Frustration and the Perception of Race

Ughhh.

If you're like me, then, at every connection point, you try to learn as much about a "people" as you can. While my family is traditionally Celtic leaning, I've been working my way through what it may mean to also be the other guy. It's a growth process and I've been thinking about it for a while. Comparing myths and art, literature and history and looking at migration patterns.

So I've been owning it and been actively seeking knowledge about my other people...all the people, who make me me. Right now it appears to be mostly Northern European with some recent additions of Native Americans. I am not any one thing.

Neither is anyone else and they never were.

So, recently I've been trying to find out more about the Northmen. Music, art, culture. It's actually been hard. I hate to say it, because of the perseption of WASPs, but it's hard to find cultural references on them. I have tons of Irish music. I can find German music and Scots music. Trying to find some examples of Anglo Saxon music or literature has been really discouraging. It's been harder than I thought.  Part of the problem is the perception of Race.

I was hunting around for Anglo Saxon stuff last night and ran across a bunch of Youtube videos. One was a newscast from Britain that stated that "The English are Germans and the Welsh are true Britons".

I watched this video and the analysis was done with a single transect line of Britain from East Anglia to Llangefni. 300 people were sampled (from a nation of millions) and the results were stated as the English are Germans and the Welsh are the true Britons. Now if you look at the map of England in the 800s this would totally make sense. It would be a total shock if you didn't get that result! East Anglia is named East Anglia for a reason!

Now if they ran that same line of testing further north what could they have said? I expect the results would be much the same, with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings being more populous in the east and the britons being more populous in the west, but you'd have to change your headline to "The English are Germans and the English are the true Britons".

England is a modern nation state and the genetic makeup of it's people has little to do with it's current borders. The Belgic tribes inhabited southern England and Ireland well before the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings came, in Ireland they were there before the "Irish" showed up from Spain (it's actually part of the origin myth of the Irish that this happened). Julius Caesar couldn't figure out if the Belgic people were Germanic or Celtic, but there they were. Who is the true Briton then? Labeling all English as Germans is like labeling all Danes as Germans or all Swedes as Germans. These Anglish people spoke a Germanic language with many words that are not unlike Celtic words. They were not all the same people. They were not a part of a modern nation state like Germany and certainly after living in England for a thousand plus years they're just as much British as anyone else.

I can't possibly do any legitimate searching because I constantly have to fend off this kind of us versus them crap.

I challenge anyone to do legitimate internet searching for Anglos Saxons and see what you get. If it's not one thing, it's the other. I can't search for Anglo Saxons or Germanic information in general without running smack into the white pride sites. I can't search out information on R1b-S21 or Germanic Tribes or innocuous things like Saxon art without slamming into Stormfront (which I don't even like to name because it might somehow give them traffic).

And that's just the obvious one. I've run through several seemingly normal sites and forums only to become dragged down in the "Germans look like this and Other people look like that" lines of reasoning. I have to watch where I'm stepping all the time or I get my boots stuck in the mud of people lamenting the debasement of their "Race" in England or Germany.

I try to walk the line. It's hard. I believe that it is okay for a person to be proud of the accomplishments, lives and struggles of their ancestors. It informs who you are, but it is not the sum total of who you are. How do I get the message to my kids that you can be proud without having to be better?

Do you see the difference? It can be subtle. If you wake up every day and say "I am a Crow Warrior. I am strong and do not need to eat any more doughnuts today." and it helps you lose 40 pounds and be there for your grandchildren, then you do it! On the other hand if you wake up every day and say "I am a Crow Warrior. I am strong and I will rid my land of these buttery Irish by blowing up a McDonalds playland." then you've got mental issues.

It seems though that all around me people are falling into two slippery muck holes. One muck hole says you cannot be proud of any accomplishment you didn't do yourself (never mind if your country put a man on the moon. What did you do?).  I think that hole was dug out of fear. Any acknowledgment of group culture and it's influence is a bad thing.

I think the fear comes from the other hole which is nationalism and ultimately group based hatred. Where you determine that there was once a pure Christian Culture or Muslim Culture or American Way or German People or Celtic tribe and anything that moves away from that core of absolute goodness is a debasement of your perfect group.

I think that has been a lesson for me. I find in my family tree many roots in different places and I have to broaden my world to accommodate them. I have to have room for many different ethnic groups and religious views and not everyone who gave me life has been a saint. What I want to do is to be able to understand what happened to them and where they were and when, even if it doesn't fit my rosy picture of some mythical past. Knowing the truth is knowing myself and expanding my worldview.

I am a Thompson Warrior. I am strong and I know that the real battle is with fear and ignorance and hatred. I also do not need to eat so many doughnuts.

Revenge of 458.2

Okay, so it seems my 16.2 is in some way important. So I decided to make a search of those people who had certain slow markers DYS388, 392, 393, 426, 437, 438, 454, 455 as determined by a web site I saw and DYS458 of 16.2. 

