Dear Hadley cousins,
After a year in which we’ve worked hard to rejuvenate the Hadley Y-DNA project, I wanted to give everyone in our subgroup an end of year update on where we stand. Now that we’ve received Big Y results for everyone in this group that chose to upgrade, I wanted to give everyone a sense of some of the conclusions that we can draw with some degree of certainty:
1. All Hadley men sharing our lineage derive from the PH137 branch of the R1b Haplogroup. This section of the R1b seems to share about 25-30 equivalent SNPs, meaning that the estimated origin of this block could have been as long as 4,000 years ago. One of our goals for the coming year is to try to find a tester from a demographic likely to break up this block into a genealogically relevant time frame that will help us identify our origins back into the Middle Ages.
2. Our Big Y results suggest that all descendants of Simon Hadley Jr. share a mutation at marker BY31340, a child branch of PH137. Given that all our participants descend from Simon Jr.’s son, Joshua, we can expect that any additional Hadley men showing this mutation also descend from the Simon Hadley Jr. line. Based on the number of unnamed variants (individual-specific mutations) occurring within each of our members in this group, DNA confirms that the estimated age of the common ancestor of this group is roughly 225 years ago. Give or take a generation or two, this roughly corresponds with one of Joshua Hadley’s sons, who were all born between 1740 and 1760.
3. The Big Y results for the descendants of my line descending from John Hadley (d. 1734 MD) share a mutation at marker BY194812, another child branch of PH137. Both participants descending from this line tested negative for the mutation associated with the Simon Hadley line and have a common ancestor born about the same time as Simon Hadley Jr, meaning that this is definitively proven to be a line related to, but not descending from Simon Hadley. So far, remaining individual-specific mutations for these two testers suggest a common ancestor living about 250-300 years ago, fitting the timeline of their common ancestor James Hadley, b. c1750.
4. The Big Y results of our only Hadley participant (Thomas Alvin Hadley) whose line has been connected back to England confirmed that all three of these lineages share a common origin. Interestingly, Thomas Alvin Hadley did not share the mutations at either the BY31340 or BY194812 markers distinguishing the Simon and John descendants. This leaves open the possibility that this Hadley line represents yet another child branch of PH137. We would need an additional participant from this line to confirm this and result in the identification of this branch by FTDNA.
These results suggest that our working hypothesis that the Simon and John lineages descend from the Hadley family living in Quatt, Shropshire at the end of the 16th century remains a distinct possibility. Our goal for the coming year is to try to find Hadley men from the Shropshire area to participate in our project either through taking a Big Y or through testing whether or not they match the individual SNPs representing our Hadley lines. We will continue working with YSeq to develop a SNP panel we can use as a cheaper alternative or precursor to having new participants take the Big Y going forward.
Of potential interest, we have a new project participant from Greece who seems to share a deeper common heritage with us. His family is from a part of Greece that was historically invaded by Normans c1100. His Big Y results are due later this month, and depending on the results and his degree of affinity with us, this will hopefully help us to both split up the 25-30 equivalent SNPs in the PH137 block as well as potentially confirm the Norman origins of our Hadley ancestors around the time of the Conquest and Domesday Book in the 11th century.
Please reach out with any questions or your thoughts on how to move forward in the new year. Looking forward to making further strides in 2019!
Regards,
Ross Hadley
Hadley Y-DNA project co-admin