The POMEROY GENETICS PROJECT #2
Background to the One-Name Study group & description of how the testees were found
Our one-name group has been collecting historical data about Pomeroy, Pomroy, Pomery & Pummery in Britain for many years.
We now have transcribed data on more than 20,000 events from hundreds of different sources. The centrepiece are the
14,000-odd birth, marriage and death (BMD) ledger entries held in the family Record Centre in London.
Over the year, many family trees have been pieced together by Tony Pomeroy and others, some of which stretch back five centuries.
Crucially, some recent research by A.R.S. Hodgson appears to fill a gap in the known records that allows us to link present-day
members of the Harberton Pomeroys back to the original Norman family that came over around the time of the Conquest.
Working with a sizeable one-name group of around 2,000-2,500 individuals -- of which perhaps 800-900 are adult men --
the only way to process and compare data is by using a database. Fortunately when the opportunity came up to
set the UK DNA project in motion I had already pieced together families using the data from the BMD ledger entries and had
begun the task of checking the cross-referenced spouse names in the marriage records and mapping the results
against the national UK census of 1881.
Launching the DNA project posed a different problem: how to select the volunteers to take part?
While previous tests on other surname groups had selected testees almost randomly, with all our
documented historical research we were determined to come up with a more exacting set of parameters.
As the Y-chromosome test analyses the male-to-male lineage line, the first task was to try and identify all the male Pomeroys
alive in the UK. The closest thing to a national public register in Britain is the Electoral Roll, the annually-updated
list of all people eligible to vote in national and local elections in England, Wales & Scotland. The 2000 version has
1,523 relevant entries in it. The Roll is only a tool and is known to contain duplications --
indeed, a person can legally be registered in more than one place at the same time -- and errors. People who
have recently died are still in the register; some young people don't put themselves on it immediately when
they turn eighteen; people working abroad are usually not present.
All in all, the accepted rule of thumb is that as many as 5% of people one would expect
to find in the Roll aren't in fact present. In order to make our records as reliable as possible, we went through
the 1998 Electoral Roll as well, plus the online national British Telecom database.
By this point it was clear that we could link over half, perhaps two-thirds, of all the adult male POMs living in the UK
to a recent address, and that for perhaps half of these we had a phone number as well.
Importantly, almost all of these POMs could be tied to some form of family tree, though in most cases this 'tree'
only reached back to around the beginning of the twentieth century. We concluded that there was a good chance that if we
phoned people to ask them to comfirm that they wanted to participate in the DNA project that this would
not only boost the return rate of the test kits but give us more information about their origins so that we could take
their trees back a further generation or so.
After tagging the oldest living male member in each family in the database, I then set some rules to ensure that
I minimised the disturbance to people who might share my name but whom I had certainly never met. The first rule was to
test only one member per family, and preferably the oldest male member. This was to ensure that we did not
accidently set up some pseudo-paternity tests. Since nearly everyone can name their uncles and grandfather, in practice
it proved relatively easy to create new links within the database and prevent this kind of duplication within an immediate
family. The second rule was not to contact anyone over seventy years of age, simply
on the grounds that it was unfair to expect everyone of that age to react without confusion to a call out of the
blue offering a DNA test. I was also aware of the possibility of unwittingly calling a recently bereaved partner and wanted
to minimise this risk as much as possible. Although this rule excluded a significant percentage of POMs with phone numbers,
I think it was a good idea and I'm glad I stuck to it. Some people later suggested to me that 'cold calling' on the
phone to anyone at all
was an imposition on their privacy, but out of nearly 100 calls that I made I remember only one person who actively objected to
being called out of the twelve who declined to take part in the DNA tests.
It struck me that the people who were often most suspicious of my call
were clearly well-educated while "ordinary folk" didn't seem to bat an eyelid. I was surprised that perhaps one in four said
that they, or a member of their immediate family, had already done some family history research.
To reduce the number of calls I also excluded members of 28 families I suspect are directly linked to those I'd already
called even if I cannot currently prove the links. This sounds a highly subjective decision, but in these cases
one piece of data -- usually an unusual location or middle name -- suggested a
link but a corroborating piece of evidence, which I usually require to effect any link in the database, was missing.
In total at the start of the calling process I had a list of 310 people to try and call out of a total of 748 adult
male POMs we'd identified.
I ran the calling process by working down the list starting with the potential testees with the largest
number of living adults in their trees, a calculation the database was able to generate on the fly.
The calling process lasted for five weekends and it became quickly clear that only certain times -- Sunday afternoon
and evening, and early evenings on weekdays -- were worthwhile. Many phone numbers did not work and many calls were
not answered, but by the time I stopped working down the list I had contacted some eighty people.
A total of 66 POMs said they wanted to take the DNA test and were sent the test kit by the Oxford lab.
These 66 were at that time logged as part of trees containing 360 adult male POMs (and potentially linked to around 115 others).
As the result of talking to people about their trees and gaining a lot of additional information,
the total number of living adult males identified in the database had risen to from 748 to 794 and the number of unlinked
address records had fallen sharply.
I estimate that there are perhaps 50-100 additional adult males living in the UK that for a
variety of reasons cannot yet be linked to other records in the database. Some of these are probably working abroad
or have emigrated.
Next Background on the DNA testing process & summary of key results
Last updated: 9 July 2001 |
