About
I’ve spent twelve years on one rare branch of the Y-chromosome haplogroup E-V13 — my own — trying to work out where it came from before it reached North Wales.
That sentence undersells how much of the twelve years was spent being wrong. I’ve followed leads that dissolved on closer inspection, over-read matches that turned out to be distant cousins rather than answers, and built at least one argument I later had to publicly take apart. This publication is the record of that — not a finished pedigree, but an honest account of what the evidence actually supports and where it runs out.
What this is.
Y-DNA testing, ancient DNA, and the occasional documentary record, read the way I’d want them read if I were the sceptical stranger checking my work rather than the person who wanted the story to be true. Every claim is tagged by how solid it is — established, likely, my own favoured interpretation, or flatly not supportable — so you can tell which is which without taking my word for it.
What this isn’t.
A pedigree chart with a bow on it. Genetic genealogy gets oversold constantly, usually by people with something to sell. There’s nothing for sale here — it’s free, with no paid tier planned — and my main qualification is that I’ve been doing this long enough to have made most of the mistakes once.
Who it’s for.
Anyone who has taken a Y-DNA or autosomal test and wants to understand what it can and can’t actually tell them — not just readers who share my haplogroup. Several posts are written for that broader question specifically.
I’m Phillip Hughes — a retired company director, family historian since 1985, and, since 2013, one of the first people to have had this branch sequenced at all.Why subscribe?
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