2021 Year in Review for the Kilcoyne YDNA Project

 Another year has come and gone. 2021 was a very productive year. Thanks to all  those who have contributed in any fashion to the study. 

Important milestones and discoveries have been made through the use of the BigY700 DNA test. This high resolution kit has allowed me to find genetic branches in our ancestors that were created in the time that we can trace our ancestors on paper. This has allowed the diaspora to trace their roots back to their ancestral parishes in Ireland. And has allowed me to genetically map our paternal migrations into Ireland with pretty accurate time estimates. 

There are now 11 families that are unrelated to each other on the male line. Some testers are left off of the map due to having the same parish pinned by their cousins. All of our groups are of Gaelic origins, and have been in Ireland for possibly several thousand years. We have nearly 50 testers now with about 50% of them being English or Irish based. This is quite the feat for an American Project administrator  on FTDNA ! Thanks to all for trusting me and assisting this study. 

The Gold family from  Tubbercurry

This family is the largest Kilcoyne group with 11 testers. This is probably because this is my branch and there is testing bias because of it. I have found 3 genetic branches that were formed at specific addresses in the area. This a tremendous success because Kilcoynes in the diaspora can simply test and find their exact roots in their native parishes, and in some cases can be tied back to a specific farm from the 19th century!

This group has definite links to the Coyle family from Donegal about 400 years ago. My theory is that the family were originally Coyles but the name changed to Kilcoyne upon their arrival in South Sligo in the last 3-400 years. Below is the migration out of Africa for this family. These Kilcoynes entered Ireland during the Iron age . You can type in FT308088 and look more closely at the genetic mutation and the ancient skeletons we are related to here http://scaledinnovation.com/gg/snpTracker.html 

The Light Blue family from Achill 

There are 7 testers now for this group. For several years I had noticed autosomal DNA links between the Gold family to this group. It had perplexed me until a family from Shanvallyhue, Mayo told me that it was passed down in their family that two Kilcoyne men left Tubbercury in the early 19th century for Achill. I strongly suspect that the Tubbercurry and Achill Kilcoynes are cousins, but their was a break in the Achill Y Chromosome sometime before 1800ad. Its possible a child took the name of his step father or took his mothers surname. This might explain all the DNA links but no match to the Y Chromosome . So this Achill family was likely in Sligo before their migration westward in the early 19th century. This group has matching to the Coyles as well, but more testing is needed to decipher when the common ancestor was. This family is R-FT18311, but is not yet added to the Tree of Mankind because of its recent discovery. I will share that map and info in our Facebook group when its added 

The Blue family of Louisburg, Mayo and Ballymote, Sligo

This is a real interesting group. It is my belief this is the founding Kilcoyne family. All the testers in this group were from the Louisburg area until a Kilcoyne man with Ballymote roots tested into them. I can see through genetic mutations that the common link could be 800 years back! Surnames started to be used in Ireland back 1000 years ago all the way up to the 1600s, so this is pretty incredible to have found this link. It is likely the Louisburg family moved westward towards the coast in the last several hundred years. The Blue family also has YDNA connections to the Coyle's back about 400 years ago. This family is R-FTA37584

These 3 groups are the primary ones that have the most testers. Some of the eight others are in fact Kilcoynes, but had a break in their Y Chromosome at some point. I have found that in at least two groups, a female passed her surname onto her son, resulting in the son carrying a Y chromosome from his non Kilcoyne father. More testing is needed to determine if the other groups are simply undertested, or they branch off one of the three primary families 

There are four Kilcoyne groups that have links to the Coyle's. As our testers began upgrading their kits to the BigY700, it became clear that these names were easily confused when surnames began being anglicized in the 1600s. I have never seen or read about any possible link, so this development  was surprising. I hope to recruit more Coyle's to gain more understanding between the links. 

I still have not found any link from the Kilcoynes to the Coyne's. Just recently we had a Coyne man test with roots in Kilmactigue, Sligo. His ancestor farmed the same lands as the Kilcoynes in the 19th century, but he did not match to any of our group's. I know there must be some Coyne's out there carrying a Kilcoyne Y chromosome, but as this stage I think its an exception and not the rule 

We have nearly 400 Facebook followers in 6 countries. Continue to share with family to generate more interest.  We are always looking for more YDNA and Autosomal DNA testers! In the early days of this Project, I had several people donate to the Kilcoyne fund to return a favor to me.  We do accept donations if you are able to help advance the study. I can think of several men in every group that want to upgrade their kits, but cannot due to the cost. If you have a specific interest in a certain family, just let me know and I can direct that money to the right kit. 

