In this study, we explored how vaccination strategies in poultry farming have shaped the evolution of this important avian virus using complete genome sequences available in GenBank. Specifically our objectives were to 1) determine if recombination was evident among full length class II aPMV-1; 2) estimate evolutionary rates of each genotype; 3) estimate the effective population size of each genotype; and 4) determine the selective forces on vaccine-related and nonvaccine-related wild type genotypes. Our results confirm that recombination is an important process in this negative sense RNA virus and that vaccine-related strains have an evolutionary history that is unique from nonvaccine-related strains, which includes distinct evolutionary rates, temporal changes in population size, and selection profiles.