YDNA meandering Elmers and Thompsons

After having been accepted into the R1b-U106 yahoo group, I used my access to contact a verified U106 person who shares a lot of my more off-beat strs. He and I are in much the same boat. There are a lot of people generally like us in R1b but on closer inspection we're part of a pretty small group of individuals who are similar to each other.

He and I have discussed some of our autosomal matches in common too, which is also pretty interesting considering the nearness of Y DNA. It's near enough to make us wonder about family convergences.

He in turn sent me a close match for both of us among the Elmers. Well one Elmer in particular. I've had a match with a single Elmer at SMGF for a while and have included them in my maps. They match at about the same level as the Knowltons at SMGF.

The Elmer he was showing me is from a different branch of the same family and where the Elmer at SMGF mismatched me on 3 markers..this Elmer only mismatched on 1. Now that is very interesting.

The Elmer at SMGF is a 34/37 match and because the other (Daniel we'll call him) Elmer is tested with FTDNA we have fewer numbers to match on, but he's a 31/32 match.

31 markers isn't enough to prove a shared family without some really good paper trails but considering that this Elmer matches me where the other Elmer does not, he could well be a 36 out of 37 match.

Not too shabby.

Flipping back over to Autosomal DNA for a minute, I believe I've seen these Elmers before. One of the autosomal matches for my father who lists Thompsons also has this Elmer family in her tree. They marry into her Thompsons in New Jersey. The scary thing is that this Autosomal match also has Seeleys in her tree from the same area and I'd guess that these Seeleys are probably related to my Seeleys..although that should definitely be looked into.

These same Elmers marry into a local Seeley family.

So there are a lot of options left open by something like this. We could be Elmers who at some point became Thompsons through all the myriad ways that can happen. I could be seeing a tie to my father's Seelye family and through the interconnectedness of all things, be seeing these Elmers that we are also related to a couple different ways. I could also be seeing a group of interrelated people from the same area in Britain who came to the new world.

It turns out that the home town for the Elmers in Britain (Braintree) is something like a hundred miles from Knowlton in Britain semi-mythical home of the Knowltons who are also 34/37 DNA matches.

All of that is really interesting, but I want to take a moment to look at those Thompsons again. While researching the Elmers who are pretty well documented, I of course ran into those Thompsons from the autosomal match. They seem well documented but the problem is, there are too many documents.

I've found 3 or more different trees for the same Benjamin Thompson who marries Elizabeth Elmer in the 1700s. One goes to Ireland and on to Yorkshire and another seems to be a mixed tree that eventually leads up to the same Thompsons who marry into the Hollingsworth family for Judith Heald's family (although a different branch). A third leads back to William Thompson, reverend in Massachusetts in the 1600s.

This is the family I'd like to look into a bit more because William Thompson has a son Benjamin Thompson who is born while William is away in Virginia. William later becomes estranged from Benjamin and his melancholia is sited as a source.

This Benjamin Thompson is not the same one who marries Elizabeth Elmer, but in some trees is his ancestor. So William Thompson leads to Benjamin Thompson who marries Susannah Kirtland, who leads to Ben Thompson who marries Elizabeth (unknown) who leads to Ben Thompson who marries Anna Newcomb who then leads to Benjamin Thompson who marries Elizabeth Elmer.

This is not the most popular tree for these Thompsons by far. The Thomas Thompson 1677 from Ireland tree is more popular. The thing that interests me about it is the proximity to these other families, the story of melancholy and estrangement which can lead to uncertain trees and the fact that Reverand William Thompson is from Winwick, Lancashire England in the 1690s less than 45 miles from Malpas, England where the (top tier YDNA match at Ancestry.com) Edwardsons are from.

All very interesting and in need of more research.

Paternal Genome Analysis

My dad was recently tested at 23 and me as well, which has been a great tool for finding both relatives on his side and on my mom's and there were a few surprises.

One of the people that I could definitely match trees with on my father's side turned out to be a genetic relative for my mother. Several of my Hollingsworth related genetic relatives went to my mom as well as most of my Swedish matches and a chunk of the Finns.

Both sides have a German contingent which was unexpected for my father and my father has more "All" Irish matches than I would have thought because I wouldn't have thought there were any. My dad carried the few Danish matches that I had.

