Sunday, November 23, 2014

Sometimes the answer is a tree in the forest: my paternal mtDNA - U5a1b

In order to find the mtDNA haplogroup of my deceased Father, Denval Perkins, I have been trying to get female line relatives of my Grandmother, Eleanor "Nellie" Walker Inman Perkins, to do either the autosomal test at 23andMe, because it also gives a limited mtDNA haplogroup, or an mtDNA test at Family Tree DNA. Because he and his half and full siblings are all deceased, I have asked his niece, but she has finally decided not to test. I then asked some of my Grandmother's sisters descendants but they also refused to test.

This week I used the Charting program in Legacy Family Tree to go back to my Grandmother's Grandmother, Mariah Moses Manning, and trace her mtDNA descendants. When I examined the chart I realized that two of those female line descendants had already tested at 23andMe and had the mtDNA haplogroup designation of U5a1b. This mtDNA haplogroup is considered one of the oldest European mtDNA haplogroups. It is currently concentrated in the Baltic and Scandinavian countries. This location ties into my Fathers's Y DNA haplogroup of R1a1a (R-176.1) which is mainly found in Scandinavia and Scotland.

My Father's known matriline:
Denval Perkins (1921-1974);
Eleanor "Nellie" Walker (1891-1965) - 1) Francis "Frank" Inman and 2) Henry Franklin Perkins;
Rutha Manning (1867-1928 - Andrew J. Walker;
Mariah Moses (1832-1873) - Jacob H Manning;
Martha Richardson (1814-1869) - 1)Edmund DeBerry Moses and 2) William Manning;
Elizabeth Davis (1778-1860-70) - John Richardson.

Locations covered are Whitley Co., KY and McCreary Co., KY. See the US Census reports for 1850 through 1930.


Sunday, November 02, 2014

US National Institute of Health Policy on Genomic Data Sharing


NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy


Genomic research advances our understanding of factors that influence health and disease, and sharing genomic data provides opportunities to accelerate that research through the power of combining large and information-rich datasets. To promote robust sharing of human and non-human data from a wide range of genomic research and to provide appropriate protections for research involving human data, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy (GDS Policy) on August 27, 2014 in the NIH Guide Grants and Contracts (available at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-14-124.html), and in the Federal Register (available at https://federalregister.gov/a/2014-20385) on August 28, 2014. The GDS Policy and related documents are available at:

The GDS Policy applies to all NIH-funded research (e.g., grants, contracts, intramural research) that generates large-scale human or non-human genomic data, regardless of the funding level, as well as the use of these data for subsequent research. Large-scale data include genome-wide association studies (GWAS), single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) arrays, and genome sequence, transcriptomic, epigenomic, and gene expression data. Supplemental Information to the GDS Policy provides examples of genomic research projects that are subject to the Policy.