Calif. Families Sikes DNA Contact
last updated 27 July 2022

Old Stephen DNA Chart


From: artsikes@aol.com, Sikes-Sykes DNA Project Administrator Date: Tue, Jul 26, 2022 To: members of the Yorkshire Sykes family,

>We now have a total of 22 Y-DNA tests with some results. One branch of that family came to New England about 1638, on what ship and from where we do not know. We have 9 tests in this group and its the group that I'm part of. It's is also the part of the family with the most mutations, why we don't know. The other 13 tests all seem to have Yorkshire connections and we could have several different family lines going back to the 1300's where we think our family started to use the Sykes surname.

The newest Y-DNA technology allows us to trace these family lines by using SNP's (mutation in our DNA) that are not very common but when they happen are passed down through our Y-Chromosomes forever. The average rate of these SNP's in the Y-Chromosome is one about every 70-90 years.

For a long time FTDNA (Family Tree DNA) has had an option to tests SNP's in the Y-Chromosomes, one at a time for about $60 per SNP to see if a defined SNP is there or not. FTDNA now has the technology to test about 70,000 SNP's in the Y-Chromosome using the same technology used for the Family Finder test (Autosomal testing) that looks for SNP's in the other 22 Chromosomes. This has allowed the increase in the number of known Y-Tree branches, defined by SNP's 20 years ago, from less than 350 to over 50,000 today.

This testing is called Big-Y testing by FTDNA. The Yorkshire Sykes group has done three Big-Y tests so far and we are all in a new terminal SNP names R-FT103278, not a very exciting name for such an important family! There is no one else in this group at this point, it's a Sykes only group. The person that got this SNP from his father and then passed it on is the common ancestor to all three Sykes lines that have been tested today. So, who is that Mr. Sykes and how far back in time did this happen? We know that it has to be after surnames where first being used for the common people, in our case somewhere in the 1300's. Lets do the math and see if that works. The three tested people have an average of 10 additional SNP's so using 1950 (a typical age of tested Sykes males today), and 75 years per SNP we come up with: 1950 - (75 X 10) = 1200. That's pretty close to the 1300's where Sykes surname was believed to first used. As we do more testing this number is probably going to be better defined.

So, now about new SNP's that FTDNA finds, they will not use them to define a new terminal SNP (Y-Tree branches) until they have seen them two and sometime three times in other tested males. Test # 69635 & # 72184 are distantly related cousins but they have 9 new SNP's between them that they don't share. To find their new terminal SNP, another person closer to one or the other needs to be tested, in other words, somewhere in our documented family. As for test # 61445 we know that the closest common ancestor is more than 420 years ago because one family was in England and one was in New England in the early 1600's. The point here is that the more testing we do, the more Sykes terminal SNP's we will find and it going to start to look more like a traditional family tree. We will very likely find Sykes families in England today that we are related to us, but closer than the 1300's.

You can help, if you are already Y-DNA tested by upgrading to a Big-Y test. If you know of others Sikes or Sykes males, encourage them to be tested. If you are not a male, get a Sykes brother, Uncle, or cousin to test for you. Lastly by making a donation we can find males that can be tested or upgraded that will help the project

Here is picture of the Y-Tree with our own Sykes branch.

PS: I have attached the latest copy of the Y-DNA results collected so far. Go down to rows 71 to 95 to see the Yorkshire families.