In the basic tools his Genome analysis is much like mine. 100% Northern Europe. Not worth posting the graphic.

His Ancestry Finder results were kind of interesting too. I would have assumed he would carry my French matches because of August Michel, but he doesn't. That goes with my mom as well. He does have someone from Jamaica though...which is interesting and would be good to contact.

I would be the Netherlands was a bit unexpected but then when I look at my Seelye family (paternal grandmother) it begins to make sense.

I asked Dr. McDonald to analyze my father's results and he said that he tested totally British with the tiniest probably insignificant amount of African.

So it would seem to me that most of the continental diversity I had, I got from my mom. I don't think that means my father's family doesn't have it, it's just that he may not have inherited it from his parents in the way that I didn't pick up a bunch of matches from the Netherlands and Jamaica.

Here is his map:

All the dots overlap in Britain. Here is his scatter plot:

Where I was in the soft spot between Britain and France my dad lines up as more English.

Shifting over to DIY Dodecad here is my father's admixture:

---------------------------

FINAL ADMIXTURE PROPORTIONS

---------------------------

10.70% East_European

52.89% West_European

27.20% Mediterranean

0.09% Neo_African

5.57% West_Asian

0.82% South_Asian

0.65% Northeast_Asian

0.02% Southeast_Asian

0.00% East_African

1.33% Southwest_Asian

0.74% Northwest_African

0.00% Palaeo_African

And here is his Dodecad Oracle result:

[1,] "CEU" "2.7351"

[2,] "Orcadian" "4.5262"

[3,] "Orkney_1KG" "4.8476"

[4,] "N._European" "5.1663"

[5,] "Argyll_1KG" "5.3784"

[6,] "German_D" "8.1553"

[7,] "French_D" "9.5645"

[8,] "French" "9.7545"

[9,] "Mixed_Germanic_D" "11.0269"

[10,] "Dutch_D" "11.4072"

[11,] "Kent_1KG" "13.6581"

[12,] "British_Isles_D" "15.5764"

[13,] "British_D" "15.603"

[14,] "Cornwall_1KG" "16.3898"

[15,] "Slovenian" "18.3699"

[16,] "Irish_D" "18.9789"

[17,] "Swedish_D" "19.1611"

[18,] "Norwegian_D" "19.8417"

[19,] "French_Basque" "21.5444"

[20,] "Hungarians" "22.599"

[21,] "Portuguese_D" "24.2288"

[22,] "Spaniards" "25.0297"

[23,] "Spanish_D" "26.2921"

[24,] "IBS" "26.5104"

[25,] "N_Italian_D" "27.6466"

[26,] "FIN" "28.1464"

[27,] "Tuscan_H" "29.143"

[28,] "TSI" "29.3426"

[29,] "Tuscan_X" "29.6094"

[30,] "North_Italian" "31.4779"

Again, like me "white people from Utah" are at the top. Orcadian and Orkney are next where I registered as Northern European. Then he hits Northern Europe and Argyll, German, French etc. Bearing in mind that Orkney is a melting pot for Norse and Scots, it seems to be in line with what I would expect about my father's family. Orkney seems to be a designation for a lot of British people and that's probably because of it's position as a crossroads for different colonizations and invasions. I don't think it would be too surprising if people with a lot of New England roots were compared to Orkney or Argyll.

Having uploaded his results to Gedmatch.com there were some interesting twists. He has matches with those people who first made me suspect Thomas Jacobsson the Finn as well as a few new Finns not in my list. He also carries my Ashkenazi matches and my Irish matches who also themselves seem to have Ashkenzi matches.

And, because Gedmatch shows smaller segments than 23 and me I can see that my dad and I share the largest X match I have.

For those of you familiar with highschool biology and sex ed...that shouldn't happen. I guess I can't say "shouldn't" it's just not expected. A man gets his X from his mother. So my father got his X unchanged from his mother and I got my X unchanged from my mother. In effect it would mean that my paternal grandmother and my mother are related...distantly.

That is completely reasonable because both my families have a similar background. Migrated to the U.S. in the same time periods, lived in the exact same communities and hung around with the same people. The real question would be "how could they not be related?".

This brings me to another interesting thing that I've been noticing. Hyper-relatedness. I read a lot of people saying that matching beyond 5th cousins is unreliable, yet I seem to only be able to reliably match with people as far away as 6th and 7th great grandparents and 8 and 9th cousins.

