Just a quick update for my R-U152 Thompson paper trail cousins in Indiana. They’ve been joined by our Highest Thomson match in R-BY98312.
In a previous post, I’d put about 2000 years between the Thompsons and the Thomsons, but the Thomson tester has narrowed that gap right down to being in the same branch as my family sitting with the Allen match at roughly 1300AD. I believe that it’s likely that the Thomsons and Thompsons are more closely related, but my cousin’s sample was at the end of its life. FTDNA support said that they struggled to get some reads that they suspect are true but didn’t pass all the quality tests. It’s possible that Thomson/Thompson would form a new branch under BY98312 but the DNA sample is spent.
Both the Thomson and Allen testers are 10 big Y STRs away, although the Thomson test has more STRs to compare to 554 for Thomson vs. 537 for Allen. More STR matches suggest a closer relationship, but STRs can be misleading and I’m not sure how to consider Big Y STRs since there seems to be a lot of variability in results.
Since I haven’t been able to communicate with the Thomson test taker and there no real family tree to compare to that I’ve found, there doesn’t seem to be much benefit in me grabbing the results and looking for those SNPs that were on the edge of being called good. Who would I compare the results to? For some odd reason, the Thomson test doesn’t even show as a Big Y match in the matches area…so I have no real clue what to look for and no one to compare notes with. It kind of highlights how genealogy is also a social/informational exchange.
It’s possible that FTDNA will decide to call some of my cousin’s SNPs good somewhere down the road based on other tests that come in (I’ve seen that with the Elmers), but for the time being this is the end of the trail for the Thom(p)sons.