DNA testing

The Direct Paternal Line

Your direct paternal lineage is the line that follows your father’s paternal ancestry. This line consists entirely of men. Your Y-Chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) can trace your father, his father, his father’s father, and so forth. It offers a clear path from you to a known, or likely, direct paternal ancestor.

Note that you and your matches may share ancestors on other parts of your family tree; however, those matches are a coincidence.

Matching for Genealogy

Your Y-DNA may help you find genetic cousins along your direct paternal line. For Y-DNA37 results, we report your results for STR markers. STR marker values change slowly from one generation to the next resulting in distinctive sets of results. We compare your set of results to those of other men in our database. The range of possible generations before you share a common ancestor with a match is wide. Your Y-DNA37 exact matches (0 Steps) may be recent, but they may also be hundreds of years in the past. Your matches that have one marker difference (1 Step) may be even more distantly related. We show this in the table above. The wide range in the test results does not prevent those results from being useful. You can use this clear paternal line to provide evidence to support a relationship. You first trace two or more male lineage descendants of a single man utilizing traditional genealogy research. The descendants then test their Y-DNA. If they are exact matches, it is evidence that supports the relationship. Not matching usually disproves the relationship. Planned comparisons are the best choice. However, you can still find your common ancestor with matches. To do so, use your known paternal genealogy. For each match, look first for a shared surname if you come from a culture where surnames have followed paternal lines. Then look for common geographic locations on the direct paternal line. Work through each of your ancestors on this line as well as their sons, their sons’ sons, and so forth.

The Science of Your Direct Paternal Line

Your Y-Chromosome is a sex chromosome. Sex chromosomes carry the genetic code that makes each of us male or female. All people inherit two sex chromosomes. One comes from their mother and the other from their father. You and other men receive a Y-Chromosome from your father and an X-Chromosome from your mother. Men and only men inherit their father’s Y-Chromosome. Thus, it follows the same path of inheritance as your direct paternal line. STR markers are places where your genetic code has a variable number of repeated parts. We report your STR marker results as the measured number of repeats for each marker. In the example below, the marker DYS393 has 12 repeats.