So these should be people who match with me at a really basic  level and then have the added benefit of a 16.2. Any or all of these could be freak mutations, but many of these also seemed to have other numbers I wasn't looking for in common with me like YCAIIa and b being 19 - 22  and DYS447 = 24. Also a noticable amount of people had the DYS385b = 11 which is usually a killer.


I could only do this search on ancestry.com and SMGF because only they allow for 16.2 to be displayed. Genetree masks the actual numbers, FTDNA displays 17 for these people and Genebase appears to display 16. So if this is an important number, most people won't know it.


So here is that map:

Some positions had to be total guesses because the people themselves don't know, just like me. Many though were pretty well educated on where they were from and I could get a lot from their pedigrees. Again I tried to colorize my closer matches but right now the colorizing is incomplete because SMGF only displays the numbers you searched for. So I don't have the actual ranking for the SMGF people, I'll have to go back and look at them individually to see where they fit.


For kicks though I compared this map with a map of Germanic migration as it met the Roman empire. The scale is off but you get the idea:

 

The German migration map doesn't contain later migrations to England because it was part of the Roman empire. Many of my close matches are in Britain which makes me think they're most recent but the Peterson from Denmark isn't totally alone as I've shown on other maps. It could be that that is my true "line" or it could be evidence of even more recent migrations within the last 500 years or so of Scots and English back to the continent (assuming we're Scots again).  Also not every marker on this map has the benefit of TMRCA since all the SMGF records are missing that info.

At the present time though (given the limited nature of the results), it would seem to me that people who look roughly like me with this one really strange marker have followed a migration path of Germanic peoples west into England and Ireland at some point in time.

It's also good to note that if FTDNA and Ysearch displayed DYS458.2 results, this map could be totally different.

Beowulf

Okay, so in coming to terms with probably being the bad guy (see owning it) I decided to pick up some literature from my youth. In English class half a life ago we read an excerpt from Beowulf and I remember that it's the earliest known English lit out there, so I picked it up from the library.

I like to get the most recent stuff I can because often times it contains new research in the notes. So I picked up "Beowulf a New Verse Translation" by Seamus Heaney. Mostly, I liked the cover, but also it was the newest copy at the public library.

Once I got the book I found out what a treasure it is, because Seamus Heaney has the original text right next to the translated text. For giant nerds like me that is awesome. You get to see the actual English language evolve on the page.  Along these lines I was totally disappointed when I read the Tanakh (which also boasted a hebrew version along with the english) that the two versions were totally seperate in the book and could not be compared side by side. So kudos here for Seamus Heaney.

Also, though, hidden in the introduction to the book are some personal notes from the translator and these were an excellent and ironically pertinent gem for my own journey. Seamus appears to be a Northern Irishman, not of British persuasion, who was asked to translate this Anglo Saxon work. How do you go about translating the classical text of the aggressor? His feelings seem to match my own as I try to reconcile the Irish Catholic side of my upbringing with what appears to be Anglo Saxon DNA for my Thompsons. Even among Ulster Scots I feel a bit like a blood traitor. As the other Thompsons are busying themselves with connecting to their innate Celtic-ness, I am learning about the hated invader...the wasp in the bees nest.

Here is the passage from the introduction that meant so much to me personally:

What happened was that I found in the glossary to C. L. Wrenn's edition of the poem the Old English word meaning "To Suffer", the word tholian (I don't have the thorn symbol used in the book so imagine a funny looking p here), and although at first it looked completely strange with it's thorn symbol instead of the familiar th, I gradually realized that it was not strange at all, for it was the word that older and less educated people would have used in the country where I grew up.  "They'll just have to learn to thole, " my aunt would say about some family who had suffered an unforeseen bereavement. And now suddenly here was "thole" in the official textual world, mediated through the apparatus of a scholarly edition, a little bleeper to remind me that my aunt's language was not just a self-enclosed family possession but an historical heritage, one that involved the journey tholian had made north into Scotland and then across into Ulster with the planters and then across from the planters to the locals who had originally spoken Irish and then farther across again when the Scots Irish emigrated to the American South in the eighteenth century. When I read in John Crowe Ransom the line "Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole, " my heart lifted again, the world widened, something was furthered.

The author continues to say that by watching the journey of this word "Thole" he gained a nostalgia for world culture and it opened the door for him to translate this work thirty five years before he was asked to do it.

And so there it is, in the language of language, my feeling at this moment in time, totally encapsulated by the introduction to a book. As this is a journey, I cannot be embarrassed that my chest tightened when I read this and that I fumbled to try to explain it to my wife. How do you explain a feeling you didn't expect to have? How could a library book have such power over me in what is, at best, a completely amateur and totally selfish genealogy hobby?

My best explanation is that for me this is no academic pursuit. Every corner I turn is filled with dirty emotion. I dislike the Anglo Saxons..the horrid invaders, but my need for answers is forcing me to face the fact that they are there and that they are my people too.

Who cares if the message is delivered by a DNA company, or a family tree or your grandparents, or the introduction by an author? The journey my family has made has also been presented to me as the journey of a single word.