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/kilcoyne/about

If there is anyone looking to buy a BigY700 DNA kit for another family line, I'd be glad to help decipher that  info . Feel free to reach to out 

Happy Christmas to all 

Michael 

mikec1120@comcast.net 

CONNECTING THE ACHILL AND SLIGO FAMILY

    A remarkable discovery has been made that may have connected the Kilcoyne's from Sligo to the Kilcoyne's from the Achill area. We know through our YDNA study that these two families do not have a shared founding male Kilcoyne ancestor, but through other DNA evidence and family word of mouth, we can put the original founding Achill Kilcoyne man in Tubbercurry, Sligo. It had long perplexed me that many of the Sligo family DNA matched on the autosomes to the Achill family. Many DNA testers from both of these families  have given me access to their kits. Time and time again I saw distant matching between these two families. Particularly to those from Rosturk. Each time I YDNA tested a new Achill Kilcoyne, I expected a possible link to Sligo on the male line, but it just never happened. 

The two groups YDNA testers mapped here . Light Blue and Gold

I spoke to a family from Sanvallyhugh, Burrishoole, Mayo, who provided me evidence that  their ancestor and his brother were born in Tubbercurry, and had made it to Shanvallyhugh by 1823. When I YDNA tested this family, I was disappointed that this family was not matched to my branch from Tubbercurry, but in fact matched to the other Achill testers. To me, there is clear evidence from the autosomal YDNA kits that there must be a connection somehow. In my view. it is likely  that their was a break in the line from these two families. This likely occurred pre 1800. These "breaks" are very common in every one of our family lines. Experts estimate it happens 50% of the time in each of our family branches. The most common breaks occur when a female with young children is widowed, remarries and the children assume the surname of their step-father. Another possibility is that a young female passed her surname onto her child. This is seen with some frequency in 19th century records. Often times we want to avoid family stories like this. The  stigma is stuck in our heads. But the fact of the matter is our ancestors had difficult lives and often times just needed to survive. Their complicated family life is much the same as we have in our own families today.

In the Light Blue group from Achill, nearly all the testers have John or Martin who were born around 1800. 

These are the Achill  testers in our Project, showing John and Martin, the others earliest known ancestors of these testers were born post 1840, so they are likely children and grandchildren of these two men

It is my belief that all descendants of the Achill family are descendants of Martin and John, both born in Tubbercury, Sligo in the early 1800s. We have 5 paternally unrelated Kilcoyne groups from the Sligo area, but I believe the Gold from Tubercurry are the Achill families cousins, based on the autosomal DNA tests. 

Here is the family tree provided by the Shanvallyhugh family that tested into the Achill group. It was passed down through the generations to this family that the founding ancestor was from Tubercurry, as seen on the top left. 

Moving forward we have the opportunity to further cement this finding in our study. The Achill family has provided enormous help in YDNA testing thus far , but this family is still undertested. If I can at least get two men from the existing group to upgrade their kits to the BigY700, I can potentially prove that all the Achill family do indeed descend from these two men. I can do this by dating the surname by seeing the mutations on the Y chromosome through the Bigy700 test. 

The existing testers could use some help. If interested in helping move this  along, please donate to this link and label your contribution to the Achill family  

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/kilcoyne/about

Michael Crow

mikec1120@comcast.net

Project administrator 

 

How to Help the Kilcoyne Family Study

My work in the Kilcoyne Project has focused on the use of Y-DNA. This specialized test is different than the at home commercial DNA test you have surely heard of. Both tests are extremely useful. Y-DNA is wonderful for matching just the male Y chromosome to others in terms of thousands of years. The autosomal DNA test looks at the 22 autosomes and is great for family matching going back six or so generations. This is the test that reads all your family's lines. 

Many have tested their Y chromosome with our Kilcoyne Y-DNA Project on Family Tree DNA. The issue many of you have is that you do not have a male relative that carries the the surname Kilcoyne for Y-DNA testing. Or that the cost of the more expensive Y-DNA test is out of your financial reach. This is where the autosomal test can help our study. On sale, the autosomal test typical runs between 59.00 and 79.00 US dollars. The next big sale runs in November. Even if a family member has already tested, it is still worth testing yourself. This is because we all inherit different genes from our parents and ancestors. Lets say you and brother test, but your brother has more Kilcoyne matches than you and has a slightly different ethnicity reading, this is not because the test is incorrect, it is because you simply inherited slightly different segments of DNA during the DNA recombination process. 

I'll list here some step's on how to move forward with testing. This is the best path forward financially speaking to get the most out of your money.

1. Test with https://www.ancestry.com/. This company has a good ethnicity reading but more importantly, a very large database of testers. The last count I saw was in excess of 20 million people. 

Once you receive your ancestry result in a month or so time, you then can upload your DNA to several other sites for free. Some companies require a fee to unlocking your ethnicity reading, but you will be able to view your cousins list for free. You do not have to  spend the money on unlocking the reading if you are not interested. 

