As I mentioned in this post, I believe that I have traced my Pointon ancestors back to a Ranalphus Poynton who was alive in the late 1500s CE and lived in the Norton in the Moors area of Staffordshire, England.
Ranalphus would have inherited and then passed down a type of dna called “Y DNA” from his dad to his son, then he to his son and so on to the present day. This type of DNA is passed down through the generations virtually unchanged, although now and again there is something called a mutation which can be used to provide an estimate of how long ago the most recent common ancestor of at least 2 Y DNA testers lived.
I decided to take a Y DNA test, and jumped in to the deep end by getting a “Big Y” test with Family Tree DNA.
This test seems to be the most comprehensive available when looking at Y DNA, or what I call the Poynton/Pointon DNA. So I was interested about what the results would be.
When I got the results back I have to admit to being a little overwhelmed with all the information available, and although I admire science I don’t always understand it the best.
The results brought back matches at several levels, these levels are the number of markers you are compared against and are at 12, 25, 37, 67, 111, and the “Big Y 700” markers. At the time of writing this post, I have 1945 matches at the 12 marker level, 49 matches at the 25 marker level, 38 matches at the 37 marker level, 70 matches at 67 markers, 5 at 111 markers and 8 at the Big Y Level. FTDNA says that “The more markers tested, and the greater the number of markers that match, the higher the likelihood that the common ancestor lived more recently.”
Although at present I don’t have matches with the surname Poynton/Pointon, I did get a place on the Y DNA haplotree, apparently my haplogroup is R – FTC83712. At the time of writing this there is only one other person with this haplogroup, their earliest known patrilineal ancestor is from Wales in the 1700s. It seems according to FTDNA that the common ancestor of everyone in this haplogroup was around in 1150 CE.
There are other sections within the results such as notable and ancient connections, a time tree, and an ancestral path, along with some tools to look in more detail at your results.
It will be interesting to see how the haplogroups are refined in the future and how the haplotree grows as more people do a test.
Our Ancestors 