I always get excited when the results from a new DNA test come in. There is always the potential to shake things up. That is certainly the case with the latest results I received from a member who has a strong paper trail inside the Green Men of Maryland Babb lineage.
DNA has a way of constantly surprising me with new and ingenious ways to slap me down and ruin the plan I had so clearly laid out in my head. But life like DNA is complicated and this is no exception.
While the paper trail shows a connection to the Green Men of Maryland, the DNA trail instead shows a connection to the North Carolina / Eastern Virginia Babbs.
Now, the North Carolina Babbs have long been shrouded in mystery with a number of disjointed families that couldn’t be connected via the paper trail. But we had seemed to be past that and have a good number of test takers that show as 37 marker exact matches.
Not so in this case. Of the first 12 DNA Markers this candidate matches 11 of the first 12 Markers to the NC/Eastern VA line. The 12th Marker (known as DYS439) is a fast mover in DNA terms and changes more rapidly than most of the others and is more likely to mismatch than the others. This is exactly the case in this instance, so I wasn’t discouraged to find it was different and initially assumed that something must be wrong with the paper trail. I had some free time last night and began checking the paper trail for any hints of an error that could have caused this. I found that the paper trail is very solid so I was even more perplexed.
Our Candidate only matches to 7 of the first 12 Markers on the Green Men of Maryland line, but with very few candidates from this branch it is too soon to say how this would shake out.
Next I went back to the drawing board looking to see why it was I only had a 12 marker match when the person took a modern day advanced test that includes 111 Markers.
The plot thickens when I realize that of the first 37 Markers we only have a match to 20 of them. This is no Bueno. So, while the initial assessment looked like a match after we compared using additional markers this does not appear to be the case.
We can only speculate as to why this is the case. Perhaps two families in the same village in England adopted this name and came over together to the US? Perhaps there is a “Non-Paternal Event” on one or more sides? Perhaps one of the members of the family was abducted and impregnated by aliens? We may never know why this aberration in the numbers occurs, but if history is a guide the DNA will keep us guessing for a number of years before unveiling its real secrets. More candidates are needed from the Maryland Babb lines to DNA test so that we can help get to the bottom of this issue. In the meantime we have a whole new Puzzling Mystery of the North Carolina/Easter Virginia Babb Family.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to create a new sub-group of the Green Men of Maryland so as to preserve/honor the connection while we continue to research it. In the long run this is likely to become its own unique lineage be additional matches are needed to say for sure.