I should be ashamed to leave this in the public, but it's part of the message in this bottle and it could inform the journey of another. When I lay down to sleep at night I send out a silent prayer to my ancestors. I ask them to help me find the truth of this so that I can put it down. So that I can "know". Before you think too harshly of me, remember that people pray for new red shoes and big screen T.V.s, asking for knowledge isn't that bad. I ask them to give me some sign that I'm on the right path and I think to myself that the message should be obvious...like a dream or letter something, but it never comes. So I struggle to find the meaning in the randomness.

A few days ago, I was standing at the corner of our street waiting for my Son's bus to come. I stood by the street sign and then I looked up at it and made some small connection. There I stood on the corner of Chatham and Hanover. I shook my head and let it go.

Later I got the word from Genetree that I'm probably S21 which would explain a lot about all these germans.

Then I am sitting and reading this introduction to Beowulf, surrounded by my favored books on Buddhism (from my last great journey of self discovery...or non-self discovery) and this note from a Medievalist from Ireland reaches out and squeezes my heart. The unbelievable thing, the thing that makes me feel the strings that tie each of us to the other,  is that the word that is used to help bridge the gap and make this quest "okay", the word that is used to explain to me, this voyage across the oceans and the seas of time is... "to suffer".

I picked it because I liked the cover.

Logically, I will tell you that these are coincidences that my brain has picked up, and because pattern making is a human trait, I have made a pattern where none exists. Logically I can say there is no overarching flow to this river of life beyond random chance and if there were it's efforts would not be wasted for one instant on something as stupid and small as a single person squandering their time and money searching for a past that means nothing in day to day life. People will have died from hunger in the time it took me to write this.

My old brain, my emotional mind is screaming at me that today and for the moment this is important to me for a reason and that when my time comes round again to face death, I will hold this past I have found in my mind like a light and remember that these people I'm hunting, who are my people, suffered too. Then maybe it will help me in that dark place to face the worst enemy, fear,  and stand my ground and laugh. My feeling mind is telling me that whatever it takes for me to face my ultimate doom head on  is good enough. I should not judge myself too harshly for being so lucky, after all, fate will bring down every man and we all will learn to thole.

Owning it

Owning the bad guy. Here is the digest version of what is a huge and complicated history.

Okay, so if you've followed me this far you know that my first forays into what it meant to be a Thompson led me to Ireland. Specifically Northern Ireland in the mid to late 1700s and early 1800s.

 The Red hand is kind of difficult for me. My only reference to it is of a nationalist symbol of oppression by the Northern Irish against the Republic. I do realize that it is a much older symbol and has it's base in Gaelic culture and the Ui Niell, but for some reason it's tainted for me.

Ireland was a surprise to me.  Neither of my trees led to Northern Ireland as we know it today or the Plantations specifically but they did lead to Donegal and Cork. Since my mother's family self identifies Catholic Irish (Murphy) it was especially "interesting".

It turns out I was mistaken and those family trees I built are wrong. They were good trees for their people, but they turned out to be bad trees for me. Now I'm stuck in Indiana or Pennsylvania in 1834. The odds are still in favor of us being Irish, but there's no paper trail that takes me there anymore.

Most Thompsons from Ireland are from Northern Ireland which is part of the U.K.  So if we're Irish, we're most likely Northern Irish. Most Thompsons came in a few waves of Northern Irish and Scots that left those places because of years of drought and threat of starvation or to escape persecution. They may have been England's war dogs in Ireland, but they were not allowed to be full citizens or hold office or even get government employment unless they denounced the Presbyterian Church and took up the Anglican Church..which many would not do. At one point the Queen of England nullified all marriages performed by Presbyterian ministers. Which was a great insult to many.

Here in colonies in the 1700s the Irish were not welcome to land just anywhere. Only certain colonies would let them in. Pennsylvania and North and South Carolina were among those. Pennsylvania and the Carolinas were actively recruiting Ulster Irish to try to solve one of their problems...the Natives on the frontiers.

So here again, we're the bad guys. Because of hundreds of years of constant warfare with the Irish the Ulster Irish were highly militarized and perfect to settle in the mountains and woods of the west. They usually poor, probably uneducated, and didn't bring much with them, but they were allowed some religious freedom in return for being the front line in fighting with the local Indian population. So we Thompsons were probably some part of winning the west..or the midwest as it is now, but our home base would have been Northern Ireland.

As I researched a bit of what it means to be Ulster Irish, I learned more about the Plantations and the Ulster Scots and the Borderers. Thompsons are one of those border groups that helped make up the plantations. In Ireland, we're the bad guys. The red hand of Ulster. The North Irish who voted to stay with England. We're the oppressive squatters choosing to stay with the English rather than join the new republic.

Thompsons of course are also in groups that already lived in Ireland before the plantations. Playing the odds though, it's still in favor of us being "Ulster Irish" or even just Scots or English borderers. So our home base would then be moved from Northern Ireland back in time to Northern Britain. It doesn't get much better there though.