2. Upload your ancestry DNA and upload it https://www.myheritage.com/dna. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqhTn4NBvkU

3. Upload your ancestry DNA and upload it to FTDNA. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0v_cJvgtuI

4. Upload your ancestry DNA  to https://www.gedmatch.com/ . This site is import because you can view the actual segments of DNA you share with others. Very important for the chromosome mapping tool many of us more serious researchers use for identifying matches in our quest to rebuild the family tree. Once you have uploaded to Gedmatch, you can then join the Kilcoyne ancestor project that I manage there. We have several dozen members joined there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80VsX1hTTPk&t=375s

5. Ensure to build out a family tree on ancestry and make it public. You can then upload your tree to other sites. It is important to fill out the tree the best you can, you can do this without purchasing a membership. If you just testing for your own curiosity and to help this study, then make sure you do not get roped into a monthly payment. 

If you follow these steps, this would be extremely  helpful to further our Project. You will also save quite a bit of money. For the price of one kit, you will have access to four databases of users in excess of 30 million testers. Each company also has different algorithms they use, so you might have a few matches show up that might not have otherwise shown up on ancestry 

If you need any guidance, feel free to reach out.

 Find me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/189583818973499

Michael Crow 

mikec1120@comcast.net 

Unexpected Y-DNA Finding's in a One Name Study

 When starting out in my Y-DNA quest to genetically map all the Kilcoyne's of Western Ireland, I expected to find the usual variants of the name Kilcoyne in the DNA lists of the testers. Coyne. Coen , etc. Of the 60 testers there are in the Kilcoyne/Coyne Project, I have found no such connection between the Kilcoyne and Coyne surnames. I am sure as time goes on, that this will change. This is where it stands now though. 

One connection I see consistently across 4 unrelated Kilcoyne families, is the matching to the Coyle's. My initial thought was that it was a coincidence, that there must have been a non paternal event somewhere in these families. The two surnames are completely different clans. The Coyle's primarily being from Donegal and Tyrone. With Scottish and English lines as  well. The Kilcoyne's exclusively being from Mayo and Sligo. So I set out to discover more. I encouraged the testers to upgrade their STR kits to the BigY700. I was lucky in having wonderful participation and several made that happen. The BigY is a far superior test than the standard STR tests. STR's (short tandem repeats) are not very reliable in determining  genetic distance between testers. With the BigY, SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism) are found in the y chromosome which enable the haplotree to build down genetic branches, which are much more helpful in seeing where families branched off more recent in time. 

While waiting on test results and finding and encouraging others to test, I decided to take on the Coyle Y DNA project on FTDNA. The administrator for that Project was no longer interested in managing it, and was eager to hand it off to me. My thought was to combine the two Projects, but there are many Coyle's and variants of the name that have no connection to the Kilcoyne's. So, the best I could do was to encourage members of both groups to join both the Kilcoyne and Coyle Projects. Most of the testers in the Coyle Project are no longer active so I found it was easier to have my Kilcoyne's join the Coyle Project. I labeled each lineage in both the Projects according to color. So the Gold in the Kilcoyne group are the same as the Gold in the Coyle Project. See  the results pages of both projects. 

https://www.familytreedna.com/public/Kilcoyne?iframe=ycolorized

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/coildna/dna-results

This is the name distribution of the kilcoyne and Coyle surnames on the 1901 census. https://barrygriffin.com/surname-maps/

As BigY results began to post, the result was clear for two groups, the Blue and Gold. In the early 18th century, the Blue Kilcoyne's were based around Louisburgh, Mayo and the Gold are from South Sligo. Both groups had Coyle matching that can be estimated back 400-600 years. The other two groups. Light Blue and Brown, do not have BigY testers, but they show close STR matching with Coyle's, the matching for these remain unsubstantiated at this point though due to STR's not being very reliable for dating. The matching is still very telling.

The Gold Kilcoyne's  match is to Donegal. While the Blue Kilcoyne's is to Athlone, Roscommon. My opinion is that the matching to these four groups are not a coincidence, that they are the result of the cultural pressure Ireland was under in the last several hundred years. As the Irish were forced to anglicize their names, surnames became mistranslated as they were documented. This was a common occurrence for many Irish families. So I had to take a closer look at the two surnames and see what could have happened, and sought help from an Irish speaker. As explained, the Coyle name in the Irish language is "Mac Giolla Chomhghaill, which translates as "son of the servant of St Chomhghall. Kilcoyne translates to Mac Giolla Chaoin. As in son of the servant of Coyne. There is substantial similarity between Chaoin and Chromhghall, particularly if you drop the ghall part off the name, for convenience or translation purposes. If you hand write Chaoin and Chomh, they are remarkably similar, particularly since "in" looks identical to "m" and the literacy levels of those are in question when these names when being written"

 To me, the evidence was clear. There are many Kilcoyne's that  carry the Y chromosome found in many that have the name Coyle. And vice versa. From the Y-DNA evidence and what is known about the two clans, there are many Coyle's that have no connection at all to the Kilcoyne's, but there are surely many that do. It will be interesting to see how all this unfolds as more testers are recruited in both Projects. 

