Col. John West of West Point, Virginia - @Colonel John West II

We've actually got him as *partner*, not son, of Cockacoeske, leader of the Pamunkey - who by the way wasn't a "queen" or a "princess", those being European ideas imposed on a native culture they did not understand and did not try to.

It's this dude who was reputed to be their son: "Sonne to the Queen of Pamunkey" John West

That still doesn't explain how autosomal DNA was proven that whoever she was, she was Pamunkey. And this profile does not explain how Col John West had two sons named John, with Major John West in the middle of his other children by Unity Croshaw.

Tom, I don't understand your question? if you are asking way a man has autosomal match .? you carry the mtDNA https://www.worldfamilies.net/dnatesting Autosomal can match if you can find the DNA. the only way to find it is to lower the default and paint the chromes. The new genesis Gedmatch did lower the default. https://genesis.gedmatch.com

Yes, but if you lower the default then YOU LOWER THE ACCURACY OF THE MATCH TO LESS THAN 1%. The mtDNA autosomal genome of a male or female is only accurate to the MALE or FEMALE line back five generations. The mtDNA DNA test will calculate back dozens of generations on the female line only, so any there would be no West female mtDNA possible except from Susan West Langford from only a direct line female descendant of hers. And that would only give you her mothers mtDNA and none of her father's yDNA. As a Family Tree DNA Surname Project Administrator, I get these type of matches daily and as I tell my members repeatedly, DNA cannot prove a certain person was an ancestor, only that this certain person carried the same DNA marker values as you do which could be identical to one of his siblings or sons. And only if we have several testers claiming ancestry from the same ancestor can we be sure that that set of DNA marker values is correct for this particular ancestor. It appears you are trying to include ancestry into the autosomal testing for genetic makeup, which this test does NOT include beyond five generations. Ancestry.com tries to do this by matching to names found in their Ancestry trees but those are NOT scientific matches. How can they when Ancestry does not do paternal yDNA or maternal mtDNA testing? And I don't know of any DNA company that has identified a Pamunkey Indian DNA marker values except for one since 2011 when the Pamunkey tribe was recognized as an Indian Nation and that one is questionable because of all of the generations since the 1600's that might have added other races, male and female, into the bloodline.

And how do you identify the Pamunkey genome mix when there are no living 100% Pamunkey Indians to compare with. All of the living couple hundred Pamunkey tribe members are only 7 to 37 per cent Pamunkey blood, the rest is a combination of other tribe's, african Americans and white on both the male and female side. If you had read the material on the worldfamilies link you cited, you would see that autosomal testing is only good for five generations.

You are wekcome to look at my DNA. My lines are from NC SC. I am a haplogroup T. You can google that with Cherokee. My ged match is T126797. I am originally from Tuscany. Then to Ireland. My ftdna is 421555. MY king line is Mingo Belgium

PS. My DNA was done back 17 thousand years.

Your DNA or anyone else's for that matter, CANNOT PROVE LINEAGE TO ANYONE 17 THOUSAND YEARS AGO. It can only determine that your autosomal genetic line comes from certain areas, NOT TO A PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL. I really don't care what your DNA says since it evidently does not answer the questions generated in this discussion of Pamunkey Indians. Even the Family Tree yDNA or mtDNA can only go back accurately at 111 markers to a thousand years, but it takes documented proof of lineage for the DNA to confirm your ancestry back that far. And it takes several matches to exactly the same set of marker values AND Haplo Blood Group to determine a father-brother-son kinship group for that set of markers. After all, even at 111 markers there are dozens of surnames that have the same identical set of markers and Haplo Blood Group.

do you know for sure you are a king?

I think Mary Kathryn is talking mtDNA, not autosomal. Autosomal doesn't have haplogroups - only Y-DNA (male only) and mtDNA (female transmission only) do.

Even with Y-DNA/mtDNA it's rare to pinpoint a specific individual (and quite impossible without a paper trail), but tracing to a general population (people who lived in x area at about z time) is much easier.