Having lived in constant warfare between the English and Scots left the people of the borders in limbo. Each belonging to a government that was too removed to do much good. The border reivers lived in a sort of lawless tribal area. They may have been "English" or "Scottish" depending on who was conscripting or buying them into what army, but their real allegiance was to their clans and their borders neighbors.

Thomson is associated with the West March of the borders along with these other families:
Scott, Bates, Little, Glendenning, Irvine, Bell, Carruthers, Graham, Johnstone, Jardine, Moffat and Latimer.

Also it's listed in the Middle March on the English side with these families:
Anderson, Potts, Reed, Hall, Hedley of Redesdale. Charlton, Robson, Dodd, Milburn, Yarrow, Stapleton of Tynedale. Also Fenwick, Ogle, Heron, Witherington, Medford, Collingwood, Carnaby, Shaftoe, Ridley, Stokoe, Stamper, Wilkinson, Hunter, Jamieson.

Information on Thom(p)sons on the Borders

When searching for genetic matches I do see Irvines, Bells, Grahams, Scotts, Wilkinsons, Reids and Littles crop up. Not many, but some.

When thinking of Border Reivers, It may help to imagine Pirates only put them on horseback. These families were such a problem that they were cursed by a Scottish Archbishop for all eternity.
 
Again, I'm playing the odds. These are not set in stone because I have no paper that says so. Most likely, we're borders English or Scottish and part of a Reiving clan who then were planted in Ulster to try and settle that area ending up "more Irish than the Irish" and then because of religious persecution or starvation moved to the U.S. where we were installed in the western fringes of society to fight the indigenous population. Bad guys.

Where does that leave us...So we're Border Reivers the scourge of both the English and the Scots and other border clans as well. I could have left it there and left well enough alone but Genetically I'm seeing a lot of people I don't think I should see...normally. For one, I don't see other Thompsons. I do however see people from all over England and into Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany and even Switzerland and Northern Italy.

I've been mulling that over for a while and I've come up with a group ( a couple of groups really) that would explain that and today I think I've gotten what I was looking for. An explanation. Some official word that would tell me why, if we're Celtic Scots and Irish all these Northmen keep showing up in my lists?

Today in conversation with Genetree. A company associated with Sorenson Genomics who did my testing for ancestry.com I was told that if I have 16.2 for DYS458 and I'm R1b1b2 then I'm predicted to be R1b1b2a1a, S21, U106. Predicted is the key word. Again it's playing the odds. Just because they haven't found 16.2 in R1b1b2 outside U106 doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The only way to know for sure would be to test for that SNP.

In England it's about 20% of the population. In Ireland it's about 6%. Other hot spots are Netherlands 35%, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Czech Republic and on down from there. It's a huge branch of R1b, considered to be about 25% of R1b as a whole. For some reason, I'm light on matches in the Netherlands, but I've got some people popping up in most of those other places. Some are just as close as my English/Scottish matches.

So that, paired up with all my maps and bumbling around means I'm probably related to this guy:

 

Yep. It's Darth Vader.

These guys are the classic bad guys. They make movies about how bad these guys were. These are the guys King Arthur died fighting! Nobody loves these guys! 

It could also mean these guys:

 

The Vikings. They may be worse than the other guys, but for some reason people like them better. It could also be these guys:

The Frisians. Who the hell are the Frisians? Anyway you've seen the map before, but here's a viking map and I think it's a pretty good general idea of where we're talking about and sort of coincides with my personal maps of DNA matches. It also goes a long way to explaining the really spread out nature of my matches.

 

That map sort of makes the Western Isles and Dumfries matches make sense along with Cumbria and Northumberland, Manchester and East Anglia.

This map is helpful too. It explains many of the matches in Germany around Westphalia (Saxon homeland) and my matches in Somerset and Dover and why they're all spread out and again why there aren't many of them. So far I think Genetics has a really hard time telling an Angle from a Frisian from a Dane from a Jute from a Geat so my specific background could be among any of them.

Bad guys. All bad guys!

I will submit this one argument in defense of my DNA though. It may not be as evil and invadery as genetics companies might have you think. It could be just as Celtic and Indigenous to Britain as any other. Many people are making just that argument and there is no invasion necessary for regular continental migrations to equal today's populations of U106 in Britain. It's also good to remember that the Belgae were in Britain before the Romans and were probably in Ireland as well. Even Julius Caeser coudn't sort them out between Germans and Celts...so we could be as British as the next guy.

If anything my DNA is the DNA of people on the edge. We're on the edge of Asia, We're on the edge of the main Celtic hubs, on the Edge of the European continent. On the edge of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Living on the edges of England and Scotland. On the edge of The British colonies in the new world. These are people that are always in motion, always pushing outside the bounds. They're always going to be the "other".

For a refreshing break from considering all the carnage and mayhem my genes may have caused in the world read this article entitled:

Germanic invaders 'did not bring apartheid' to Anglo Saxon Britain

I'll leave off with this thought. I've seen a few references to vikings in recent years that give them Scottish accents (robots, how to train your dragon, one even shows up in the 13th warrior) mostly because the Scottish accent sounds damn cool. 