The results from the Blue Kilcoyne group, as mentioned, show a match to Coyle man from about 400-600 years ago. But interestingly, this same group shows a match to a Kilcoyne man that is estimated back 600-800 years ago. So it seems the Kilcoyne surname in this instance has been used for that long, and the introduction  of Coyle in this genetic pool could have been the result of the Kilcoyne name being mistranslated, and it being a variant of Kilcoyne. The timing of the match coincides with the island losing its native language as it's primary language.  I eagerly await test results and finding and encouraging others to test, so we can discover more

These are the  Kilcoyne families in Ireland discovered using Y-DNA . 8 groups. The largest being the Gold, Light Blue and Blue. Its is possible the smaller groups are from non paternal events, like adoption, or a child taking the surname of his mother. 

Thoughts and suggestions are always welcome. 

If you are a Coyle, Coyne or Kilcoyne, and would like to participate, feel free to reach out to me. 

I am the volunteer Project administrator of the Kilcoyne and Crow Projects on FTDNA. 

Michael Crow

mikec1120@comcast.net 

Kilcoyne Blue Group Update

 Progress in the Blue Group in the Y-DNA Project has come along nicely in the past year. In the beginning this group was only defined by the Louisburgh, County Mayo Kilcoyne's. We have since added several testers with some interesting results. We are seeing the names Coyle and Coen appear in the match lists of the Kilcoyne's. The Coen kit has tested at an entry level DNA kit, so I am unable to decipher time to the most recent common ancestor between him and the others. His earliest known ancestor was from County Sligo. So if this man upgraded to the BigY700 DNA kit, we could see exactly when the match was. I have talked about the match to the Coyle's extensively in my Facebook group. I believe the Coyle and Kilcoyne surnames in this instance are one in the same. As explained to me by an Irish speaker, Kilcoyne translates to  Mac Giolla Chaione, Coyle translates to Mac Giolla Chomgaill. Giolla means Kil, if the pronunciation is stretched it sounds like Coyle. I believe the names at one point were the same and was used by a man who was the common ancestor for all the testers in this group. It is likely that due to the Anglicization of surnames in Ireland beginning in the 16th century, that the surname evolved into the variations we are seeing in the match list. This was quite common during this period with many clan names all over the island. With the information we have this point, we can ascertain that the common ancestor for this group was sometime between 600-800 years ago. So the surname Coyle/Kilcoyne has likely been fixed to this specific family for that amount of time. Surnames became custom around 1000 years ago in Ireland, so its possible that this family has carried the same surname throughout the course of the surname era in Ireland. I haven't come across any information on a historical connection between the families. So with our Y-DNA study, we are rewriting was is known about this clan.

In this image below is the "Block Tree" on the results page of Family Tree Dna. This shows where the testers sit on the Haplotree, or the Tree of Mankind. I-FT418455 is downstream or a twig on  Haplogroup, I-M223. I-M223 is prehistoric Irish Gael, and was formed about 14k years ago in Europe. You can read about that here . https://www.irishorigenes.com/content/dna-irish-gael

The Block Tree shows an average of 7 Private Variants for these testers. We can estimate the time to the most recent common ancestor by multiplying about 100 years per variant, or mutation.  

Below is a map of Kilcoyne/Coyle and Coen matches. Based on the location of the earliest known ancestors of the testers. All being in the 19th century. With new testers and existing testers upgrading to the BigY700, we can learn much more. In the image below, I have entered the surname alongside the blue pin. 

This family tested positive for genetic mutation  I-FT418455. Formed around the year 1200AD in the common male ancestor in Ireland. Here is the paternal migration for this family out of Africa. Which began a few hundred thousand years ago. This family likely entered Ireland around 800BC. 

http://scaledinnovation.com/gg/snpTracker.html

The latest BigY700 tester for this group will be adding a new branch to the Haplotree. This branch will be  downstream of I-FT418455. This high level Y chromosome testing is now building a family subclade in modern times.  Building the genetic branches down in the genealogical era has enormous value, as more testers come in to the mix, we can more accurately determine genetic distance between the testers. And see where families branched off. This is the ultimate goal of Y testing. And an achievement for this group. The new branch is not yet added to the haplotree but will be within the month. 

Blue Group in the Y-DNA Project. Visit the Kilcoyne Project at https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/kilcoyne/activity-feed

Trees of testers

                                              Ballymote, Sligo to Lawrence, Massachusetts

                                                 Louisburgh, Mayo to Clinton, Massachusetts

Aglish, Mayo to Quebec/NY

                                                                        

                                                       Louisburgh, Mayo to Pennsylvania