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My FamilyTreeDNA (or other Y test) gives a deeper or a different terminal branch — is your result wrong?

Almost always a difference in depth, not a contradiction — the deeper branch usually sits below ours.

Almost always, no — it’s a difference in depth, not a contradiction. Big Y and YFull sequence the Y-chromosome directly and can detect rare, recent mutations that a consumer chip file simply doesn’t cover, so they can name a more recent branch. When they do, that deeper branch is normally a descendant of the one we report — the same lineage, further down.

If you walk up the parent chain of your more-detailed result, you’ll typically arrive back at the branch we placed you on.

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