The reason I'm able to match up at all seems to be because I can take a family tree to the 1700s...even into the late 1600s. Even to me that seems a bit old to be showing up. None of these are close matches mind you. My dad and I don't match with anyone more that 0.43%..so less than half of one percent of our DNA is shared with anyone else.

I don't think it's any accident that I'm finding these matches in old East Coast, colonial families that are well documented but it makes me wonder if I'm going to be able to connect with someone who is related to my 1834 Thompsons or 1840 Williamsons. How can I find them if I'm overshooting the mark by 100 years?

Also, most of my matches to date have been indirect. Meaning they're not people who appear in my tree. Most family trees have parents and siblings, somtimes just one child and their parents in a line back to the past. Autosomal DNA is relevant for cousins, wives of cousins, step siblings and moms only listed as "mary" or "elizabeth" so I have to effectively make new trees for my matches with branches that reach wider than tall. I also have to do the same for my own tree. Each mom without parents or siblings is a loss of hundreds of years of information.

The other danger that I've seen is in being labelled a "collector". I've contacted genetic matches only to have them ask how many people are in a tree. When I answered thousands they were done working with me. That's because when people think of genetics they think of their parents and siblings. Some might stretch it to cousins. Rarely will their patience go beyond that.

Trying to use our genes to gather information has been at the same time, fascinating and frustrating. Every step I take leads to more steps.

Now I have my dad to use as a wedge to split out my mother's family. The next logical step is to find a relative that is outside of one or the other grandparent to split matches even further.

For instance. If I was able to get a Seelye cousin or known Thompson (my dad has no Thompson cousins my grandfather is an only child..as far as we know). I could then split out hits based on matches that overlapped with my dad and that cousin. The same goes for my mom's family. Finding a known Price or Hutchinson outside of my grandparents family could make matches more meaningful.

Meaningful is "expensive". In times like these it's hard to come up with hundreds of dollars to spend on frivolous pursuits. People have families right now they need to take care of, third great grandparents can take a back seat.

Needle in the Needle Stack, Pioneer Style

Butler county Pennsylvania has presented a conundrum. I can't find any references to Levi Thompson. There actually seem to be very few Levis at all. I did find a Levi Campbell who would be much younger than Levi Thompson, living with a Thompson family, but that's about as close as I've gotten.

The other side of the coin is that Butler county is thick with Thompsons. Thompsons are early settlers in the county and by the 1870s there are so many it's hard to keep track. The unfortunate issue I have is that Levi was born around 1834-9. So the first census he would appear in would be the 1840. Assuming that he knew he was from Butler PA because he had some waking memory of living there, he's probably listed with his family then. The issue is that the 1840 census doesn't list everyone in a household. Just the heads of households and number of people in the household between certain ages.

So I will probably end up making a survey of the Thompsons there in 1840 who have children between the age of 1 and 10. The thing is that there are so many and there are enough origin stories to make your head swim.

Several sources say all the Thompsons of Butler are related to a single John Thompson born around 1755 near Juniata who is the son of John Thompson a Scot.

Others say there are two different Thompson families in Butler that are unrelated one straight out of Ireland with three brothers, James, Anthony and Moses and another from Lancaster county with it's own three brothers, John, James and Matthew. Still further in the same history of Butler it relates that one of the first Thompsons in the area was from Cumberland and of Scotch Irish heritage named William Thompson. All of this is taking place around 1796, but a quick glance at the 1803 tax list for Butler will tell you there are more Thompsons than these.

Connoquenessing Township:

THOMPSON, Andrew        ---

THOMPSON, James         400     (single man) 

THOMPSON, John          400     (B.G.) 

THOMPSON, John          400     (Muddy Cr.) 

THOMPSON, Matthew        50     (single man)
THOMPSON, William       400

Middlesex Twp., Butler Co., Pa.

THOMPSON, Anthony       400
THOMPSON, Hugh          ---
THOMPSON, John          400
THOMPSON, John          400     (blacksmith)
THOMPSON, John          400     (Con. Creek)
THOMPSON, John          400     (weaver)
THOMPSON, Martin        400
THOMPSON, Moses         400     (single man)
THOMPSON, William       100
THOMPSON, William       400     (single man)

These are not the lists from all the townships, but you can see that you have several John Thompsons to try to keep track of and little more identifying information. Some could be sons of those first settlers, or totally unrelated.

