You have exemplified why a DNA test for a surname such as Etchells is as relevant as a bucketshop heritage peddled by fraudsters.
When a surname group which is formed from a habitation name such as Etchells there are many thousands if not millions of primary sources to that name.
In other words there is not just one genetic lineage but thousands of genetic lineages.
It follows that to get any worthwhile data the DNA database will have to be large to enable to determine if one lineage is associated with other lineages for the same surname.
The most likely scenario is that large numbers of different unrelated lineages will develop from the one location and that those unrelated lineages will probably be contained in other surname groupings.
I've seldom seen someone miss a point so spectacularly.
There is more than one reason why surname projects with organizations like FTDNA are dominated by people in the US. The one we seem to be neglecting is that people in the US are much more often
looking for their recent ancestral origins than people in the UK or even Canada are. (Canada was, overall, settled much later than the US, so we have less difficulty pinpointing our origins in England or elsewhere.)
What these people don't know is precisely this:
which Etchells clan, say, they belong to. Their ancestor arrived on a boat, maybe as recently as 1800ish, and there they are stuck. Nobody is looking to prove that all people named Etchells in the world belong to one big extended family, for the love of Pete. They are not looking for linkages between lineages; they are looking for
their own lineage.
Even though I was able to find my mother's father's father's origin in England, after much sweat, I found myself still stuck. It turned out that the surname he had passed down to her was completely fake. I am 100% confident that I have identified him as a person registered at birth in Cornwall as Hill. The ages and names of the two individuals (my gr-grfather and his doppelgänger), the various names in their families, the fact that Mr. Hill had a sister whose given names included my gr-grfather's fake surname which the Hill sister also adopted, the complete lack of any overlap between them in time, all made this indisputable. But whether his father was really Mr. Hill is the question. Maybe there was some truth to his tale about his fake surname (that no one ever knew was fake) being his real father's name.
So I seemed to have an either/or question: either he was a genetic Hill, or he was a genetic X, his adopted surname. X is a very uncommon name; not much hope of finding a match, or of being able to rule it out by the lack of a match. But Hill? Several hundred of them in the FTDNA project, mostly in the US with unknown British origins. I should be able to rule Hill in or out.
This raised the possibility of YDNA testing producing two good outcomes: me confirming that my gr-grfather was a Hill, by matching one or more people with that surname, and someone in the US finding the source of their surname, i.e. a source of themself, by matching my Hill YDNA for which I have a paper trail back to Cornwall/Devon.
The Cornish being the great emigrators, it seemed likely that if my man was a Hill, some relation would have ended up in the US, likely having emigrated in connection with mining.
And lo and behold, yes. I got a very close YDNA match (probability 75% at 12 generations, 99% at 24 generations) with someone in the US whose grandfather had emigrated from the same area of Cornwall in the 1840s, in connection with mining ... whose name is not Hill. No, it's the surname of my great-grandfather's paternal grandmother, who was married to Hill. Which doesn't count at all.
But it does do one thing for me: any doubt that might have persisted that my fake-named gr-grfather was the Mr. Hill from Cornwall whom I had identified as his real identity is pretty much dispelled by this match. The coincidence of matching YDNA with someone whose line, for generations, lived 20 miles away from where my Mr. Hill was born would be way too much.
This development doesn't actually help me find the ancestors, but it confirms I am at least on the right track -- the match is from exactly the geographic location where I expected it to be.
Obviously the idea that all the Hills in the British Isles are related, and my maternal grandfather's family's YDNA will prove that, is an utter nonsense and it would never have occurred to me to even think of that.
I'm sure it's nice to have one's ancestral lines all traceable back to Domesday and beyond just by finding the dusty papers or pixels to show them. Some of us aren't that lucky and do not yet know what we are looking for, even. That's what we are after finding out: what to look for, and where.
I didn't
expect to create another insane mystery when I had the YDNA tested; I hoped to confirm or deny the work I had done, and probably help somebody make the trans-Atlantic leap to find their own ancestors if they had not yet been able to. So far I've muddied the waters, but with info that is essential to my ongoing search.
