Our Sherbondy Deep Ancestry
By Jeanette= E. Sherbondy, PhD.
January 201= 1
Sherbondy Family Association,
= What can we do when our historical rese= arch runs out of documentation to search? Our common ancestor Jean Cherpantier (= John Sherbondy) has left an historical record of his children’s births and bap= tisms, his own record of joining the Pennsylvania infantry in the Revolutionary wa= r, his land deeds, and his will, all dating to the 18th century. We know he probably came from France and there are possibilities to continue o= ur historical research in that country, but few European records help us for t= he times before the 16th century. We can make conjectures based on general historical knowledge, but what about a personal record of those ancestors?
= Such a source seemed impossible until recently when we realized that our genes car= ry a meticulous record of who we are. That record is transmitted from parent to child with great accuracy considering the vast amount of data involved. Two genetic tests can reveal to us a great deal about who our long ago ancestors were and what routes of migration they followed to end up at the point where each of us is today. One examines the mitochondria in our cells, the energy producing part, that we inherit from our mothers: mtDNA. The other looks at part of the non-recombining portions of the male chromosome: Y-DNA.
= These tests give us a record of our genetic matrilines and our genetic patrilines. A matriline is the line of inheriting mitochondria from our mother, who inher= ited it from her mother, and she inherited it from her mother, and on and on bac= k to the woman who is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all the women now living in the world. She lived sometime between 107,600-174,300 years ago. = This theoretical woman is known as the “mitochondrial Eve.” This doesn’t help us at the moment be= cause John Sherbondy could not pass on his mtDNA to his children; his wife did th= at.
= The Y-DNA however, has been passed down through John Sherbondy’s male descendants f= rom father to son, to his sons, etc. to the present. Two of our living Sherbondy men have been tested: Jeff D. Sherbondy and my brother Don Owen Sherbondy. = They are identical as far as they’ve been tested.
What do the results of their analyses mean for us? First of all both belong to Haplogroup I1, which is t= he designation of the subgroups in the world. Scientists have established a fa= mily tree showing the relationships of different haplogroups of Y-DNA. They use = the letters from A-T to designate them. The starting point is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living men, our theoretical “Y-chromosomal = Adam” who lived about 75,000 years ago. You will notice that he lived a good 30,000-100,000 years later than the “mitochondrial Eve.” That means that there are no living men= who are descendants of the mate(s) of “Eve.”
The first haplogroup is nam= ed Haplogroup A and is founded by “Adam.” It was located in Africa. About = 5,000 years later there was the first significant split in this lineage, forming Haplogroup BT. This is the branch our Sherbondy men descend from. Each new haplogroup is decided by certain markers in the genome sequence that are markers and are referred to as M#. By locating these markers in Jeff’s and Don’s Y-DNA geneticists can determine which branch they were in when a li= neage split.
Geneticists and archaeologi= sts can work out where in the world those splits took place by looking at where the greatest density of people with those markers are, especially among indigen= ous peoples, those that have a long history of living in one place. Sometimes the time frame su= ggests which culture was dominated by people carrying those genes.
The Sherbondy line, in brie= f, started with Haplogroup A in Africa, then was part of the BT branch that al= so originated in northeast Africa. The next split formed Haplogroup CT. It occ= urred in Africa but some of its descendants migrated to Eurasia and populated the rest of the world. This was about 68,500 years ago. Haplogroup CT is the mo= st common haplogroup from which most men alive descend, including most African= s. Two splits from CT produced Haplogroup E which is mostly of Africans, and Haplogroup F, mostly non-Africans. Sherbondys have the Haplogroup F marker.= 35,000-40,000 years ago Haplogroup F split in Western Asia or in the Middle East and prod= uced Haplogroup IJ which spread throughout Western Asia. Finally Haplogroup I originated about 25,000-30,000 years ago by splitting off from Haplogroup I= J. This happened somewhere in Europe or in Asia Minor.
Haplogroup I1 is identified= by the marker M253. The accompanying map shows that it is most frequent in Fennosc= andia (Scandinavia and Finland). It originated sometime between 4,000 to 20,000 y= ears ago. Early on Family Tree DNA labeled Haplogroup Ia as “Vikings” though= the Viking period we know historically was much more recent. This map does show, however, the sprea= d of Haplogroup I1 to the limits of the Germanic world, to eastern Britain and Scotland. This undoubtedly includes the Viking expansion. Perhaps soon we w= ill know more details about the origins of the subclade I1.
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Map of the = Haplogroup I Subclades Distribution[1]