That is the thing I keep running into. Most of the histories of a place assume they are written for the current residents not for someone in a different state a hundred plus years in the future. They assume you can tell John Thompson from Lancaster from John Thompson from Slippery Rock or Dr. John Thompson who owns the furnace and mills. You would know which one you belonged to because it's 1895 and you're looking back fondly on the awesomeness of your family over that last hundred years.

These guys didn't have DNA testing and excellent paper trails. They were hunting wolves and fighting natives on the frontier and for their grandchildren, myth and legend was just as reasonable as a tax list.

So I'm working at gut feelings. I think Levi was likely there in 1840 but probably gone by 1850 because in 1855 he's married and having his first child. Where he is in 1850 is hard to say. He could be in the next county over still in Pennsylvania, he could be in Kentucky or Ohio he could already be in Indiana..he could be farther west.

What the histories do give me is an idea of what was happening at the time and how people felt about themselves. These were largely Irish, Scots Irish and German frontier people and they owned that. They fought and died, spied and killed, farmed and paid taxes. They also intermarried, a lot and had a lot of children. One of the Thompsons had 11 kids. Imagine if every one did that. No wonder the place is awful with Thompsons.

There in lies the hope of the genetic testing my family has done. So far, even through genetic testing it's hard to tease out the Thompsons (everyone is related to a Thompson), but I may be able to pull out members of these other families that married in and through them and the histories I can find, be able to match my Thompsons with their "John Thompson from X".

Several families mentioned in the history of Butler also move on to Indiana and may, in the end, be the key to a migration route from Butler PA to Alexandria IN.

The End and the Beginning

When I ordered my records from the State digital archives I also ordered several other records from Madison County. From the Anderson Library I ordered some obituaries I thought might belong to my family and I also ordered death records from the county using the forms I got from the Madison County Historical society.

The Health department kindly mailed my original forms back to me in the self addressed stamped envelopes I sent them. I'm not sure if there was some error in communication or if there is some message there.

I did however get the obituaries from the library and they were most informational. One lists Rosa with several children and the other references Levi without naming him.

This is a nice little obit listing the children and even her sister who I now know is an Eaton, but sadly not her husband. The next excerpt is a bit more ...tabloid, but it does contain some good information for me.

Disappeared! How, why? What really happened? The text is so vague, what is "these 20 years ago"? Does it mean 1886? Were there no police or no sheriff in this town? What was this lawsuit? If he disappears in 1886 how can I pick him up in a veteran's roll in 1890 in Ohio? Why is his pension request only closed in 1902?

"A later day will have to be awaited in order to solve the mystery."

Butler County Pennsylvania

I did a search of the Indiana State Digital Archives and found a civil war record for Levi Thompson. His civil war records have been the most effective way to track him (as in the 1890 veteran's roll in Ohio). Unlike his other documents from the National Archives or his online indexes, this one listed some more interesting personal information. Including the thing that made me change the secondary title on this blog.

Eyes hazel; hair dark; height 5'10"; complexion dark; nativity Butler Co Pa. Not just a state or several states, but a COUNTY! So his wife was right. He's from Pennsylvania. Having spent more than a year trying to find such a minor piece of information...well it makes the smallest victory exciting.

Finally some concrete reason why he's not with the other Thompson families in the area and  a big bolster of support for those Pennsylvania genetic relatives.

I was also sent the information on other Thompsons in the area as well. At least two other Thompsons served in the vicinity. Both were 19 at the time, both born in Indiana, both named John and I've been able to find both in the 1850 census. None with Levi though. Without some further proof, it appears that he is unrelated to the other Thompsons serving with him, although the physical descriptions of the other Thompsons are very similar to him. 

For reasons I can't really defend logically, finding a place for Levi has been very important to me. I have a place. He does too.

Hollingsworths

As I've contacted genetic relatives and asked permission to view their trees, I've made it a habit to try to check them against each other to see if they have any matches. I have a lot of matches in the Pennsylvania area, and sorting them out can be pretty hard, not least because they are so interrelated. I began with just one genetic relative who happened to be from Pennsylvania and also happened to have Thompsons. She actually has two distinct Thompson families. One family beginning with Robert Thompson born 1786 in Lancaster Co PA and the other beginning with James Thompson born 1668 Wicklow Ireland (but moved to New Jersey).