Yes, I have done a 111 marker test with a Big Y additions that confirm my 98% British Isles and 2& Shephardic Jewish ancestry. And I have a proven documentation back through the British royalty and back to Charlemagne.
Mary has to be talking about autosomal DNA as that is the only test available that would take someone back 17,000 years. Tracing to a general population group is no proof either as there are proven to be many people of the same surname living in the same county in Virginia (some by the same first name) that DNA has proven to be distinct and unrelated lines. The Haplo Blood Groups are still in the process of being defined as to where and when each was formed, that anyone would have noticed if they saw the many refinements FTDNA has made the past 4 years since we got the new sequencing machines. This is still an ongoing process, so the Haplo Blood Group you have today may change at any time in he future.

Repeat: AUTOSOMAL DNA HAS NO HAPLOGROUPS.

Certain haplogroups (mostly mtDNA) have been specifically identified with First Peoples (i.e. the *original* discoverers of the Americas) and no other peoples anywhere. It is now thought that this discovery took place anywhere from 15,000 to 40,000 years ago, with most experts going for "~20,000 +/- 5,000". And mtDNA has a *much* slower mutation rate than Y-DNA.

So yes, it's possible that she does know what she's talking about.

Your dragging blood groups into the discussion shows that *you* are still somewhat confused - blood groups are *an entirely separate dataset*. A, B, AB, O have nothing to do with the A-Z typing of Y-DNA or mtDNA, and while haplogroups *can* be determined from blood tests, they can also be - and much more commonly are - determined from saliva, hair, skin/tissue samples, etc.

Also for the record, *as long as* the line of descent from mother to daughter remains unbroken (no generation with only sons, or no children at all), it makes absolutely no difference whether the fathers were Native, Anglo, Malay, or Martian.

I have known all that for over a decade. As a FTDNA Surname Project Administrator I have to deal with Haplo Blood Group problems almost daily. It is the str markers that determine a haplogroup but those markers have not been clearly defined as yet. FTDNA has completed defining all of the I haplogroups with new designations rather than I1bi to I-M230 and is currently working on the R haplogroups. This has meant that ALL DNA kits be re-sequenced with the new machines and this takes a lot of time. TMK, the T haplogroup is not scheduled to be retested until next year. BUT HAPLO BLOOD GROUPS ARE A FACT, that are distinguishable from the A,B,AB, etc BLOOD TYPES. You need to go to the FTDNA website and read more on these matters.

FTDNA website has *nothing* on "haplo blood groups". I tried several different searches and came up with *nothing*.

I wish Justin Durand would comment on this - he's been working with the G haplotype projects almost since they were discovered and defined, and seems to have a *much* clearer understanding of the science involved - or at least is able to explain it clearly to laypeople without becoming too overbearingly pretentious.

When FTDNA started renaming that field in the results pages, it was changed to the SNP field, which is not, IMO, a true reflection of what that field stands for. And there is still much discussion in the genetic scientific community as to whether STR's or SNP's define a haplogroup. This carries over to the particular Groups that are now finding that distances to a common ancestor vary greatly between STR and SNP determinations. Even in my group people are arguing that several SNP matches to over surnames occurred with the Norman Invasion of England while others say it was 300-400 years earlier.
All of this DNA discussion is getting away from my original question as to how anyone could determine that DNA proves that a wife of Col John West was a Pamunkey Indian. Since there have been no living 100% blood Pamunkey in many decades, how does one determine the genome of a Pamunkey 300 years ago
with both the mtDNA and yDNA portions?

Tom,

Let's see if we can get on the same page here. I understand what you're saying but some of your terminology is idiosyncratic and confusing.

Haplogroups are defined by SNPs, not STRs. There is no debate about that. We have to use the scientific definition even if you disagree. And we have to be clear that they are technically SNPs not "blood groups".

We also need to be clear on another point. Autosomal DNA "washes out" after about 5 generations, but that is not its limit. If you compare two well-researched trees it's easy to find examples of shared autosomal DNA going back 9 or 10 generations -- even with a floor of 5 or 7 cM. There is no satisfactory explanation for it but some segments seem to persistently not re-combine over many generations. It's hard to find an absolute. You need to analyze each such claim on its own merits.

Now. Much more interesting is your point about using DNA to identify the mother of John West as a Pamunkey "princess".

