers is DYS 442 = 11, but this
is not to say nobody else has it. If you take seven M222+ modal values and
add DYS 442 = 11 as the eighth marker, then run this against the public data
bases, you will turn up lots of Ewings--last time I did this on YSearch, I
got more Ewings than all the other surnames put together. And if you start
adding these four "Ewing markers" pairwise to a M222+ modal set, you quickly
start getting almost all Ewings. You yourself have done the experiment of
looking for three of them, and found one guy. Thanks for that.

For me, the lesson in all this is that one marker in isolation tells you
diddly-squat. What really helps to define a branch is a small set of markers
that are off-modal for the trunk.

David Ewing

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