Jumbled Mess of Analysis

Along the way, I had to give up on matching any Thompsons. I just don't. Not within 500 or more years. So I won't be finding any relatives this way. So I moved on to finding a place. Where do I fit then in the grand scheme? Ancestry.com left me at R1b which could be anywhere from Afghanistan to Ireland. How can I go further. Well the quick answer is...I can't really go much further with Ancestry.com; they don't offer any further testing. Most people I've run into use Family Tree DNA. They give you a bit more information and have many avenues for testing. Including SNP testing, which would help me find a narrower list of places. That all costs money. So I've been all over trying to figure out some sort of system for finding people like me...as you can see from my maps. Here is a breakdown of what different sites and people have categorized me as:

Ancestry.com 46 markers says R1b (super helpful) no further testing available through them.
Genetree guesses R1b1b2* - s128 (a safe bet, well above any defining)
OGAP19 (comforting but outdated) Highest in the highlands but also present in North England, Borders, East Anglia and Wales
McEwan R1bstr10 or R1bstr21...yes there are two of them. 46 markers is so frustrating 10 is popular in scotland and scandinavia 21 in Wales.
Campbell (also here) R1b-11 (R1b1c9*) - It's everywhere there are sheep- Cornwall, Cumbria, Western Isles, Orkney, Shetland, Wales and Norway?

A nice haplogroup predictor gives me two results:
Haplogroups and probabilities are as follows:
R1b =>51%  R1b-S21-Scottish =>11%  R1b-Frisian =>10%  R1b-S.Irish =>6%  R1b-Frisian3 =>5%  R1b-S28 =>4%  R1b-North/South 2 =>3%  R1b-E.Europe =>2%  R1b-Leinster =>2%  R1b-N.Irish =>1%  R1b-M222 (NW Irish) =>1%  R1b-North/South 1 =>1%  R1b-S21-Scottish2 =>1%


The s21 Scottish seems pretty explanatory and McEwan suggests that S21 is a broad group. S21-Scottish is spoken of in the context of the Scots modal Haplotype which I have quite a few markers in common with...but also some very telling markers are missing.

The same tester with a slightly different group of panels..probably listing all my numbers gives me this:
Haplogroups and probabilities are as follows:
R1b =>52%  R1b-S28 =>11%  R1b-S29-Frisian2 =>10%  R1b-North/South 1 =>8%  R1b-N.Irish =>4%  R1b-M222 (NW Irish) =>4%  R1b-S.Irish =>3%  R1b-North/South 2 =>2%  R1b-Frisian3 =>2%  R1b-Frisian =>2%  R1b-Ub =>2% 

R1b-s28 is a bit more enigmatic..Here is what McEwan says:  

"One of the principals of Ethnoancestry, David Faux, is S28+ and has been also undertaking considerable research genotyping as well. They have also found it in Southern Norway and in Wales. His full summary and hypotheses can be read at http://www.davidkfaux.org/dnaprofile2.html . In brief he ascribes S28+ to have appeared sometime during the LGM and was located in the Balkan Refugia. After the retreat of the ice, S28+ individuals traveled north to Germany via the Danube and into Poland. At a much later date they were associated with the La Tene culture and later still the Cimbri celts. Further work is required to clarify its exact origin and movement."

 Reading that and taking a look at my maps...it seems to fit. Here is what David Faux says:  

"In order to determine the S28 who is ancestral to the Faux family it has been necessary to delve into the history of the Celts and Germanic peoples and ferret out what makes the most sense.  The evidence is very much in favor for the intermediary (between the first settler in England and pre - history) as being a member of the Cimbri Nation, a Celtic people from the uppermost reaches of the Danish Jutland Penninsula."

Unfortunately not much is really known about the Cimbri, including whether they spoke Celtic or Germanic. Some consider them Celts others Germans. What is great about this for me is the weird nature of my matches. I don't have any in Denmark, but I do in Germany and Poland and it's nice that someone else is looking for these "edge tribes" between the Celtic and German world.


Interestingly Capelli's listing for me is pretty widespread in Britain with most in Llangefni which is in North Wales on Anglesey . Another name caught my eye though. Morpeth. I'm not sure why anymore, but I associate that with this Campbell/Capelli/Oppenheimer group of clustering. For some reason it's stuck in my head. Morpeth. It comes up in a tie for 4th place for people like me. It's in Northumberland and it happens to be really close to the epicenter of Thompsons in 1881 (Belford UK just up the coast). It's definitely part of the Scottish English borders area where the Thom(p)sons are so plentiful.  It's on the side of Hadrian's wall associated with the Votadini or Otadini (a tribe someone I contacted from my maps turned me on to).




Wikipedia: The name is recorded as Votadini in classical sources. Their descendants were the early medieval kingdom known in Old Welsh as Guotodin, and in later Welsh as Gododdin.

Why is it Described in Old Welsh? Because some of the Gododdin leave the Old North; Hen Ogledd and form a kingdom in Wales called Gwynedd...which includes..yup.. Anglesey.


So what does it all mean?


The odds are that the other paper trails I've followed are correct for our Thompsons as well. We're probably British/Scottish/Welsh and we probably moved to Northern Ireland before crossing over to the U.S. with the other Thompsons. We seem to be kind of different than the other Thompsons. We're from some odd scattered group. Odd ducks with some sort of Germano-Celtic-Belgic heritage that seems to stem from the east moving to Britain before the Romans..possibly...maybe.