SHARING RESULTS
The basic test results help answer the question:
How many different common male ancestors are associated with the WILEY surname?
Are different variants of the Surname WILEY, WILLY, WILY, WILLEY, WHALEY, all from one WILEY (or variant) Surname?
How are the different WILEY family lines related?
Unfortunately these results as presented DO NOT answer the question:
Which WILEY researchers should be collaborating because they share a common ancestor?
To answer this question you need to know who the participants are so you can collaborate with them. All participants are encouraged, but not required, to provide contact information so they and others can share information. After the information above is posted and participants have the opportunity to review their results compared to others, they will be asked to release contact information. They may agree to do so or decline. No contact information will be provided without a WRITTEN RELEASE FORM from the participant.
WORD OF CAUTION
There is always a possibility that you could get disappointing test results. Samples that vary by three or more markers from the main group may do so for a number of reasons. One possibility is that they represent distinct lines either older or younger than the currently observed most frequent line. Another is that there has been a “non-paternal event” at an unknown past time. There are several possible types of non-paternal event in addition to a pregnancy gained outside of a marriage. For example, a child may be adopted and given the WILEY name; a man may take the WILEY name when he marries a WILEY daughter; a WILEY man may marry a pregnant woman whose husband has died; a couple where the wife is the WILEY may choose to give their children the WILEY name for various reasons; clerical error in recording administrative data may assign a WILEY name to the wrong person, and so on.
It should be stressed that adoptions were quite common in every age (i.e.. parents died by disease or war and a relative took in the children and raised them with their name; or young daughters had a child out of wedlock and the parents raised it as their own).
Some may not want to see a result indicating a “non-paternal event” but we are all legal WILEYs and a small sample size could be misleading. One may get a DNA sequence which suggests a “non-paternal event” but they could be of the original blood WILEY line. Let me explain. Twenty people are tested and 19 are very similar but the last is clearly different. It could turn out that the 19 descend from the same person 300 years ago and this person was an adopted WILEY while the other is of the original blood line going back 800 years.
