Y-DNA Test Turned up a Perfect Match with Different Last Name

[rsel]

My two principal matches have a genetic distance of
5 & 8 at 111 markers
4 & 7 at 67 markers

Philip,
With those GD's you could be looking long before surnames :-)   I don't know what your Y Halogroup is, but assuming its under r1b, look to join the 'R R1b ALL Subclades'  project, and ask the admin's on there, they can give you some really good advice on the timelines.  They will also recommend doing the BIG Y test as well, to really lock down where your branch belongs :-)

Richard

[Twdyr]

Richard,
Y DNA is R-M269
Thanks for the advice and suggestions, I will follow them up.

Philip

[Craclyn]

R-M269 is one of the most common haplogroups in Europe. It was formed tens of thousands of years ago. If you want to narrow down to a more specific group then you may want to consider Y-700. The kit I manage is also R-M269 and it moved to a split about 500 years ago as a result of Y-700, but like you has no matches at GD 0 at Y-67 or Y-111.

[Twdyr]

I will go with Y-700 - instead of a holiday, thanks to Covid-19 !  It seems a positive way forward, I have applied to join FTDNA R 1b All subclades, as Richard has previously suggested.

Thank you both for your time and good advice
Philip

[Craclyn]

Be aware that it will not help much with matches until more people test, but it will help you figure out where you fit in on the overall haplotree.

[larkspur3]

Thank you all for jumping in and supplying information. Here's where we are:
My brother Robert Lovett, matches 7 other people by the last name of Lovett. We also can trace our direct ancestry back to 1640 or so so we know we are not the NPE. His test was only Y-DNA-37. Patrick Terry matches that and has done much further testing. My brother has not run a Family Finder (autosomal) test but I have and Patrick and I have no overlap. Would it necessarily be different if my brother did the test? Patrick and my brother are listed as genetic distance 1 on the Lovett surname project, which is what led us to believe the NPE was somewhat recent.

Laura

[rsel]

Thank you all for jumping in and supplying information. Here's where we are:
My brother Robert Lovett, matches 7 other people by the last name of Lovett. We also can trace our direct ancestry back to 1640 or so so we know we are not the NPE. His test was only Y-DNA-37. Patrick Terry matches that and has done much further testing. My brother has not run a Family Finder (autosomal) test but I have and Patrick and I have no overlap. Would it necessarily be different if my brother did the test? Patrick and my brother are listed as genetic distance 1 on the Lovett surname project, which is what led us to believe the NPE was somewhat recent.

Laura

Hi Laura,  a GD level 1 match at Y-37 is going to be a long time in the past, at least 1,000 years ago.  At that age range, an autosomal test will not find any link either.   Based on what I have learnt, to be brutally honest a Y37 test is never going to show you very much at all if you are looking for actual close relatives, it will only give a basic picture of the migration line for your family.

Richard

[larkspur3]

Richard, thanks for that honest assessment! Here's what's leaving me muddled, however.

Of the 6 people who match my brother, we have linked 5 of them to our family tree within about 8 generations or less. Most of these are people that have a genetic distance of 2 or 3. So it's a bit hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that the person with the genetic distance of 1 could link up to our tree as much as 1,000 years ago. The only place he and my brother do not match is in CDY, which mutates fast and is listed as a range of numbers, and none of 7 matches happen to have the same range for the SNP CDY. Go figure!

cheers,
Laura

[rsel]

Of the 6 people who match my brother, we have linked 5 of them to our family tree within about 8 generations or less. Most of these are people that have a genetic distance of 2 or 3. So it's a bit hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that the person with the genetic distance of 1 could link up to our tree as much as 1,000 years ago. The only place he and my brother do not match is in CDY, which mutates fast and is listed as a range of numbers, and none of 7 matches happen to have the same range for the SNP CDY. Go figure!

cheers,
Laura

I you can have close matches as well, but unless you test at the highest level you will never know for sure how :-)  Like mentioned above if you join the various projects on FTDNA the experts there can provide real advice.  I know from my matches (at Big Y) each variant they say is on average about 83 years, my understanding is that the lower level tests that time range goes up quite quickly.

Richard