The DNAPrint Test purports to be able to assess a person’s ancestral make up in terms of percentage of European, East Asian, Native American, and African. They do this by scanning 19 of the 22 autosomes (non sex chromosomes) using 71 “deep ancestral markers” which are SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) based on the observations that a change in a single base pair (say a Cytosine to a Guanine at a particular locus) tends to be found much more frequently in certain “racial” groups. They then use this information with a complex algorithm (mathematical formula) to arrive at percentages of each group. At the moment this test suffers from a very small and unrepresentative sample of Native Americans (and others) and the test has particular difficulty in distinguishing between Native American and East Asian. Therefore for all practical purposes, a finding of East Asian in any of the individuals below is likely to have come from a Native American source since none have any known true East Asian (e.g., Korean, Chinese, etc.) ancestry.
As is noted elsewhere, Catharine HILL was a Six Nations
woman of the Mohawk Nation, Bear Clan, who was born in 1747. There is considerable evidence that she was
part – European, so it is unlikely that we could assign her to a biological
100% Native American category. A
present estimate would be that she was in total about 75% Native American. The question of interest here is whether the
above DNA test would show any evidence of the presence of Catharine HILL in the
biological make up of her descendants to the present day. The laws of genetics indicate that someone
who is 7 generations removed from Catharine may show less than 1% Native
American (NA) on any test. It is
possible by the laws of chance that some of her descendants inherited more than
the expected percentage of NA (which as indicated could also be seen as East Asian
or EA in the DNAPrint Test). To test
out this possibility, and to verify that the genealogy constructed on a paper
trail was in fact true, the present author was able to obtain samples from two
descendants of the eldest son of Catharine, Abraham YOUNG; and two from her
second son John YOUNG Jr. The results
of their respective DNAPrint Tests are presented below in table form, along
with the number of generations back to Catharine.
Participant 1 - 7 generations removed.
|
Ancestry |
Estimate |
|
EUROPEAN |
92% |
|
EAST-ASIAN |
8% |
|
NATIVE-AMERICAN |
0% |
|
AFRICAN |
0% |
Participant 2 – 8 generations removed.
|
Ancestry |
Estimate |
|
EUROPEAN |
97% |
|
EAST-ASIAN |
1% |
|
NATIVE-AMERICAN |
2% |
|
AFRICAN |
0% |
Participant 1 – 7 generations removed.
|
Ancestry |
Estimate |
|
EUROPEAN |
91% |
|
EAST-ASIAN |
5% |
|
NATIVE-AMERICAN |
4% |
|
AFRICAN |
0% |
Participant 2 – 5 generations removed.
|
Ancestry |
Estimate |
|
EUROPEAN |
91% |
|
NATIVE-AMERICAN |
8% |
|
AFRICAN |
1% |
|
EAST ASIAN |
0% |
The DNAPrint Test is at present the subject of a lot of
heated debate – especially in reference to its ability to accurately represent
minority ancestry. Therefore the absolute
numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.
All that can be said with some degree of certainty is that there appears
to be a DNA signal from Catharine HILL that is still seen in her descendants to
the present day. It is important to
note that the genealogies of each of the four participants above was checked
closely and there does not appear to be any Native American source other than
Catharine HILL.