I haven't seen the evidence, but I would be very skeptical. DNA could certainly support an oral or written tradition, but it's hard to imagine a scenario like this one where DNA could prove descent from a specific person.

That's not to say there aren't other scenarios where DNA can pinpoint an ancestor. For example, if a mutation can be shown by triangulation to have originated with a particular "recent" person, it's not much of a stretch to suppose everyone who shares that mutation is a descendant. I want to emphasize the word "recent" because it is not possible ever to rule out completely the possibility of the same mutation appearing independently more than once.

My guess about this Pamunkey princess is that someone has done some triangulation here. The link in the profile goes to a dead page but the description of it says the data is from a study by the National Park Service. I would still be skeptical.

It's fairly easy to envision a scenario where yDNA, mtDNA, and autosomal DNA of various descendants converge in a way that proves a Native American descent. Perhaps it is just somewhere in this area of the tree. Perhaps they have data to pinpoint the mother of John West. No way to know without reading it.

And, if they have found evidence of Native American DNA in this line, it is not much of stretch to think they could be drawing on historical context to say it is likely Pamunkey. In general there are not sufficient data to link specific DNA markers to specific tribes, but we would have to know whether there are any yDNA and mtDNA lines that are thought to have been linked to the Pamunkey. I haven't heard of any, and I probably would have, but I'm not so dogmatic as to think I've heard everything worth hearing ;)

So, in the end, my short answer to this question would be that I can see how someone might think they've made this kind of connection but I'd want to read the data and analysis for myself.

Maven, from what I can find there is little or no doubt from the historical record that "Sonne to the Queen of Pamunkey" John West was the son of Cockacoeske, A few quibbles here or there, maybe, but nothing to seriously challenge the line.

From what I can see, Tom's only point is that the DNA evidence doesn't prove it. In response, I would say it can't prove it but it's easy to see how there could be DNA evidence to support it. I'm skeptical about the evidence but not about the relationship.

Native Americans have distinct yDNA, mtDNA, and to a large extent also autosomal DNA signatures. yDNA isn't going to help with this line. They're all Wests. We're only thinking about a woman, Cockacoeske, so yDNA doesn't come into it.

I notice Cordelia Clark is said to have been a maternal granddaughter of Cockacoeske and Col. John West, so a niece of Maj. John West. She has many lines coming down to the present. It's plausible her female line descendants belongs to a Native American mtDNA haplogroup. If so, that would support the relationship.

Paper trail plus DNA. I don't see the point of the dispute.

Even if you have a paper trail proving conclusively that this Cordelia Clark was a niece of Maj John West, there is still no paper trail to prove he was the son of Col John West. That is only assumed as his father was called Colonel West, but it could be one of the other West family. Col John West was still living in 1676 when this John West was before the Council at age 20 and he already had a son named John West who married 1st to Judith Armistead. It would be highly unlikely that Col John West would have had two sons named John West, one by two different wives. No Pamunkey mtDNA haplogroup can be determined as none of the many proven surnames of current Pamumkey tribe only trace to either Miles or Puck. There are NO 100% Pamunkey Indians living and those that are still living are a mixture of Pamunkey, other tribes, african american and whites on both the paternal and maternal lines. Only pure 100% native americans have a distinct ydna and mtDNA with the haplogroup of the paternal line. While there is a slight possibility that a living direct female descendants of Cornelia Clark could take a mtDNA test, there is no way to prove that her haplogroup was Native American, much less Pamunkey.

You've got a mix there of right and wrong, Tom.

You said, "there is no way to prove that her haplogroup was Native American". Wrong. This is the easiest thing in the world.

http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2008/03/17/the-six-founding-native...

You said, "there is still no paper trail to prove he was the son of Col John West". Debatable. I looked at the evidence in some detail this morning. I see a few quibbles, as I said above, but nothing serious." Two sons with the same name? Becoming more unusual at this period, but there are many documented examples of it. Particularly, as here, where there are different mothers and it is the father's name being repeated.