In our case though, maybe it's true.

My Thompsons in Print

One very useful tool  for searching is local histories. Madison Indiana has a few. Unfortunately the only one I can find references to Levi Thompson in is The History of Madison County. It has some very nice biographies of prominent citizens but not many for died young civil war vets and their washer woman wives. Although he's not left out entirely because Levi was a veteran of the civil war. Here is a snippet of the listing I found. It contains his rank and when he mustered in and out.

Levi Thompson just isn't a big enough citizen. He really didn't have much chance to make his mark. He appears to be a tenant farmer or farm laborer in 1850. He serves in the civil war, becomes lame because of an ulcerated ankle and probably dies before he's 40. When he applies for his pension he brings two witnesses. Someone that looks like a William or Mf McTiernan and a man named Silvanus Free.  For now, I can't find the McTiernans but it appears that Sylvanus Free does eventually get on the map by investing in a glass company. It is the only mention of these people.

So what about other Thompsons? It's unlikely that my Thompsons are totall alone in the world. There are many Thompsons in Madison Indiana and surrounding counties. So I've taken the liberty of copying some of the texts from these freely available books here. I found these books through the Indiana Genealogy Forum at genealogy.com in a posting about Genealogybooklinks.com.

This is from OCI readers so you'll need to decipher a bit. Here is an excerpt on Howell D Thompson.

John L thompson is his father. His only surviving brother is Samuel
Thompson:

fU^ OWELL D. THOMPSON is one of the old-
\Y]i] est attorneys-at-law in continuous practice
/^^' in Madison County and first hung out
(^) his shingle in Anderson in 1862. He was
born at Bellefonte, Centre County, Pa., on the 6th
of May, 1822. His father was John L. Thompson,
a native 6t Huntingdon County, of the same state.
Howell, the grandfather, was a native of County
Antrim. Ireland, and was by occupation a linen
manufacturer. He came to America a single man
and located in Pennsylvania, where he married
and engaged in farming. Although a cripple, he
was a successful farmer and lived to the ripe age
of ninety-tliree j'ears.

Mr. Thompson 's father was an expert mechanic in
iron, making all iiinds of essential novelties, and his
wares became quite popular. He had a shop at
Stormstown. In 1829 he moved to Ohio, where
he engaged in farming in Clinton County. After
retiring from business, he came to Indiana and re-
sided with his children until lie died, at the age of
eighty-six 3'ears. He was an Elder in the-Presby-
terian Cliurch, and an active Democrat.

The mother of our subject was Sarah John, who
was born in Northampton Count}', Pa. She died in
Ohio in 1837. There were nine children, eigiil of
whom reached their majorit}', but at the time of
this writing but five survive: Samuel, a farmer of
Grant Count}'; Anna, who resides at Dells, Ore-
gon; Hannah, a resident of Grant County; Jane,
of Franklin County, Kan.; and Howell D., the
third oldest of tiie living. The latter spent his
first seven years in Pennsylvania and came west
with his parents in wagons in 1829, landing in
Clinton County, Ohio, after a trip of twenty-two
da,vs. The first house was made of rude logs.
Young Thompson helped to improve the farm, and....

Since that time Mr. Thompson lias continued the
practice of law alone. One of Mr. Thompson's
earl}' business combinations was with Asbury
Steele, of Marion, who was afterwards Colonel of
the Thirty-fourth Indiana Volunteers. Early in
his career Mr. Thompson discovered the force of
the axiom, "Honesty is the best policy," and has
always rigidly adhered to it. He has the ini[)licit
confidence of the people among whom he lives.
Mr. Thompson has always taken great pride in Ins
library and has probably the finest individual ....

The reason I like this clip is that it specifically mentions Pennsylvania and a member of the Steele family. There is a John L Thompson born around the time of Levi Thompson who marries a Rosanna Steele. They always come to the top of my searches in ancestry.com. Also Captain Steele was in charge of Levi's company in the 34th Infantry.

Here is an excerpt on George D. Thompson from Madison County. I like it because he was born in Virginia in 1830 but was in Indiana by 1832. One of Levi's Census records says he was born in Indiana so it's worth a shot.

EORGE D. THOMPSON, a prominent citi-
lil ^— , zen of Madison County, and Trustee of
^V^J Lafayette Township, is the owner of eighty
acres located on section 34, and is recognized as
one of the most progressive men of his community.
He was born in the southeastern portion of Vir-
ginia, February 8, 18.30, and is a sou of William
A. and Mary (Burger) Thompson. Three of his
brothers were valiant soldiers. Thomas, who en-
listed during the Mexican War, died of measles at
Vera Cruz, Mexico; David and John fought for
tlie Union during the late war.

In 1832, our subject was brought by his parents
to Indiana and spent his childhood days in Henry
Count}'. In 1841 he accompanied the family to
Madison County, where tor several years he re-
sided in Fall Creek Township, removing thence to
Anderson Township, adjoining the present site of
the city of Anderson. They removed to Lafay-
ette Township in 1853, and subsequently located
in Richland Township, whei-e the mother died in
1863. The father survived her for a long time,
passing away in Vigo County, Ind., in June, 1885.