Previously I had gathered a list of surnames surrounding the Lancaster PA Thompsons to see if they appeared fairly often among my genetic matches. Many of them did. When I find a pattern in my matches in simple surname searches at 23 and me, I like to search through the trees I have shared to see if there is anything there.

What I've found is that the New Jersey Thompsons marry into the Hollingsworth family right there in the early 1700s with James and his wife Ann Hollingsworth. I also found that a second Genetic match had Hollingsworths in her tree right there at the same point. The second match was related to Randal Malin who marries Mary Hollingsworth (sister of Ann).

What really blew me out of the water was that a third genetic match was related to the Hollingsworths at Mary Hollingsworth born 1816 in Illinois.

The other odd irony is that the Hollingsworths seem to be active right in the same area of Pennsylvania and Delaware that the New Sweden colony was. Some were even married in the old Swedes church.

Of course there are no Hollingsworths in my tree that I know of (but that's what I know). I seem to be related to people who are related to Hollingsworths, but I do not genetically match with two Hollingsworths I've seen at Gedmatch.dom.

They may not be my family but clearly they are to be watched.

http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/d/a/r/Earl-L-Darrah/GENE3-0005.html

Finns, Swedes and Danes?

The long haul to figuring out my Y DNA results has left the playing field for Thompson ancestors more open rather than closing it up. I'm R1b-U106 which is pretty popular anywhere around the North and Baltic Seas. My closest Y DNA matches at Ancestry.com are from Denmark and England. YHRD has Denmark and Germany, SMGF has Anglo-americans, Swedes, Germans and Russians. That's a lot of ground to cover and these people have been mixing and matching for centuries.

In looking for some information on the Corson family (higher matches at Ysearch) I got embroiled in New Amsterdam and associated colonies. Since any of these places is reasonable, I did a search for Thompson and Sweden and found an interesting article on Thomas Jacobsson the Finn and  his Thompson descendants. The article follows several generations of Thomassons/Thompsons in the New Sweden Colony: http://www.colonialswedes.org/forefathers/Jacobsson.html

These are Finns who lived in Sweden and moved to the (eventually) Dutch colony of New Sweden at the junction of White Clay and Red Clay Creeks. The article was interesting in that these Thompsons sort of melt into the fabric of Pennsylvania, Delaware and the Carolinas, blending in with other Thompson families and becoming "lost".

It was an interesting possibility but really any "Thomas" who had sons from Ireland to Prussia would be a good candidate. So I put the article away.

Then I had my tests done at 23 and me. A friend who is also doing family research told me I should load my results into Gedmatch.com which is a free gedcom and genome comparison tool. All free things cost somebody something and I'm sure this is no different as the person developing it is donating all their time and effort, let alone the costs of hosting.

Anyway I did load my results and (as with 23 and me) there were no really close matches. Gedmatch.com will return results you wouldn't normally see at 23 and me. These would be the smaller and older matches that many people disregard. Among my matches, was one email address with a .SE extension and given that Danes are at the top of my Y DNA list and Sweden is not too far away, I decided to contact her.

She didn't have a whole lot to go on, because Swedes switched last names every generation, but she did have a large "Forest Finn" family that she could give me last names for. I had to look up Forest Finns. That got me thinking again about that article I had read so many months before. So I shared the Thomas Jacobbson article with her to see what she thought.  She immediately recognized a name from the article as a relative of hers, a Mulikka or Moulica. She told me that the Forest Finns often intermarried.

That led me to do a quick study of my smaller matches at Gedmatch.com and I noticed quite a few .FI email addresses.

So here's where all this could make total sense. The Forest Finns had a kind of diaspora leaving the Swedish empire and were on the move within the empire in the 1500s. My Y DNA matches are no closer than the 1500s and are "sons" appearing in Denmark and England. It's possible that a common Forest Finn ancestral family left the Baltic and headed for points west depositing DNA along the way. Also since my Thompsons may have been from Pennsylvania and these Finns disappear into Pennsylvania there is a good case for matching proximity. I also seem to be related to at least four other people with ties to the same New Sweden colony.

