Origenes Business Model Has Changed!
Attention family history researchers using DNA tests and analysis! Dr. Tyrone Bowes (company Origenes, including Irishorigenes, etc.) has changed his business model and no longer offers some of the very sophisticated analysis he once did. Bowes no longer offers his more sophisticated and more precise analysis of Y-DNA test results, that he formerly offered. Y-DNA comes exclusively from male lines of father to son which has solved several family history mysteries but Y-DNA tests are only available from FamilyTreeDNA.com, Instead, Dr. Bowes has switched to exclusively offering his analysis services only of simpler autosomal tests, from Ancestry.com
Still, Dr. Bowes continues to have his specialized databases of families long attached to particular pieces of land in the three main UK regions: Scotland, Ireland, and England-Wales. There are no other databases like these. Bowes created these looking at the land records that still exist for the early 1800’s. Using them, Bowes can show where many, many land owning and long-term leasing families were physically located before the industrial revolution–when people began moving around more, and greater distances for jobs and marrying further away from families’ long-time settlement.
The Industrial Revolution began a bit earlier in England than it did in Scotland and Ireland which is fortunate for the researcher of those latter two realms. Thanks to so many civil wars later than the Wars of the Roses, there are fewer earlier records for Scotland and Ireland than in England, sometimes. So, although the largest bodies of complete records for Ireland are the Tithe applotments, and the Griffith’s Valuations for tax purposes (not just property but personal property such as livestock also), and those were done in the 1820’s and 1830’s for the former and the 1850’s for the latter, one group was still made before people were moving around so much, and the other, after the famine, showed who was still alive. Both are very important for researchers of Irish and Scots-Irish families.
While Scots were moving or displaced earlier, many Scots went to Northern Ireland, which means between the records of Scotland and those of Ireland there is still a moderately continuous combined set of records for Scots, one way or another. Again, most Scots working in industry went south to England after the Napoleonic Wars. Groups did go south after James VI of Scotland also became James I of England and went south to London to rule but a Parliament and government in Scotland still existed until 1708. After 1708 more went south but often could be tied to clans in Scotland and families within them who were wealthy enough to deliberately send middle or younger sons to London for more prestigious and lucrative opportunities connected to government, or finance or military connected to government. There are decent paper trails. After the Napoleonic Wars, though (ended in 1815), not everyone in Scotland was so fortunate though, any more than most of Ireland and people looking for better opportunities in industry were not generally from middling or well to do landed families with a lot of records about them. There began to be major economic upheavals in both Ireland and Scotland starting by about 1820.
The excess from poorer families were not going just to England, though, but also by that time to the U.S. and Canada–when they could afford trans-Atlantic travel. The largest group of people who use companies and their data bases such as Ancestry, come from the United States, followed by Australia and Canada. These are countries that have had large amounts of poor and lower middle-class emigrants to them, especially since the steamship was invented and crossing the Atlantic became much cheaper than in the 18th century–and especially after famines in Europe, after ‘the year without a summer 1814-1815, after famines in the 1830’s and 1840’s in Scotland, Ireland, and parts of continental Europe. The industrial revolution brought about movement, not just because of all the new urban jobs and industries being created, but also because cheap, speedier travel, the steamship and railroad were invented, and England was among the nations to have them earliest. In fact, until the 1850’s and 1860’s or later, most Scots, as well as Irish were getting to English jobs by ship, cheaper steamships starting about the late 1820’s, but more so in the 1830’s.
Dr. Bowes understood both where the greatest market for DNA tests to help family history was and where the greatest problems were–the British Isles ancestry and created specialized databases of samples from families who lived in the same places for centuries before the industrial revolution. He also knew that even with the industrial revolution, there were no safety nets for economic downturns. While families sent middle sons away, the oldest and youngest or oldest and second oldest continued to stay on the old lands and have families. This way, it was possible for middle children, if they could afford, or somehow obtain, even beg the four pence or so to take a packet from Liverpool to Cork or Belfast or Dublin, etc. might get home to where they still had support and not starve to death. Families, at least parts of the same original families, continued to be on the same lands until the 20th century and many still have twigs or branches still in the same original areas.
Thus, Dr. Bowes identified the families from the 19th century, pre-industrial Revolution records and went all over, or communicated all over, and obtained data samples. He made maps that now show where surnames and haplogroups are and for many people this is all they need.
He still can match anyone who has an Ancestry DNA test to the families in these specialized data bases. So, if you are looking for where your Irish families came from and aren’t all that particular about whether the links are paternal or maternal, you still have an additional benefit from his tests. However, if you are trying to determine better exactly how you relate to families, through a paternal or a maternal line, he is no longer doing some of the sophisticated deep analysis he once did.
