A new Big Y for the rare I-L1294 "France" group: a simple tree for I-L1294

Click here for a simple tree showing the five completed Big Ys for I-L1294:  (February 19, 2018)

I-L1294 is a rare and relatively widespread branch of I-P37. YFull calls this branch I-Y21979, and estimates that its common ancestor lived 4100 years ago. Recently a Big Y was completed for the French-Canadian ancestry man shown above: he shares a slightly more ancient common ancestor with the other men.

I-L1294 is easily identified by its STR marker pattern, even with short haplotypes: it is characterized by the very distinctive marker value DYS388=9. Haplogroup I expert Ken Nordtvedt nicknamed this branch I-P37.2*-"France" because he found several examples with French ancestry.

At FTDNA, I know of fewer than 50 surnames belonging to I-L1294 and most of them have English/Scottish surnames. A few have French surnames, and a few have German surnames. I know of only one I-L1294 man with a Spanish name, he lives in Spain and he is not in our project.

But I-L1294 has been found elsewhere in Europe: the Solé-Morata (2015) study of Catalan surnames (click here) found 22 men out of 2500 who very likely belonged to I-L1294, these 22 men belonged to 4 separate genetic lineages. And Battaglia (2009) found one very likely I-L1294 sample in Albania, out of 1206 samples in the study from all over southeastern Europe (click here)

I think this is a good example of how the FTDNA customer database doesn't give a good sample of genetic diversity even in a place like Spain.  Probably Spain has better representation at FTDNA than France. Probably we will continue to find members of these rare haplogroups, and completely new haplogroup branches, in less studied parts of Europe.

I-L1294 is part of the I-S21825 branch of I-P37, along with I-L233 "Western" and the "Alpine" and "Northern France" branches. Click here to see a outdated I-S21825 tree which shows these relationships.