Migrations 3 - Other Databases

Ancestry.com did my testing. They use Sorenson Genomics for their test company. I have searches and my haplotype out on SMGF (the Sorenson public site), Genetree (the company that does testing for Sorenson now), Genebase, Ybase and Ysearch (the public site for FTDNA). Since I want to get the broad overview, I've made some maps of those matches that each comany thinks are closest to mine. Here are my matches from Ancestry.com. The red ones are further away, the yellow closer.

This is pretty typical. These are just the matches from my top 10. I excluded the Winnie because he only had 12 markers, but that would probably be another peg in Northern Wales or the Netherlands. The missing Winnie was my top match, but the Peterson from Denmark had more markers and is my closest match above 12 markers  at ancestry.com. Ironically, Peterson, according to HON, is a Swedish or Scottish last name.

Here are my matches from Genebase:

 

 The yellow pin in France is Normandy. The name is Eveland. Eveland is my closest match at Genebase. He claims Germanic ancestry but gave no location. HON says Eveland is a British name from Normandy. These are not all my matches from Genetree. Just those who match up to a genetic distance of 3. The other three close matches are a Bird, Hawkins and Hobby.

Here are my matches from SMGF. Again yellow is closest, followed by yellow dot then red then blue:

 

  Closest at SMGF are the Knowltons (they are always near me) a Graham (HON placed in Scotland) a Smith from Kempston England and a Johannson from Sweden. 

Here is a map of my closest "off modal" matches. (These people shared more of my markers than others in my other off modal map.

I believe the closest in this group was the unknown specimen from Denmark..or the Knowltons from Kent again. This is a map posted elsewhere on this site, but I've narrowed it down to my closest matches.



Here is a map of ybase matches these are people that have a least 34 markers in common with me:

I haven't marked any of these closer or further away because Ybase doesn't do that kind of genetic distance calculation. These are people who match me on any 34 markers. The pin in Denmark is for the Corsons. They believe they are descended from Caersten Jansen who lived in New Amsterdam in the 1600s and was Scandinavian. That could be Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway..etc. Again, Ironically, Corson is listed by House of Names as Scottish.

Next up I'll try and put together a map of Thompson or proto-Thompson hotspots and look at the standard map of migration accepted by many and  laid out by the OGAP groups.

Migrations 2 - YHRD results

Before we talk about YHRD, I want to point out that, in my experience, YHRD has less English and Irish records than FTDNA, Ysearch and Ybase. I think that YHRD is meant to be a forensic database, not really a genetic genealogy database.

It is sort of helpful to get another perspective on things. If you create a YHRD account you can do up to 20 searches a day. You can choose to view searches that are "close" to you or only those that match. YHRD builds a nice world map with your matches. Their databases are limited by the number of records you use. So if you search on 17 markers, you will be searching on a smaller database than if you used only 7. I chose to do a 7, 9, and 11 loci (markers) search because beyond 11 I have no matches.

Here is a map of the 7 loci search:

Now I believe that the Red squares indicate a percentage of matches in a given area. So That bright red box in Northern Italy means that, given the 7 loci I entered more people in that area matched than in say Portugal.

 

When I enter 9 loci (markers like DYS385a and DYS385b) Many of the locations are gone. Some are still there and still have a high concentration (like that Italian square). Others have all the sudden become more prominent like Southern Norway and Northern Denmark (Jutland).

 

Finally I've narrowed it down to 11 loci. Beyond this, I have no exact matches and I have to look at neighboring haplogroups. Like I said above, Ireland, England and Scotland seem to be under-represented in YHRD, but they are also only a small part of Europe. So I'm down to two places, Jutland in Denmark and Southwestern Germany. The Italians have been knocked out of the running and the British are long gone. 

What, if anything, do these places have in common and how are they connected to the British Isles..if at all?

Next up...Let's take these findings and look at what we've gotten from ysearch, genetree and ybase again to see where things line up.

Migrations 1

Where we come from seems to depend largely on when I stop looking. Right now, as far as I know we spring from the earth in Pennsylvania or Indiana. My DNA so far has pointed to Western Europe..probably British Isles, but really no place specific. The Thom(p)sons seem to be centered around Northern England and the Scottish Borders area. If you look at my Off modal DNA matches map you'll see that there are a couple of really good matches probably from the Scotland/Northern England area, but there are also compelling matches elsewhere in Kent and some poor unknown in Denmark. What I've learned is that, although the likelihood of British Isles descent is very high, Britain itself has always been a melting pot. As people sift through all these DNA results and try to tie them to historical and archeological events, it seems ever more apparent to me that there are no indigenous Brythonic people, just people who may have been around longer than others.

