DNA Testing
Y-DNA
In 2005 my father read about Y-DNA testing as a way to help you with your genealogy and immediately sent away for the test. The Y-DNA can help you, if you are a male, follow your family tree back along your paternal line (your surname line) since Y-DNA is passed on from father to son virtually unchanged. So, if you match YDNA with someone relatively close and you have the same Surname, it is very likely that you have descended through a common ancestor at some point in time. If you are a female, you will have to get a male relative with your surname to test for you.
My father became an administrator of the Garrison DNA Project and after enough Garrison's from around the country had tested, he was able to verify his genealogical paper trail he had gathered starting with himself and leading back through his paternal Garrison ancestors to a German man who sailed with the Dutch in 1631 to manage Killian Van Rensselaer's farm and his name was Gerrit Jansen von Oldenburg (Gerrit Jansen from Oldenburg).
By the end of 2005, there were about 6 Garrison's that tested and matched my father's YDNA had and also had paper trails that led directly to the known sons of Gerrit Jansen. Furthermore, this DNA proof of lineage along with the genealogical research (paper trail) was used to dissuade others who were stating that one of the sons of Gerrit Jansen, known as Old Jacob Gerritsen, was actually an aristocrat who sailed from France. That group had a lot invested in Old Jacob Gerritsen being their ancestor and the YDNA proof against them was so overwhelming that they could not deny it. To this day, I still see some trees on Ancestry that have this line all wrong!
My father passed away in late 2007 and he asked me to take over the genealogy work and to help take over as an administrator of part of the Garrison DNA project. The Garrison DNA Project had grown so big and had many different unrelated Garrison lines. So, we know have three administrators for the Garrison DNA Project.
This is a portion of the preceding figure from the Garrison DNA Project. This portion usually describes the earliest know paternal line ancestor that the person being tested knows. My father's test is the red highlighted colored one and min is the yellow one below. On his he shows that his earliest know Garrison Ancestor is Gerrit Jansen van Oldenburg who lived from 1600 - 1661 then Jacob and then Abraham.
His Y DNA haplogroup is R-Z283. If you look below his you will see that my haplogroup is R-YP3896. This is because I had further testing done to determine my terminating haplogroup. R-M512 is further back in time then later on it becomes R-Z283 (through mutations) and then R-Z282 then R-Y2395 then finally to R-YP3896. Everybody in this group would be R-YP3896 if they would test with a BIG Y.
Notice the kit highlighted with the greenish blue color? Their oldest know ancestor is Lemuel Garrison born in 1750 and died in 1818. They dont have a paper trail to a Garrison before that. We have not been able to find one. But since we had that kit tested for the R-YP3896 SNP and it tested positive, we proved that they descend through Gerrit Jansen von Oldenburg as well.
The portion of the table is the part that is just to the right of the haplogroup and is a list of all the STR (Short Tandem Repeats) that make up each individual test.
Notice that each rows numbers are almost all exactly the same. Where a kit's allele value happens to differ from the MODAL's value, the value will be colored. In the example you can see some mutations are purple and a couple near the bottom are pink.
When you have enough members tested then the Modal value for each column is thought to be the most accurate representation of the common ancestor for the entire group. Kits's that all have a common mutation are more likely to share a common ancestor along one of the many branches from that oldest common ancestor.