I’ve been talking about various Y DNA matches in Denmark for…well the whole time I’ve kept an online journal. In 2010 testers from Denmark appeared in my matches at YHRD, SMGF/Ancestry, Genebase and Ybase.
It was exciting in 2015 when I got permission to further test one of the Cumberland men who had ancestors in Denmark (Jensen) who was a 458.2 like me. This January I quietly ordered a Big Y test for Jensen around the time I ordered my test for the U152 Thompsons to keep some of those promises I made and take advantage of the testing before the samples could no longer be used.
For years, I’ve wondered where Jensen would fall on the Y DNA family tree. I suspected he would be somewhere between my group and Lund, our tester from Norway who branches off at R-ZP85. Currently there are two branches under R-ZP85, one with Lund and Rathburn and one that contains multiple families and branches which the Elmers, Lunsfords and Knowtons are on (among many others). My hunch was that Jensen would be at the top of my side of R-ZP85 as an early branch, possibly all by himself.
That is not the case.
Jensen is well down the Lund/Rathburn branch under R-ZP85 currently labelled under the shared SNP R-PH1934 aka R-ZP193 which represents about 14 SNPs in a line. In the block diagram for R-ZP85, you can see R-PH1934 now Jensen, Rathburn and Lund with 2 branches, and on the right the branch the Elmers are on under R-FGC78528 with 22 branches.
Diving in further, Jensen is more closely related to Lund than the Rathburn tester (and another tester in a branch with Rathburn). Jensen shares 6 more SNPs with Lund on a branch currently designated by R-PH2557.
Lund and Jensen have an average of 8 private SNPs between them. DIY age estimating says 8 X 83 would be 664 years. Normally you would add the number of SNPs multiplied by years together for each tester and then divide by the number of testers, but that would just get us back to 664 years. Without knowing the age of the testers to average out a birth year, we’ll go with 1950. That gets us to 1286 AD which, if you read my recent post on the U152 Thompson Big Y results, should seem familiar.
We learn something with every Big Y test and getting to the 1300’s for a match for Lund is an excellent end to this testing saga and a long time in the making. I only wish our Jensen tester had lived to see it.
Getting in the wayback machine.
Here’s an early post in 2010 looking at my matches, with some from Denmark: https://wanderingtrees.com/2010/11/28/migrations-3-other-databases/
A post in 2014 referencing DYS458.2 and Jensen’s DF95 test: https://wanderingtrees.com/2014/07/05/ball-3-results-from-denmark/
A post that talks about DYS520 = 21 in the Y67 panel and cumberlands that match that value being Lunsford, Knowlton the Elmers and Jensen: https://wanderingtrees.com/2015/03/22/y67-results-getting-from-point-a-to-point-b/
Then this post later in 2015 where I decided I wanted to get more testing for Jensen…possibly even a Big Y: https://wanderingtrees.com/2015/06/22/fathers-day-y-mile-markers/
I’ll round out my Wayback references with ZP125 conversations where I ate crow about my dates and theories and eluded to Jensen’s impending Big Y results: https://wanderingtrees.com/2020/02/09/zp125-conversations/