The problem is what method is used to determine that any female descendant of this John West or his sister Susannah is from one of the six proven Native American haplo groups. If the use the str method you may not come up with the same haplogroup as sequencing the stp markers. These Haplogroups are not set in stone but are still under refinement at FTDNA so adding the full mtDNA sequencing test to an already mtDNA test can results in an entirely different haplogroup assignment. Tests at FTDNA done under the old STR method are now being resequenced under the STP method so who knows what may happen. My surname group that was all I-M170 now has a few I-A8, I-BY, I-L and I-M253 haplogroups for the same 52 members since the I haplogroup was resequenced. And these could change if a member gets the Big-Y test. This does not compute with the comments above by Mary King that says she is from haplogroup T and compared to Cherokee (Indian)
which is not one of the haplogroups of the six Native American lines.
The naming of two son or daughters by the same name was not allowed by the Church of England except in cases where the first of that name died and a child born later was allowed to be given that same name. So I do not believe that this Maj John West was actually the son of Col John West and won't do so until I see the yDNA test results from a direct male West descendant of this Maj John West. As i direct descendant of Ann West Fox and her brother Capt John West Jr and having researched this West line for over 55 years in the original court and church records in person both here in Virginia and in England, I have never come across a single instance in any family that named two sons or daughters by the same name unless the first had died. I do have one couple that had five Anna Josephine's and four John Henry's that none lived more than a year after christening and four others living to adulthood.

I don't think you'll get far with those arguments here.

Yes, there are routine changes to haplogroups that change the defining SNP, and sometimes they remaster an entire group, and sometimes an amateur player can begin to see potential problems before the official change is made.

But! This is not a case where an entire line known to be Native American is suddenly going to be switched from the Americas to the Caucasus. It's not one of those little shakeups as when part of U5b suddenly became V2 (as happened to me). Switching a line out the Americas would be an earthshaking event.

Probably also worth noting that you're using yDNA examples. mtDNA does not have STRs. It's all SNPs.

And you're ignoring the role autosomal DNA might play in this type of analysis.

I'm looking at this from a theoretical point of view. I say again -- it seems to me a scenario like the one I've outline is possible and could be supported by DNA testing.

Now I have to ask whether you've actually seen the data and analysis, or whether you're just opposed to it on theoretical grounds? If you're working from real data, now's the time to share it.

(An aside: I think you are misreading Mary King's comment. She is not saying Haplogroup T is Cherokee. In fact, just the opposite. T is Middle Eastern.)

Turning now to the paper trail problems ...

I'll defer to Maven who knows more about this area and period than either of us will ever know.

I'd be interested in a citation to your assertion that canon law prohibited the giving of duplicate names to children. I've encountered many interesting canons over the years but never that one.

Supposing such a canon existed, I would still doubt it was uniformly enforced in the Virginia and Maryland colonies. Particularly not where the child was the illegitimate offspring of a Native concubine. There, I would expect the social imperative of announcing paternity could easily have outweighed other considerations. Too, it does not seem quite so likely to me that a Native woman would be cowed by Anglican rules.

Have you read White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America? If you loved Albion's Seed, you'll love this one. It's shocking how little control would-be government and church actually had on the "frontier". But, I suppose frontiers are always like that. There are rules but they don't mean much if someone wants defies them.

The real genealogical question here doesn't turn on anything so minor. It's a question of whether the John West who signed himself as "Cap't John West, sonne to the Queen of Pamunkey" was the same person as Maj. John West.

The piece I find most persuasive is this bit quoted at Findagrave:

"Maj. John West who died in Stafford Co. in 1716 left land at Pamunkey and West Point in his will. The 500-acre tract he owned on the Pamunkey River was originally owned by his grandfather, Gov. John West, which appears to prove that he was the John West who was the son of the Pamunkey Queen."
https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=136257324

This seems enough to establish that he's a different person than his (half-brother?) of the same name.

I run across English persons in History of Parliament biographies who named surviving sons with the same Christian name, of different wives, and named to honor the grand parent. In fact we have a documented three brothers with the same Christian name. The youngest renamed himself at age 14. :). I suspect it has more to do with regional customs.

There are many instances of living siblings with the same name in England, particularly in Somerset and there is documentary evidence to support it.