Here's where it all falls apart. I don't know which side of my family these Finns fall into. It is most likely a grand coincidence that my genetic matches with Swedes and Finns would turn up a Thompson. After all I am completely missing my German Schultz family after my great grandmother. There are hundreds of possibilities there for intermingling with Swedes and Finns. I also don't know the last names of many of the mothers in my tree, any one of which could provide me with Baltic DNA.

Without a clear paper trail, this is just more conjecture. It's worth following up on as one more possibility in a sea of possibilities.

Genome Analysis

A bit of a warning here. When analyzing the genome of a person like me, it helps to realize that this is not the genetic analysis of a single person but the combination of everyone I'm related to for several hundred years. Everyone..even the ones I don't know about.

23 and me provides some of this. My Y is R1b-U106 which we've discussed at length here. My MTDNA (super ancient all-mother stuff) is T2a. Wide spread in the old world but not very prolific. It appears to offer some protection against alzheimer's but comes with a downgrade in fertility.

They also provide some broad generalizations. Like the major category of your ancestry:

 

Okay so 100% Europe is not the most exciting thing. Their examples show awesomely diverse people with oranges and greens. I've got the gray box.

Here is 23 and me's Global Similarity for me:

Northern European. Okay that's probably what anyone could expect.

They also have an Ancestry finder, which is based on the responses of other people to a general ancestry survey. These results represent the people who are related to me who have all four grandparents from the same country. I made the amount of DNA necessary smaller to get the most results.

If I leave the settings at the default it's UK, Ireland, Germany and France..which you could pretty well get from my tree.

There are people who will also run analysis of your results. I contacted Doug McDonald and he was kind enough to run an analysis of my genes. Here is what he came up with. 

Mostly Europe a little Middle East, some Africa and a tiny splotch of America. Doug said the African is real but probably beyond the genealogical timeframe.

This next graphic is interesting. It's a scatter plot of nations and types of people. It doesn't represent my nationality, just my similarity to other nationalities. I am most like:

The melty spot between France and England appears to be me. Keeping in mind that this represents the total of my parts and also that the data for Germany is missing. Germany won't give away it's genome apparently. 

Here is the map version of a similar represntation:

The green dot is me. Right there in the Channel. I asked for some explanation of what I was seeing and Doug said it was English or British with significant input from the continent. That sounds about right.

The final bit of analysis I did was with Dodecad Oracle which does a different analysis along the same lines as Dr. McDonald's analysis. Here are those results:

DodecadOracle(c(11.7,49.0,26.9,0.2,8.6,1.2,0.6,0,0,1.4,0.4,0),k=30)

      [,1]               [,2]    
 [1,] "CEU"              "5.3498"
 [2,] "N._European"      "6.8162"
 [3,] "Argyll_1KG"       "7.5783"
 [4,] "Orcadian"         "7.7582"
 [5,] "Orkney_1KG"       "8.1615"
 [6,] "German_D"         "8.3337"
 [7,] "French"           "11.0648"
 [8,] "French_D"         "11.1261"
 [9,] "Mixed_Germanic_D" "13.625"
[10,] "Slovenian"        "14.5148"
[11,] "Dutch_D"          "14.8358"
[12,] "Kent_1KG"         "17.2383"
[13,] "Hungarians"       "19.0526"
[14,] "British_Isles_D"  "19.3073"
[15,] "British_D"        "19.3129"
[16,] "Cornwall_1KG"     "19.968"
[17,] "Swedish_D"        "22.1075"
[18,] "Irish_D"          "22.6407"
[19,] "Norwegian_D"      "23.3146"
[20,] "French_Basque"    "23.3369"
[21,] "Portuguese_D"     "23.5818"
[22,] "N_Italian_D"      "24.7998"
[23,] "Spaniards"        "24.8212"
[24,] "Tuscan_H"         "25.3811"
[25,] "TSI"              "25.5292"
[26,] "Tuscan_X"         "25.6874"
[27,] "IBS"              "25.9553"
[28,] "Spanish_D"        "25.9719"
[29,] "FIN"              "28.684"
[30,] "North_Italian"    "29.1846"

Of course my first question is: What is CEU? it turns out it's white people from Utah. The listing runs from group I'm most like to least. The way I read this, I'm most like white people from Utah..fair enough. Next I'm Northern European..check. Next Argyll, which I'm going to guess is people from Argyll Scotland. Argyll is a bit of a melting pot of Scots, Irish and Norse. That's probably close enough. Orcadians and Orkney...Orkney is also a melting pot of Scots and Norse, then on down to German and French etc..All reasonable and pretty much in line with what Doug McDonald has to say about me. 

