Sinclair DNA - A Few Notes on Lineage Smugness

The fact that you belong to a lineage in the project should make you no more certain that you’re an ‘of the cloth’ Sinclair than the person who’s not in a lineage. It could simply mean that your oldest known ancestor from the 1600’s was very fertile and many of his children survived to have lots of sons. Meanwhile, your oldest known ancestor may have taken his surname from his laird in Scotland. Unless you continue to do very solid records work, you may never know.

The number of people in a lineage, examined with an eye towards the genetic spread of the alleles, can point to an older lineage and a chance of being an ancient lineage of the family.

Other clues in the Markers

A couple years ago, I created a chart that examined our participants only based on those markers known to mutate at a rate of .02 or slower. This is a brutally honest way to look at things. I allowed a mutation rate of only 2 markers within this new set as a definition of relatedness. As a result of this new way of cutting our results, I was surprised to see that not much changed from the previous way of examining results. Two lineages that had previously been separate were joined. Those who weren’t part of a lineage before remained outside of a lineage. What this exercise proved was that our lineages were formed long ago.

If, in this new chart, you found yourself in one of the larger lineages it is slightly more likely that you’re a part of the cadet branches of the Scottish family. I can say this with a mild degree of certainty due to the likelihood of so many people randomly connecting being very slim. But this connection in no way rules out those who are not in a lineage. Our E3b participant, for instance, whose line almost certainly acquired the name from the lands in Normandy, can claim to be of a lineage once documents tell us how far back he connects. And to that point, I believe we’ll eventually arrive at a point where documents and DNA will be completely inseparable in defining a lineage, as they should be.

Keep in mind as you read the above, that the definition of a cadet branch of our family is now completely out the window as these were defined by R.W. Saint-Clair in his Saint-Clairs of the Isles, and that books is now likely proven somewhat flawed in it's approach to our ancient connections.

Also, we must all keep in mind that we have almost zero participation in England. We have no participation from South Africa, none of value from France or the Netherlands. We don't have any Sinclair surname participants from Norway. So it's entirely too early to say you don't belong to a lineage. We may just not have found that lineage yet. Stay tuned.

Hopefully, you’re seeing how complex all this can be and hopefully everyone in the family will see why we must all relax a little regarding this dream of connecting to Earl William of Rosslyn’s line. Our story is much more complex than that and, certainly, far more interesting.


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