I suppose in essence that is what I'm attempting to find. Maybe not a place, but a journey. I would like to plot and connect these people on a map through time. I'd like to be able to see my Thompsons and those proto-thompsons as they move across continents and over seas.

To begin with, lets look at the maps I first looked at after getting my DNA results. This is the map Ancestry.com gave me after my DNA test.

In general these two arrows do sort of sum it up. R1b seems to spring up in central Asia and move into western Europe.  The general consensus at the time of this map was that R1b people hung around in the northern Basque region of Spain and then moved north after the last Glacial Maximum to inhabit Britain and Ireland.

After I found that I was R1b I wanted to know more about it than the generic Western European I was given and I found the percentage maps for R1b concentration:

So there is R1b. Of course the more red you get the better your odds of finding people like you. Generally it follows the simple arrows of the first map. Small amounts in Eastern Europe and Central Asia moving westward to higher amounts in Northern Spain, Western Britain and France with concentration peaking in Ireland.


At this point, it seemed safe to say that the Thompsons are basically Celts. R1b seems to follow the basic pattern of Celtic tribes in europe and is busy being tied to those same timelines through archeology and dna testing of artifacts.

I'd like to narrow that map down a bit though. Europe is a big place.

In the process of trying to find relatives any way possible I entered my results at Genetree which uses the Sorenson Database. They gave me a bit more of a prediction with this subgroup: R1b1b2a*-S128

It's still well above anything definitive but it's better than nothing.  Having someone guess at my results led me to go look at other predictors,  as you can read in my jumbled mess of analysis.

Two possible haplogroups came to the top depending on which panels I put in the mix: S21 and S28. The reason there are always several choices is because I have a subset of the panels that most people have. Here is what Ethnosancestry and ISOGG say about those groups:

Genetree says I'm S128 which is right off the main trunk for R1b-M269. It's the Parent of one of my haplogroup guesses S21 and the Grandparent of one of the other guesses S28 as well as our buddy m222 (Northwest Irish and Scottish borders). If I had real SNP testing and it came back that we were m222 then this conversation would be moot. M222 has been pretty well proven to live in the lowlands of Scotland and Northern Ireland. That's not what these guesses for me are though. So lets look at those guesses:

S21 (my haplogroup predictor came back s21-scottish). I've read some comment that it really should be labeled s116-scottish...which would actually be a parent of S28 (my other prediction). For the sake of argument though we'll accept S21 at face value and look at it's map.

The distribution of S21 is shown in orange, along with the rest of R1b in pale yellow.

S21 is most common in the Germanic areas of the North European plain and also in England. The frequency drops dramatically south of the Alps. 

S28 appears to be fairly widespread moving out from Austria. I haven't found a good map of it yet but I hope to. 

If that listing for S21 really is S116 then I may be no closer to finding some geographic locations. S116, like S28 appears to be widespread throughout the "Celtic" world and may defy mapping.

Next up. Let's take a look at YHRD and see what it comes up with. Along with my own maps and maybe we can make some coherent pattern out of this mess.

Needle in a Needle Stack

Thompson appears to be the 4th most popular name in the Northern United Kingdom. It's the 4th most popular name in Belfast Ireland after Johnston, Wilson and Campbell. I think it's the 13th most popular name in the U.S.

How can it be so hard to find people in my little branch of this tree then? It seems nearly impossible that I'm alone looking up these particular Thompsons.

Right now I'm busy waiting for some documents from the National Archives. There is no guarantee that they will find anything. A person with the Sons of Union Soldiers told me that it's most likely that Levi applied for his pension but died before he could collect it. I don't have any record of him receiving a headstone and I have no idea what his death date could be. Although I believe it's before 1880. Confusingly a Levi Thompson dies in a nearby town in 1894, but I believe that is John Levi Thompson who marries a Nancy Trueblood..different guy.

I also haven't been able to find any marriage record for Levi and Rosa/Rosanna. So I have no idea what her maiden name might be. I can't find any record of Levi before 1860 when they appear in the census in VanBuren, Madison, Indiana already married and with a few children.

Really, when I had reached Albert's father, I had hoped to find him in other family trees. Every generation I go back, mathematically, I'm just that much more likely to run into some existing family on their own path. So far no luck though.

I contacted the Methodist Church in Alexandria Indiana trying to get any possible information from them about my Thompsons but they don't have any record of them. One of my great-grandfather Ray Bishop's brothers was a Methodist when he died, but that doesn't mean the rest of the family was. I think I have some information from news articles that Bishop's sisters were Baptists as was my grandfather. I'm not sure if the Baptists keep those kind of records. I haven't heard back from the Baptist church I contacted.

I have two trees on Ancestry.com, one at myheritage.com and one at genetree. Ancestry and Genetree have my Y-dna results attached to the trees.

The waiting is the hardest part.