Next is an excerpt from a person named Spann, although much of the text is devoted to David Thompson:

With reference to the maternal grandfather of
our subject, David Thompson by name, we note
the following: His father, Robert Thompson
was of Scotch parentage and settled in the Colony
of Virginia prior to the American Revolution.
He was born in Amherst County, Va., vSeptember
12, 1771, and during General Wayne's expedi-
tions against the Indians of the northwest he dis-
tinguished himself as a l)rave soldier, and was
rewarded by a letter of grateful commendation
from the captain of the company in which he
served. This document we deem worthy of pub-
lication. It is in the following words:

"The bearer hereof, David Thompson, has served
as Corporal in my com])any of riflemen in the
army of the United States, from which he has
obtained an honorable discharge. But in justice
to the said Corpoial, foi- many services he has
rendered the pulilic, I consider it my duty and am



fully warranted to say that his conduct ha>
uniformly met with my approbation, as well as
that of all other officers who had an opportunity
to know him.

"Corporal Thompson was employed in recon-
noitering the Indian country and paths leading
to and from their several towns and villages, as
well as being constantly in advance of the army
during the campaign. While thus engaged, he
assisted in taking seven Indian prisoners — all
warriors except one^frora their towns and vil-
lages, in order to gain information for our army.
In accomplishing this great object, several skir-
mishes ensued, in which he behaved in a brave
and soldier-like manner, and when the garrison of
Ft. Recovery, which I had the honor to com-
mand, was attacked and surrounded by nearly
two thousand savages, this Corporal Thompson
made an escape through them, with intelligence to
the Commander-in-Chief, who was twenty-four
miles distant from the place. For this service, I
now beg leave to return him my sincere thanks,
and hope that all good people who are friends to
their country may receive and treat with respect
the said David Thompson, .i reward which he
has merited.

"Certified under my hand and seal at Staunton,
in the state of Virginia, the 29111 day of October,
1795.

"Ai.EXAXDER Gibson,
"Captain in the Tenth Legion."

At the expiration of his period of service,
David Thompson was honorably discharged by
Maj.-Gen. Anthony Wayne, Commander-in-Chief
of the Legion of the United States. After
the treat}' of Greenville, August 8, 1795, when
the troops were disbanded, he settled in what is
now West Virginia, and there formed the acquaint-
ance of Mary Swope, whom he soon afterward
married. She was born September 21, 1775, in the
old fort in Monroe County, Ind. In 1817 he
removed with his wife and ten children to Butler
County, Ohio, and in 1823 to Henry County Ind.
About 1842 they settled in Salem Township.
Delaware County, where both Mr. Thonijison and
his wife died.

All this is from the portrait and biographical record of madison and
Hamilton counties indiana:

What I may want to pursue later is not whether these fine gentlemen are directly related to me, but whether they are collaterally related to me. Second cousins several times removed.

For What?

If you're reading this, then you probably already know why. It's not because my life is empty, I have plenty to keep me busy. It's not to feel important. Well, not more than any other person wants to feel important. There is no prize. There are no bragging rights. There is not accomplishment, other than in the "finding out". You can be proud to be sure. Everyone can. The very fact that you exist is a testament to the struggle of those who came before you.

So what do you get? For some people, it's okay not to know. It's better. You're from Michigan or Indiana or Minnesota and that's where you are. That's your culture. You might pick a favorite sport or a favorite food. You may feel a part of everything or totally alienated by the choices you make.

So why choose to look for something you can't possibly change?

If you like Sushi, speak Japanese and practice Shinto, why should it matter that your ancestors are from Poland? Now that's a good question. It doesn't. Not really. Not on the grand scale of things that matter. Unless it matters to you.

Now if you think that everything you like and identify yourself with is based on a personal choice then I submit that you attempt to like something else. If you detest greenbeans then you should turn around and like them. It's your choice right? Don't like skydiving? how about knitting? Like the sports team from your area? Well it's about time you started rooting for the team from that other area.

When I think about Genealogy in human terms I think about things like religion. I may be a Buddhist. My children and their children may be the same.  Some day down the road though, several hundred years from now when Buddhism is the standard in my family my great great great grandchildren may find it interesting that I was born Catholic and that we didn't always live on the Moon colony.

They may look back and wonder at my own humble life. What was it like to be one of those people? It may cause them to learn about this time and these events. They may be proud or sad or indifferent about what they learn, but it could be a spark of knowledge. A bit of story told by some adult in their lives that they can confirm and expand on. When they consider the choices we've made and can apply the outcomes of those choices to their own lives, they may  learn understanding.

Just as I am learning by following the trail of my people so can my children into the future.

There is a great line in the True Blood series. Local bar keeper says "It must be nice to have an old family." His employee says, "All families are old, just some have better documentation."

I like history and I've spent a lot of time reading about the history of others. I love it. Now I have the time to learn about the history of myself and along the way, maybe give some other poor soul a leg up.

