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Add fields for maternal and paternal Haplogroups

Divon Mordechai Lan

September 04, 2012 05:03

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With the exponential growth of Genetic Genealogy (driven by companies like 23andMe), many of the hard core genealogy community (i.e. Geni's power users, like myself) are getting tested. It would be great if you could add fields in the profile for paternal and maternal Haplogroup, and propagation of that information up and down the maternal and paternal lines. Here how I envision it:

(1) A user enters his Haplogroups (just maternal for woman, maternal and paternal for men), from a pull down menu of all Haplogroups (this is because many Haplogroups have several different names - it's important that users select the correct one and not enter free text)

(2) Propagate the Haplogroup across the entire tree - along maternal and paternal lines (for example, my father, father's father, father's father's father etc will all have the same paternal haplogroup as me, as well as all male descendants of these people).

(3) When a haplogroup is propagated to a Geni user, notify him of its source (i.e. which user entered it) and request permission to update his profile with it

(4) Highlight errors based on conflicting haplogroups - for example, if two users, that our both male-line descendants of an ancestor, have different paternal haplogroups, there is an error somewhere in the tree.

Haplogroup propagation is an extremely powerful tool in figuring out the correct tree, esp in cases where records are missing or ambiguous. It can settle the correct option between several competing educated guesses.

Thanks!

2 comments

• 0
  
  Steven Patrick Frank June 27, 2014 13:24

  With Geni's partnership with Familytreedna, adding haplogroup fields to profiles makes a lot of sense.  Projects are an unwieldy way to document something that is easily placed in a single data field.  We wouldn't document year of birth by forcing people to add profiles to a project for that year.  Plus it depends on some other user approving the profile's entry.  Making a field in the profiles would simplify haplogroup tagging and allow people to search their own trees by haplogroup.  I often use haplogroups of my non-direct lines in research so I can rule out connections between possible families.  Having this as a data field rather than just a project association would be helpful in that regard.

  I would however not be in favor of propegating a haplogroup entry down the tree.  Someone's going to assign a haplogroup to Adam and screw up all of Geni if that happens.  Though if someone enters a haplogroup for your direct line, notifying users of that would be simple and useful.

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  Brant Boucher July 18, 2014 18:30

  I have been searching for haplogroups online for some time, awaitiing the results of my own DNA test. Given the low rate (1%-4% in many communities) of "non paternal" events , i.e., adoptions, name changes, children conceived by an unknown father or a father other than the recognized father, etc., it is reasonably safe to assume that some lineages are sound if multiple tests have predicted the same haplogroup, but clearly results has to be confirmed for each generation (and child) in a line of descent.

  There is a need to distinguish between "predicted" and "confirmed" haplogroups--the testee is the only person whose haplogroup is nearly 100% certain without triangulation and sound genealogy. To support a confirmed haplogroup a researcher should be able to provide the source(s) of the tests which support it. It might be useful to have predicted haplogroups as well provided they are clearly labelled tentative. The information needed is the testing company, the kit no, the identifying data of the kit (names, dates, location of birth, etc.), predicted haplogroup, and possibly the SNP numbers, etc.

  I have been adding this information to my notes in my Family Tree Maker tree on the understanding that it is speculative but reasonably probable. It should prove very useful once enough people have had the tests to confirm partial or complete lineages.