The Hyde DNA Project has one group of men who have a very rare variant of a NULL for their DYS marker 448 location on their Y-Chromosome. Based on datasets of other surnames that share this variant, we believe it occurred in a single individual who lived in England during a time when surnames were not commonly used, roughly a thousand years ago. We refer to these men as “448s.”
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The 448s – Ansel, Micajah, Noel, Austin, and many others – are sometimes grouped together with the family of Richard Hide the Pirate. They are not related to that family, not by the paper trail and not by DNA. Also, Richard Hide who came over in 1635 was not related to the family of Lawrence Hyde and the Denchworth Hydes. There is very extensive genealogy concerning that family – pages and pages of it – and Richard Hide of Chippoakes Creek does not appear in it. He came over as a servant of the Minters, who covered the cost of his passage in exchange for a number of years of service.
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Family Tree DNA’s male Y-DNA test is able to confirm male-to-male lines going back several thousand years. The female equivalent, MtDNA, traces maternal lines back in the same way, mother’s mother’s mother and so on, and, because it changes much more slowly, it can go very far back, in a few cases more than a hundred thousand years. Since surnames have only been around for about the last thousand years, and while most married women up to the mid-to-late 20th century generally took their husband’s surname, surnames are not as useful for genealogy as Y-DNA. However there are cases where it can be quite useful. When the University of Leicester was trying to confirm that remains found under a Leicester parking lot were actually those of Richard III, the search was on for possible living relatives through the paper trail. Descendants were located and notified. Both Y-DNA and MtDNA were tested and the MtDNA ended up being a match, from the children of Richard’s sister, Anne of York, down through female-to-female descent, to a retired journalist in Canada. You can read more about it here https://le.ac.uk/richard-iii/identification/genetics/living-relatives
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DNA tests are all a bit different, and different types of tests serve different purposes. Ancestry, 23andMe, Family Tree and most other companies offer autosomal tests. These are useful for finding genetic cousins with a common ancestor (male or female) within 4-5 generations, or roughly the past 150 years or so. So let’s say you take one of these tests and get a message from someone that you have a match with, and you both have Sir Guy de Hyde, Knight of the Pointy Shoes b 1504 in your family tree. Does it mean that you’re both descended from him? No, not with autosomal testing. Neither of you share enough DNA to connect that far back with an autosomal test. Your match is much more recent, possibly through a great grandmother or grandfather. Whoever the match is through, the common ancestor was born generally AFTER about 1850.
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The reason for this is simple: you get roughly 50% of your DNA from your mother and father. That’s about 25% from each of your grandparents, and about 12.5% from your eight great-grandparents. However, “roughly” means that DNA gets passed down in chunks and it’s a dice roll how much you get each time it gets passed down. A full sibling, i.e., a brother or sister, might share from 38% to 61% of their autosomal DNA. Autosomal DNA becomes diluted very quickly. Third cousins might share from 0% to 2.2%. Fourth cousins may only share 0% to 0.8%. Notice, if you are unlucky in the passings of your DNA, you could share NO autosomal DNA with a third cousin. Also, you might not even have any autosomal DNA – zero – in common with some of your 32 great-great-great (3x) grandparents, that’s the randomness of the way genes are passed down. For example, if your great-great-great-grandfather had been a full blooded Native American and you are unlucky, you could have NO autosomal DNA from him. Therefore, no autosomal DNA test could ever detect a match. Ref. https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_statistics
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So, to recap, just because you match on an autosomal DNA test with someone who has the same Guy de Hyde, Knight of the Pointy Shoes b 1504 in their tree, it does NOT mean that you both match That Guy. It means that you both match Grampa Joe or Great Grandma Ernestine or someone much more recent in your tree. So let’s imagine That Guy b 1504 was suddenly, magically, brought back to life and took an autosomal DNA test today. What would happen is that he would not even turn up in your testing results, because you share less than a fraction of 1% of your DNA with him. The female MtDNA would also not be a match because that only comes down the female-to-female line. But your Y-DNA WOULD be a match if you are a male who descended in a direct male-to-male line from him.
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Autosomal DNA is great for finding cousins in a RECENT (about 150 years) time frame. MtDNA is great for matching along the female-to-female line. Y-DNA is great for matching along the male-to-male line for distant ancestors like Guy de Hyde b 1504 and especially great for surname studies. If enough of the 448s test (not just Hydes but also other surnames they are related to who carry the variant) we might eventually be able to triangulate the part of England where these surnames converge, in much the same way that another line of Hydes is currently contributing to the North Mercia Project https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/r-a6093-north-mercia/about/background
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Questions, further information, and corrections are always welcome in the comments.