It is also understandable why he made the changes he did. Ancestry is the 800-no make that 2 ton–gorilla and more people not only use the Ancestry site and all its products, but also to make it convenient and consistent, they also use the Ancestry DNA test and Ancestry offers ONLY an autosomal test. They do not sort out the Y-DNA and they do not offer an MtDNA test. He has a wife and family now, of growing children and wanted to maintain control of his work, his data bases, his maps and his analytics and not just sell them to someone else. He made a choice to appeal to a greater number and to be able to be more efficient with and for that greater number and make a better income for himself and his family. We wish him well and still recommend his maps, and his services for being better at tying family surname ancestry to more precise locations in the British Isles. He’s probably also going to do better for tourism in Ireland and Scotland and they both probably ought to give him an additional stipend for sending so many Americans so many places that might need and want the extra tourist dollars.
However, if you have a marriage in your ancestry of two families with the same surname, and you have that surname, he would no longer be able to tell you which of the two families was on your father’s father’s line and which was someone who married into that line and about when. You won’t see any more analyses like the one he did for Dr. Ingemar Woods in 2018.
As I am an experienced, skilled researcher who communicates often with others with similar skills, we and many others can do a lot of analysis ourselves and thus had asked Dr. Bowes for his assistance with more complicated questions. We also used to recommend Dr. Bowes Origenes for more precise analysis of male and female line DNA tests to identify not just which lines of Irish, Scottish or English families a test subject matches but also whether this is a line that comes through fathers, such as when you are trying to find the ancestors of your male surname family, or females. Only a Y-DNA test can show father to son families of a surname that a male bears, while autosomal testing, including that done by Ancestry has improved and analysis can be done to determine your relatives on your father’s side or your mother’s, matching to your father’s father’s line cannot be easily or quickly done with the autosomal tests. We all understand, though, that these are fewer common questions than most family history researchers and writers have, or even want to tackle.
That being said, there is a complication that is more common and can no longer as easily be sorted out without the tests and analytics that Dr. Bowes used to use, and now will require more paper searches and more money and time spent by those trying to answer these questions. There are many families that bear the same surname in the British Isles, particularly when the surname is a general location such as ‘Woods’ for someone who lived near a forest or clump of woods in some county or other, or other types of locations. These names can occur in any part of the British Isles, in many counties. Likewise, occupation surnames like Taylor or Clark/Clerk. Autosomal DNA analysis when it finds more than one family with the same surname related to you by either your mother or your father, cannot go that extra step and tell you easily whether that family is related to you through your father’s father or your father’s mother. Y-DNA testing and analysis is still the most powerful tool for analyzing the relationships of a male, father to son, line.
There was another use that we discovered for ‘complicated ‘families where relationships are not always what parents told their children. About 15-20% of the U.S. has complicated mixed families and while it might have been less in more distant times, it was not zero. People do have questions about whether or not they are really related to cousins and precisely how when they run into relationships that are not what they were originally told. There are also ancestors that for one reason or another are later forgotten, sometimes deliberately. Then there are families now of not solely or primarily British, or German, or some other heritage but mixed and there have been events in Europe that took large numbers of different ethnicities and sent them both to the U.S. where they mixed with those earlier British, German and other families–and scattered families all over Europe besides. Ancestry and FT-DNA and other companies’ maps of one’s ancestry’ often do not seem to make a lot of sense because of all the migrations–and mixing. Again, more sophisticated analysis, no longer being done by Dr. Bowes, used to help sort some of this out better and faster.
We discovered one of those complicated situations in my family and a forgotten ancestress. We knew that a male cousin and I had some extra ‘interesting’ DNA. He had some DNA that one wouldn’t expect at all, and I had some extra. Both were Irish, somehow, and the percentage amount suggested a female ancestress of either Scots-Irish or Anglo-Irish origins might have entered my male cousin’s and my mutual paternal line, about the time of the Congress of Vienna, or about 1815.
To make a long story short, Dr. Bowes’ business model has changed and is no loner as useable for all those ‘more difficult’ questions some researchers have and we are all going to end up employing more paper chasers in other places. I’m now about to employ a researcher in east central Europe for a paper search–and during a fractious election year–to answer the question of who was this mysterious Irish ancestress on our mutual fathers’ lines for a cousin and me because Dr. Bowes no longer does sophisticated Y-DNA analysis that could have more easily and quickly answered the question… The same will be for others. Plan on doing more research of the paper kind, primary and valid secondary sources and looking for all consistencies, and employing other researchers when the records you need are distant, because it’s also going to be, at the rate they are digitizing and uploading records a century or more before all the records that could be online and easily accessible (like beyond the libraries in a particular state), are accessible. In the U.S., to hire researchers since the professional genealogical organizations have outdated data bases on who is actually available for what, I’ve also found that the metropolitan, regional (within a state) and state genealogical societies are now the best source of names of reputable, good researchers, especially at reasonable rates.