Migrations 5 - Finally...The Middle of the Road

If you had asked me when I posted Migrations, I would have said we were Celts and that we were probably L21 and possibly M222. Now it seems we are closer to "Frisian" R1b lines and probably S21 and possibly S29. People who look like me fall into many of these groups.

Knowing for sure what our group is will cost me some money. Ancestry.com doesn't offer SNP testing. Sorenson says they may offer it in the future. FTDNA, Ethnoancestry and Genebase would have me start over with them in order to get them.

No matter what, I think it's safe to say that we're part of a group of people that probably lived in and around Germanic peoples and were probably Germanic themselves. The areas people like us inhabit are full of well known Germanic groups, from the Lombards in Italy to the Norse up in Norway. East to the Visigoths and west to the Frisians, Angles and Jutes. My closest Thompson match now is from Holland.

Getting to England...

We may well have entered England right along with the other Celts, lived a Celtic life for hundreds or thousands of years.  Some of our family may have ventured off as soldiers of fortune in Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark and Poland as Scots abroad, eventually adopting the names and languages of those cultures while others migrated to the U.S. with our Scots Irish kin.

We may have been Angles or Saxons or Jutes invading after the fall of the Roman empire and becoming part of the fabric of England and Scotland. Replacing the language and social order, and making the Britain into Angla Land. So much so that when our Kindred Vikings began colonizing Britain we considered them the "invaders".

We could in turn be those very same vikings moving from Denmark with other Scandinavians pushing into Germany and east into Russia and west to England and Ireland. Altering the places and names of the people we encountered. Adding words and concepts to their languages that are still used today.

We could be the so-called 1/3 of Normandy that may contain Northmen and moved in with William the Conquerer to stake a claim in England.

We could be descended from Frisian merchants and weavers invited to England and Scotland after heavy flooding in the German Low Countries, helping to create the economies of both countries as a working immigrant class.

The theories abound. My personal feeling... It has to be a feeling at this point because I don't really have any hard evidence...is that we are either the product of the Anglo Saxon or Viking-Danish colonization of the British Isles. Genetically, I seem to have close matches in those places where these people were most active. Denmark seems to be particularly close although not prolific. All of that still leads me to the conclusion that we are most likely Lowland Scots and Borderers or Northern English..culturally there may be little difference. We still most likely came to the U.S. after being a part of the Plantations of Ireland in the 16 and 1700s. That's what my gut tells me. Sometimes, my gut is wrong.

There is another perfectly good explanation for our surname and our DNA. That is that we are a product of German or Scandinavian settlement here in the U.S. around the same time the Scots Irish are making their historic run west. We may indeed be Thomsens who changed their name to Thompson to match those people they were living with and around. Tracing Scandinavian families can be frustrating because they used a patronymic scheme until the 1800s with children taking their fathers name every generation. Our Thompsons could have been Nelsons or Petersons in the 1700s.

Right now, I think some of this conjecture hinges on the Knowltons. They are closest to us in any search I do. They also seem to have some issues with where they come from. They have a place name. A town name, but it could be named for any town on a knoll. They seem to be a small family though, which is ironic since Thompsons are everywhere. It seems from their own postings online that they have a genetic split in their family and openly are questioning their semi-mythical link to Kent England. Tantalizingly they seem to have ties to Nova Scotia (New Scotland) in modern Canada. Also it appears that they may be R1b-S21. The person in charge of their DNA project says that I am not the only one who matches the Knowltons and not many else and that the Knowltons seem to match each other and not many more. He left off saying he wanted to look into my "vitals".

So here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

We will see how this adventure continues.

Migrations 4 Common Maps and Ideas

As you go through this it may help to reference Migrations 1 - 3 to see the other maps I'm comparing to.

Early on in my search the things I found left me pretty well established in Northern Ireland. I had a couple of family trees that landed there and my DNA seemed to be very close to the Northwest Irish Modal. Everything fit nicely.  When you look at the map of R1b the odds are in favor of being from a Celtic nation.  I have to admit, that would suit me just fine.

One of the first things I ran into was the OGAP map which mapped out migration paths for OGAP groups. Our OGAP group would be OGAP19.

And that's okay. You can see the path through Southern England into Ireland and over to the Western Isles which makes total sense. It would also explain the odd North South split in my matches in Britain.  In some ways it also backs up the MacTavish claim to Thompsons. Except that no Thompsons look like me...but still, for me it worked out. I'm a Celt.

But again there is that nagging feeling that something is amiss. It's not just that I don't see any Thompsons in my matches. I don't see a lot of highland clans in there. I see a lot of Brits and Quite a few Scots both east and west, also I see Scandinavians and Germans, Swiss, Polish and Austrians even a few Baltic Russians.  This analysis is running on so few numbers that they're called bikini haplotypes.  They just don't cover much and can lead to a lot of assumptions. I'm sure for many people this map and migration route is correct. For me, I fear it isn't.

Here is a more consolidated map of the range of my matches taken from the other maps I've made.