There certainly was not any "canon law" in the Roman Catholic Church that said two living siblings could not have the same name - and the Church of England took a great deal of its principles straight from the Roman church.

The most prominent examples of living siblings with the same first name are John White, Bishop of Winchester (c. 1510-1560), and his younger brother John White, Alderman and Lord Mayor of London (c. 1511-1573). There is no indication that they were anything but full brothers (some reason to wonder if they were twins, with the Bishop coming out first). They were both, incidentally, members of the "gentry" White family of Hampshire, Essex, Berkshire and Surrey - the one that got into so much trouble by being resolutely recusant Catholics. (The Bishop was actually sent to the Tower for making disparaging comparisons between the late (Catholic) Queen Mary and the regnant (Protestant) Queen Elizabeth during the former's funeral oration, which he gave.)

No,the main question has always been whether the John West who signed the treaty as "Cap't John West, sonne to the Queen of Pamunkey" was the son of Col John West or his cousin Toby West who had a proven relationship with Cockacoeske . It was Toby who patented the 300 acres that this Capt John West inherited but he makes no mention of where he got the land in his Stafford will.
And no, the autosomal tests on this line would not be accurate beyond five generations as FTDNA states The accuracy drops 50% for each generation over 5 generations so by the time you get back to the 1600, you have only less than one per cent accuracy. Yet, I have hundreds of users that are taking a autosomal surname match as the surname of a 1600 ancestor's wife. All of the known ancestral trees of the 200 living Pamunkey tribe show intermarriages with African Americans, other Native American tribes, Melongeons, and whites on both the paternal and maternal lines. Their longest line descends from an African American indentured slave in 1620, though they now believe African Americans are lower than dirt. So how do you expect to derive a yDNA, mtDNA or autosomal DNA that represents the true Pamunkey tribe DNA? If you are talking about the genome used for ethnicity testing, those results are in the thousands of years range and quite unusefull for determining lineages. FTDNA does not do matches to the ethnicity part of the Family Finder Test or even release that data TMK.
And NO, I can't release the data that even FTDNA does not release to its surname project administrators. You wouldn't known what it means or know how to use it.
FYI, there are two proven tests for time to common ancestor and whether use use the old STR values or the newer STP values, our genetic group always comes up with differences in our English line with many Big Y matches to other surnames where one test says they came in the Norman Conquest and one test says they were neighbors back in Frances 300-400 years earlier.
FYI, It is Canon Law in the Catholic Church that forbids two children in a family from having the same name. That's why they invented the baptism name that could be duplicated. The baptismal name is usually the name of a saint but lately it had taken from the first name of one of the godparents.

Tom, you are making a grave mistake if you think we "wouldn't known what [DNA data] means or know how to use it."

I'm also an FTDNA project admin for the Scandinavian yDNA project, the G-L497 project, four surname projects, a regional project, and an autosomal project. I know what data is released, and I know how to interpret it.

But, you know, that wasn't the question. I'm not asking whether you have access to secret or insider information. I'm asking whether you've seen the analysis published by the National Park Service that supposedly endorses this line. That analysis is mentioned in the profile overview but the link is dead. I'm not able to find it doing an NPS search. Even a high level overview would likely reveal the methodology used. It would be helpful to know if they relied on mtDNA, autosomal DNA, or a combination.

Tom,

You quote FTDNA as saying "The accuracy drops 50% for each generation over 5 generations".

You're giving entirely the wrong impression by taking that information out of context. It's not the accuracy of autosomal matching that drops, it's the reliability of ethnic matching.

This is a complex subject, so I don't want to go off on a long, detailed explanation here but you are confusing two different things.

With autosomal data, it's the likelihood of inheriting the fragment that drops 50 percent per generation.

If you go back to 1600, it's not that you have a 1 percent chance of accuracy. It's that you have a 1 percent chance (actually less) that there will be anything in your DNA from that particular ancestor. But conversely, there is a 100 percent chance you will have DNA from some of your ancestors living in 1600.

Some people beat the odds, some don't. It's chance.

Then, there are additional problems of whether the DNA is intact in large enough chunks to be meaningful for analysis, as as well as whether the apparent match is Identical By State (IBS) or Identical By Descent (IBD).