Coming Soon: Y-DNA Haplogroups for Family Finder

[ArmandoR1b]

A few weeks ago I reread the story about Bennet Greenspan calling a genetecist about using DNA testing to prove or disprove a common ancestor between two people. The genetecists reaction is that he gets call from crazy people like him all the time. Just think about how many people there are in the world and in comparison how few people there are with a Big Y test at FTDNA or how few there are in YFull with a WGS test. We are the crazy people. There ought to be a way to calculate how many people would have to be tested in order for almost everyone to get a match with a MRCA within the past 1,000 years. Maybe by calculating the world male population in the year 1,000? I think that would have to be the amount of crazy people. Of course once something is that common it isn't crazy anymore but I doubt that there will ever be two desendants from most males that lived 1,0000 years ago will ever be tested. I hope I am wrong. I hope there is enough "crazy" people in the world for most people to have a match with a common ancestor from the last 1,000 years.

You can't compare people from different backgrounds. Like I know, roughly speaking, most of the descendants of my last genealogically known ancestors about 300 years ago and I also know that this branch is highly likely to be the only surviving from the last 500 years. This means, there a few dozen or so males of my terminal branch from the last 500 years.
On the other hand, I have genetic relatives which are not just emigrants to America, where testing is way more common and popular, but which last paternal ancestor from 500 years ago has many times as many descendants. That completely skews the odds in favour of those lineages, with hundreds and hundreds of male descendants in America vs. my branch, which has some American descendants too, but only a handful and some got tested already.

There is no one to test, in the USA, for the last 500 years beyond those few, this handful of my known relatives. The pool of potential testers is way smaller than for those relatives with very succesful colonial lineages with those hundreds of male descendants.

Therefore even if there is more testing, it won't be distributed equally. I know that very well since my main haplogroup has a couple of colonial founders, of which some get regularly new testers, kind of every 2-3 months since the rate of BigY testing improved. Therefore what the higher rate of BigY testing in the USA primarily those is enlarging the already existing lineages representation, whereas new lineages, especially those with very few or no American emigrants, grow either not at all or at a much, much slower pace.
I got a lot of interesting STR matches which represent Central European lineages with just one single tester, which are not willing or no longer able to upgrade. Its great that the big successful projects recruit so many testers, but its also kind of annoying to see ever more testers with the same surname (many of them already have more than a dozen or so), whereas all those single STR tester lineages stay behind and remain completely untested (BigY or comparable NGS) so far.

In one case I couldn't believe that his prominent German lineage being so undertested, but then I looked through the trees and apparently while there are a lot, really a lot of descendants, there are very few from the direct paternal line, even though it emigrated to America in the 18th century. How many male descendants exist of a lineage, even if its an American colonial one, can be extremely different from one to the next...

I was already aware of the points, not the details, you are making. The point I had was that DNA testing would have to become really popular worldwide in order for almost all, not all, people to have a match that has a MRCA from the last 1,000 years even with your example. It's not even "popular" in the U.S. On the other hand sports are a lot more popular, and not just in the U.S., and if even a portion of what is spent on being a sports fan around the world were spent on Big Y testing, or similar, then I think most people, maybe not even almost all but most, would have a match with an MRCA even in situations you are talking about. But we are the "crazy" people and they are not. I never implied that we could reach a saturation point that every single person in the world has a match that shares an MRCA within the last 1,000 years. I am actually surprised that people are still getting Big Y tests. I hope that the numbers continue to grow for many years. In the meantime there will always be a significant percentage of people without a match with an MRCA from the last 1,000 years.