Now given that this is trying to map ancient people to their relatives today, there is some room for fudging. Also in the scope of this map you're missing the Austrians, Czechs, North Italians, and Polish. Also under-represented are the few Norwegians in the mix. You can't ignore though that there is a large dip in France and that there is a decidedly "Northern" and roughly coastal flavor to my matches. It's not too unlike the OGAP map though.




I recently had someone label me a North Sea Celt, but I can't say that all R1b people are Celts. There wasn't ever a hard line between these peoples that I can see so my Ancestors may have spoken a Celtic language but it also seems really likely that they spoke a Germanic Language. When all the other Celts are lining up behind the Basques, my family seems to be lining up with the Germans.



Because there are so few of us and we are so spread out, it's hard to discern a true pattern, but I'm going to try. As I look at things more and more it becomes a bit more I get the feeling that we're much more Germanic than I, at first, suspected.



Take a look at this graphic. It's from a paper by Campbell that talks about Capelli's groups in the British Isles and gives some stats on where people who looked like that came from. I've only included my match here, but I think it's kind of telling.

 

At first is seemed to me that this was a really Celtic set with all the matches in the Western Isles and Llangefni in Wales, but now I look at my maps and some maps of more recent history than these OGAP migrations and I think that maybe people who look like me came in one of the waves of Germanic tribes. Whether it was Vikings from Norway or Denmark or Angles and Saxons or some other Baltic Sea tribe like the Geats. It started to come together when I looked at this map of Viking England on a Children's homework site.

I've found from reading about viking settlements in Britain that Wales was not untouched. Anglesey where Llangefni is (9 matches in the chart above) was also a viking settlement and that Anglesey isn't named for the Angles, but is an old Norse name meaning Ongull's Island.  Also, although the map does show a little pink arm riding up into Cumbria, I've read that it was also a viking settlement along the coast. 

Here is England while it was under Cnut the viking King of Denmark:

Here is Anglo Saxon England:

On this map from Wikipedia the Britons are the Celts and the other named groups are Angles Saxons and Jutes. Most Thompsons in Britain live right up there in Northumbria about where it says Bernicians. There are many Bernician names that make up my matches.

For more representation on the continent here is a map of the Ingavoenes. The "People of Yngvi". Some think it's where the Angles get their name.

To me, it seems that my matches can always be found where there is a Germanic influence in Britain and Ireland. My matches in northern Ireland are probably not because I match an Irish gene, but because I match a Germanic group along with other lowland Scots and Northern British. Both Scots and Northumbrian English are Germanic languages (as is old English). The closest language to English and Scots today is Frisian.

To add more fuel to the Germanic fire, I was looking at the results for the Knowlton DNA project because they are closest to me in almost any search and they seem to share my 16.2 at DYS458 (sometimes these .2 numbers at DYS 458 are referred to as 458.2) which is pretty rare. It's something like 1% of people at SMGFs Y database.

I noticed that one of their people is S21 positive. Most just show R1b1b2* but one person had more testing and came up with S21 or R1b-U106 or at this time: R1b1b2a1a1*.

At the same time, I ran into this bit from Genebase in their tutorials section:

R1b1b2a1a (S21+), previously known as R1b1b2a

Unusually short DYS458 alleles (DYS458.2) are associated with R1b1b2a1 (S21, aka M405).  Cases of this allele have so far been detected in Ireland, England, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. (1-5%) and this appears to a unique west European marker.   The DYS458.2 allele also occurs independently in the Y-chromosome J1 subclade. 
The R1b1b2a1 (S21+) is a prominent R1b subclade and is likely the major subclade in resolving identity after the R1b1b2 (M269+) subclade.  It frequency is highest in the Dutch (35%) and it is also rather high in England, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Czech Republic and Switzerland (13-23%).  This region overlaps origins of Germanic groups, such as the Anglo-Saxons in Frisia.  It does not appear to have extended its reach beyond West and Central Europe (except recent migration to the U.S.). 
The levels of the R1b1b2a (S127+) subclade in conjunction with other R subclades have not been reported to date.  Check this site regularly for updates on this subclade as new information will be posted as studies become available.

So there are my DYS458.2 numbers that are so rare. I also read somewhere that the J1 subclade is 19.2 and above where the R1b U106 seem to be 18.2 or less. (I don't remember where I saw it so it should be verified. The entire article from the study can be seen at the U106 DNA project site or directly here.

R1b S21/U106/M405 makes up about 25% of Europe, if we're S21 then why then do I have such a hard time matching people? Well, we're not exactly the "norm" for S21. We don't fit the modal there much better than anywhere else.  It just seems right, right now. 

All of this is conjecture without actual SNP testing, but it could inform the kinds of tests I try when I do look.  For all I know we really are the Irish Modal and this has been a complete waste of time. This idea seems to fit right now though with all the odd locations and the broad match set. With this in hand, when I have some money to burn, I'll order some kind of testing that will give me SNPs to work with. Then we'll have a much better idea of where we fit. 

Next up, I'll go over the broad theories I have about all this and how it could effect my search.