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McCollough

  • 275 members
Administrators
  • Rebecca Christensen
Co-Administrators
  • Edison Williams
General Fund
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FAQ

Y-DNA Participants

Setting up your account to participate in the McCollough DNA Project

Opt In to the McCollough Y-DNA Project (IMPORTANT!)
To give permission for your results to be used in the McCollough DNA project and for your Y-DNA STR marker results to be seen on the McCollough Y-DNA Project results page (public), you need to complete these steps to Opt In to the project:

1. Sign into your Family Tree DNA account.
2. On your account dashboard, hover over your name in the top right hand corner. Click on Account Settings.
3. Click on the Project Preferences tab
4. On the Project Preferences screen, scroll down to Project Sharing
5. Under the Group Project Profile, you need to Opt in to Sharing. The default setting is Off. You need to allow your results to be used in the Project for your marker results to show up on the results screen and to allow us to use your results in the project.

Your results won't show up in any project results pages until you Opt In.

Setting your Earliest Known Ancestor (Paternal Ancestor Name)
1. Sign into your Family Tree DNA account.
2. On your account dashboard, hover over your name in the top right hand corner. Click on Account Settings.
3. Click on the Genealogy tab
4. Click on Earliest Known Ancestors tab
5. Enter the name of your earliest known, documented male McCollough ancestor, his birth-death years and location. You may also consider adding additional identifiers such as a wife's name or the son's name "> name of son" after the information about your earliest known ancestor.

Joining Haplogroup Projects on Family Tree DNA
McCollough BigY participants are encouraged to join the associated haplogroup and subclade projects for their Y-DNA results. Top level haplogroup projects are included below. Depending on your results you may want to also join additional subclade projects.
  

2.  R1a Project

3.  I-M223 Y-DNA Haplogroup Project

Learning More About Your BigY Results
RootsTech 2022 and 2023 included several video presentations about the BigY test including information on interpreting results, determining the time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) and other information.

Y-DNA BigY: A Lifetime Analysis (Janine Cloud, Family Tree DNA, 2023) (8 min)
https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/y-dna-big-y-a-lifetime-analysis

Discover: Exploring the new beta feature on Family Tree DNA (Janine Cloud, Family Tree DNA, 2023) (9 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dpd_LOuzQQ

"Why oh Why Do Your Y DNA?" (Tanner Tolman, RootsTech DNA Day, April 2023) (64 min)

Older videos:

Part 1: How to Interpret Y-DNA Results, A Walk Through the BigY (2022) (23 min)
Part 2: How to Interpret Y-DNA Results, A Walk Through the BigY (2022) (13 min)

Y-DNA: How SNPs are Added to the Y Haplotree (2022) (4 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGQaYcroRwY

Y-DNA: Haplotree and SNPs Page overview (2022) (5 min)  [no need to order SNPs if you have completed the BigY-700!]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOuVhoMD-hw

Y-DNA BigY: A Lifetime Analysis (2022) (8 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6NEU92rpiM

Autosomal DNA Participants

Transferring Your Results from Ancestry to Family Tree DNA and Joining the McCollough DNA Project
1.  Download your raw AncestryDNA results to your computer. Keep track of where you store the raw DNA data file on your computer. It will be a huge zipped file. Do not unzip the file. If it becomes unzipped, you will need to re-zip it. Instructions for downloading can be found here:
https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/Downloading-AncestryDNA-Raw-Data
2. Upload your raw DNA results to Family Tree DNA (free)
https://www.familytreedna.com/autosomal-transfer
3   Create an account on Family Tree DNA as part of the upload process. If you already have a Family Tree DNA account, log in first. Each person/DNA tester has their own account on Family Tree DNA.
4.  While logged into your account, you can join the McCollough DNA project at the link below. You can also log into your account as part of the join process. (free)
https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/mc-collough/about
5. There will be a short question to answer about your McCollough lineage before you are accepted into the project. Please allow time for the response to be reviewed.
6  Family Tree DNA provides additional tools to analyze your DNA results. There is a small fee if you want to gain access to the tools. (recommended)

Advanced Matches Search - Family Finder matches in the McCollough DNA Project

You can find out who your autosomal DNA matches are in the McCollough DNA project (vs. the entire Family Tree DNA database) by running the Advanced Matches comparison. The results will show McCollough DNA project participants who share autosomal DNA with you. CAUTION: Just because you are both in the McCollough project doesn't necessarily mean that you received your common DNA from your McCollough ancestors - you may have more than one set of shared ancestors who are not McColloughs. But it gives you a good place to start.

To check for Family Finder matches
1 - Under Family Finder, select Advanced Matches
2 - Select McCollough instead of Entire Database
3 - Select Family Finder box
4 - Run report