You may be interested in the information at these other locations.
Both can be downloaded from the Family Tree DNA Library.
The Y chromosome—found only in men—has many locations where a short, presumably meaningless pattern is repeated over and over. Tests (STR tests) count the number of repeats at each location. The counts usually remain the same from father to son. Rarely a count increases or decreases by one. When comparing two people, the number of matches, or mismatches, can be used to prove, or disprove, a relatively recent common ancestor. Even with a large number of mismatches, the remaining matches can be used to infer, often with high confidence, the common ancestral branch in the distant past. From time to time there are separate tests (SNP tests) that become available to confirm ancient branch points.
In the popular book Genome, Matt Ridley writes, “Historians may lament the lack of written records to document the distant, prehistoric past, but there is a written record, in the genes, and a spoken one too, in the very vocabulary of human language.”
My grandfather came from Hungary. The Hungarian language is related to Finnish, Estonian and some smaller groups. One of those smaller groups is the Saami (sometimes described as Lapps), whose Y-DNA haplogroup distribution is presented in both of the references listed above. The related language groups, aside from Hungarian, share a common haplogroup, currently labeled N1c. But Hungarian does not fit the pattern. The data in Semino et al.1 indicate that modern Hungarians are a melting pot of Y-DNA, similar to their neighbors in Central Europe, with little or no contribution from N1c.
| Y-DNA Haplogroup | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nomenclature | Current | R1b | R1a | I | E1b1b1 | N1c |
| Semino et al.1 | Eu18 | Eu19 | Eu7 | Eu4 | Eu13,14 | |
| Hungary Percent1 | 13% | 60% | 11% | 9% | 0% | |
So I was curious about which haplogroup my 12-marker YSTR results would best fit. It turned out that 11 of the 12 markers matched the most common results for haplogroup R1b. There was little doubt that I and my Hungarian grandfather belonged to Haplogroup R1b, which is predominant in western Europe. In fact R1b is especially prevalent among Irish with Gaelic surnames (see my page for the Meagher/Maher/Mahar surname project.). Ironically, my Hungarian grandfather's distant paternal ancestor was more related to my Irish ancestors than to the ancient Hungarians and their language cousins.
One of my first twelve markers is an outlier. That marker is DYS390, which has a value of 22, rather than the most common value 24. The 22 value might provide a clue about a distant ancestor. Recently new “deep clade” SNP tests have become avalable at Family Tree DNA. I added these SNP tests, which confirmed that I am in haplogroup R1b1b2h (formerly R1b1c10). I then became convinced by David Faux that additional STR markers would be helpful. So I upgraded.
It is a bit of a mystery why, unlike the other Uralic language groups, haplogroup N has pretty much disappeared among modern Hungarians. My grandfather's R1b is a small part of that mystery. Certainly R1b would have been in the area before Hungarians arrived over one thousand years ago. On the other hand, the assimilation could have happened much more recently. Toth is a very common Hungarian name, not quite like Smith or Jones, but almost that. It's easy to imagine a relatively recent immigrant to Hungary adopting the surname. Maybe the YDNA tests will offer some clues.