Minnie Magdalene (KUHN) VAN DUYN is my 2nd great grandmother. The Tecumseh family story comes from this line. I have suspicions of Coonrod S. COON’s and Barbara RADABAUGH’s parents, but not enough to publish them here. Mary WHITAKER is an annoying brick wall. DNA has shown, though, that her direct maternal ancestresses were not Native American on their mothers’ sides. Mitochondrial Haplogroup U5a1i1 is of European origin.
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Good luck!
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I need it! 🙂
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Hi, u5a1i1 isn’t necessarily European. It seems to be a more ancestral strain with also Asian and Siberian links. We just identified it as the mitochondrial DNA that we believe comes from a woman in our family who may have been from the Onondaga Nation of the Iroquois tribe. We also have Beringian (Bering strait) genomic DNA. However, we are still gathering records. It doesn’t seem like a lot of DNA information has been gathered on the eastern Native American tribes. I’m wondering if this could be one of their haplotypes, possibly from a prior migration to the ones for the western Native American tribes (who tend to be haplotypes A, B, C, etc.). Anyway, it’s still possible it could be Native American.
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Hi Jenn. Thank you for your comment.
While it is always possible that your ancestress may have been part Native American, you can eliminate her direct maternal line from your search for that, because the U haplogroup and its subtypes have only been found to have migrated from Africa into Europe. There have been no Native burials discovered pre-Columbus with that haplogroup, ever, on the entire continents of North and South America. It is found in Europe, so it can’t be both.
In your relative’s account on FTDNA, on the menu to the left, under mtDNA, select Migration Maps to see how the U haplogroup has migrated. Wikipedia has a blurb about U5 on it’s U page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_U_(mtDNA)#Haplogroup_U5.
Roberta Estes, who has a blog DNA-Explained, studies and keeps track of Native American haplogroups. Her page, which she updates when new information is discovered by geneticists, is at https://dna-explained.com/2013/09/18/native-american-mitochondrial-haplogroups/. It is amazing how much this is studied in the scientific community.
So, to sum up, U5a1i1 is of European origin, but I’m not sure there is a decision on when it originated. No hyplotype descending from U is Native American, but your ancestress still could have Native American ancestry. I hope this helps.
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