Haplogroup Testing

[curiousity]

I took a couple of tests at another company, one that advertises it was involved in the Melungeon identity question, also. I found out some interesting facts about haplogroups, and how they show where a customer's ancestors originated from. That fact really should solve a question like the Melungeon dilemma.

If a Melungeon's y-DNA and mtDNA tests come back as, respectively, R, G, or I haplogroups or subclades, the mtDNA results maybe H and its subclades, then the Melungeon is European, his ancestors were colonists. They may have intermarried with Native Americans, their recent genetic history might reflect this in an autosomal test, but the haplogroup tests are mandatory to find out if a Melungeon is indigenous or not.

And the Western Atlantic Modal Haplotype: http://isogg.org/wiki/Western_Atlantic_Modal_Haplotype A y-DNA haplogroup test that comes back with a WAMH hit proves that the customer's ancestors emigrated off of the Western European seaboard. That proves that the Melungeon is probably from Spain, Portugal, France, or England. He isn't indigenous at all.

Honestly, I find this incredible that I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere. An autosomal testing project of this magnitude that uses relatively inexpensive autosomal tests to research an entire group or tribe of people is ludicrous. Now it's advertised that the Melungeons are mixed race. But no mention is made of their origins, and to label an entire people with such a vague tag as this when autosomal tests only cover a few hundred years is criminal. Sorry, it really is. An autosomal test may cover the few hundred years of post-Columbian New World, but doesn't touch the origins of the Melungeon at all. With the WAMH tag the Melungeon is no different than much of the American people, either on the north or south continent.

How did these companies get away with this? You realize that with all the referencing the South's Jim Crow and One Drop laws a vague or false decision on an important racial topic like this could be catastrophic for a person. I'm not wandering with this as that's always referenced in relation to the difficulty the Melungeons have had in the past couple of hundred years, especially the Civil War ones. If there was a sincere concern to identify them genetically, the people behind the effort could have done a much, much better job. Why didn't they?