Analysis of changes in genetic structure from surnames. A study of three generations of Pag Island isolates, Croatia

The aim of this study was to estimate, from the distribution of surnames, t he recent historic changes in inbreeding, kinship and generic distance matr ices among Pag Island village populations, and to compare them to previousl y published anthropometric. sociocultural and generic distance matrices. Th e study included 484 marital Fairs with spouses born between 1929 and 1960 ("current generation", CG), 704 pairs between 1897 and 1928 ("parental gene ration", PG), and 680 pairs between 1859 and 1896 ("grandparental generatio n", GG), taken from 11 villages. Total inbreeding on the island, estimated from the frequency of isonymous marriages, amounted to 3.14% in CG and 3.31 % in PG and GG. Total kinship (unreduced variance) of the entire island was 4.7% in CG and PGI and 4.9% in GG. The comparison of those values to other previously reported for other isolate populations of the world indicates t hat the population on Pag is highly inbred, with accumulated kinship over r ime. The generic distance matrix determined from surnames revealed a good f it to Malecot's isolation by distance model only in PG (R-2 = 0.176, p < 0. 05), and a good correlation with linguistic, genetic, migrational and femal e anthropometric distance matrices in all three generations.