Zieglers in PA versus Zieglers in WI Thursday, September 3, 2009

I read somewhere that men with German ancestry fall into one of the three majors Germanic groups/tribes labeled I1, R1, and R2 in the genealogical genetics world. (TBR) Which group do my ancestors fall into? One way to find out is to take a DNA test; which we did and have the results for now. I learned something interesting today while looking at our Ziegler surname page.....

My ancestors fall in the Haplogroup "I1" and they came to Wisconsin. We know there are also many Zieglers in Pennsylvania. From the limited number of samples to date, most of them fall in the Haplogroup "R1". From this, we can infer that there is no relationship between my ancestors and those who settled in Pennsylvania.

As more samples become available (aka more people take genealogical DNA tests)... this inference will have to be re-evaluated.