Do Mayflower Descendants Still Carry Mayflower DNA? What the Science Says

Do Mayflower Descendants Still Carry Mayflower DNA? What the Science Says. You can have documents for every generation, approved by the society that checks them, and still carry not one piece of that passenger. That is not a failed test. At thirteen generations the mathematics says it is the normal outcome — roughly a nine in ten chance you inherited nothing from any one ancestor that far back. Your average share would be under two centimorgans, and no test looks below six. The General Society of Mayflower Descendants will not accept a DNA test as proof of Mayflower descent, and their written policy says so. There is one line where genetics still works, and seventeen passenger surnames now have a signature on record. Plus the passengers who left no descendants at all, which matters if your tree names one. CHAPTERS 00:00 Proven descent, and nothing to show for it 01:11 Thirteen generations back to 1620 01:58 The halving, and 8,192 ancestors 03:02 Only 35 cut points in the genome 04:48 The odds of inheriting nothing at all 06:38 Every test has a floor 07:09 Your share is smaller than the floor 08:47 A real segment would be half-false 09:09 What the Mayflower group feature measures 10:39 The one line where it still works 11:27 17 passenger surnames now have a signature 11:59 Richard Warren and haplogroup E 14:21 The Society's written policy on DNA 15:10 What counts as proof, what they reject 15:42 The Silver Books shortcut 16:40 100,000 proven against 35 million claimed 17:52 102 passengers, 51 with descendants 18:59 The passengers who left nobody 19:40 Three traps: Tilley, Browne, Allerton 20:47 The forgeries, and Wrestling Brewster 21:58 Only a third of them were Pilgrims 22:46 Why there is no Mayflower founder effect QUESTIONS THIS VIDEO ANSWERS Can a DNA test prove Mayflower descent? How many generations back is the Mayflower? Why does my DNA test stop finding matches past the 1700s? Which Mayflower passengers have living descendants, and which have none? How do you join the Mayflower Society? Is there really a Mayflower genetic group? Were all the passengers Pilgrims? THE NUMBERS, AND WHERE THEY COME FROM The arithmetic. 1620 is about thirteen generations back — twelve through mostly male lines, fourteen through mostly female. That gives you 8,192 theoretical ancestors. The shuffle. When a parent passes you a genome they cut and recombine it, and there are only about 35 cut points — around 43 in a mother, 26 in a father. Measured across more than 126,000 parent-to-child transmissions in Iceland. The genome you get is a mosaic of large chunks, not an even blend. Why it runs out. Chunks grow by addition, about 33 a generation. Ancestors grow by doubling. At thirteen generations that is roughly 418 pieces for 4,000 ancestors on one side. Nine in ten get nothing. The odds of zero. Derived twice, independently — in 1983 and 2013, by different methods. They agree: the probability of inheriting nothing from a named ancestor passes half at ten generations and sits near 90 percent at thirteen. This is mathematics, not a measurement — nobody has tested a cohort of proven descendants and counted, and the video says so. The detection floor. Ancestry needs 6 centimorgans in a segment, 8 in total. 23andMe, 7. FamilyTreeDNA, 9. Your average Mayflower share at twelve generations is under 2. And Ancestry's own paper puts roughly half of all 6-centimorgan segments down as false — exactly the size a genuine 1620 segment would be. The exception. The Y chromosome passes father to son without recombining, picking up a change roughly every 80 years. The Mayflower genetics project has 328 men tested and signatures for 17 passenger surnames, including Richard Warren's unexpected haplogroup E. The paperwork. 102 passengers sailed; 45 died that first winter. 51 left descendants, across 26 households and 25 surnames. The Society has admitted just over 100,000 members since 1897, against a repeated estimate of 35 million descendants — a figure with no author, no study and no method behind it. Which passenger does your family claim, and has anyone checked it against the Silver Books? I would also like to know how many of you find your passenger on the no-descendants list — I suspect it is more of you than anybody realizes. And if your line runs father to son the whole way back, say so: you are in the small group who could actually test it. #Mayflower #MayflowerDescendants #Genealogy #FamilyHistory #Ancestry #DNA #AmericanHistory #Pilgrims #Plymouth #AmericanBloodlines #GeneticGenealogy #FamilyTree #ColonialAmerica #NewEngland #AncestryDNA