That is me and several thousand of my ancestors in a nutshell.

Giving it all I've got

Genetically anyway.

I've been using my 23 and me account along with the vast sources of the internet to contact and confer with genetic relatives. It's been awesome and eye opening.

I was spoiled by success right away. My first contact through 23 and me was related to the Hathaways and I was able to triangulate with another genetic relative who matched me in the same spot on the same chromosome and also was related to the Hathaways. So that part of my genome is "Hathaway".

Here is the gentle reminder I get from 23 and me almost daily..."not always so". The things I think I know are not always the way things are. Genes care little for nice clean family trees or social rules or boundaries and borders between political states.

I am also reminded that, although I'm a Thompson, I'm also a Hathaway..as much as a person named Hathaway today is. I'm a Williamson and a Paull and a Dartt. I'm a Clarke and a Hutchinson and I'm a Sutherland.

So far, most of my genetic relatives are fairly distant. Falling into the 1700s. None much closer than that. Everyone so far at 23 and me shares less than 1% of my genome, yet I've been able to confirm that my Seelye tree is fairly accurate and so are my Hutchinsons. So..it would appear that my parents are my parents and that my grandparents are probably my grandparents...Of course there are no Thompson matches and no matches with any family related to them.

I could despair about that but before we go there I need to point out that my genetic matching has only been as good as my family tree. Genetic matches, for me anyway, are not often direct and they are hundreds of years in the past. So if you and I don't have a tree going back at least to the 1700s, we are unlikely to find each other. Now we can get an idea of why I don't have any Thompson or Williamson matches...I wouldn't know one if I was staring right at it.

There are tantalizing clues though. I seem to be related to a lot of families from North and South Carolina. I'm also related to a cadre of Pennsylvanians. I've got people from Scotland and Ireland as well as Canada. I'm also oddly related to Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians and several German families in Russia. Somewhere in the more remote past I'm related to Swedes, Finns and Danes and some segment of Ashkenazi Jews. The most remote match has been a man from Morocco.

Whatever ideas I have about my family and it's identity, they have proven to be just that. Ideas.

23, The North Sea and Me

Well I got my results from 23 and me and it makes me feel better about the path my research took. I'm R1b - U106 or S21 or M405. 23 and me says I'm R1b1b21a1a1* which follows the 2010 ISOGG tree for nomenclature. Recently FTDNA and ISOGG have changed the tree nomenclature so the haplogroup is now R1b1a2a1a1a 23 and me now lists me with a * to signify that they think I have further snps but they don't know what they are. 


I had a hunch that we were R1b-U198 or S29 or M467, but it turns out I am ancestral for that so. I had a no call for L48 which means they couldn't get a result so I may be that, but I'd have to have more testing to find out and I'm not sure how much narrower this group can get. 


23 and me says this group is centered in the now submerged area between the mainland and britain called Doggerland. Estimates of the MRCA for R1b-U106 are given as 3000 to 4000 years at many sites. It's hard to say though and on an interactive map of europe I saw that Doggerland was pretty well and Island by 5000 years ago so it makes me think that scenario needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The other theory on this is that the Germanic migrations brought R1b-U106 to England, Scotland and Ireland.

On the left is U106 my clade. On the right is S116 or P312 the large branch that eventually leads to L21 and then to M222 which is a major Irish clade. Although no culture can really be assigned to P312 it's often seen as Celtic where U106 is often seen as Germanic and labeled Frisian because of it's concentration in old Frisia. For fun here is a distribution of I1 another "Germanic" group.

So obviously even haplogroups seperated by 10s of thousands of years can inhabit the same area, and there is considerable overlap among these groups. Although Haplogroup I1 is considered Norse because of it's concentration you could obviously be French or German and and have Haplogroup I1. 


So they say my group of people can be found hugging the north sea and to an extent the Baltic sea as well. It would seem that they were pinched between the R1b-S116 people to the south and the I1 people to the north. 


To me this explains all the German, English and Danish/Swedish matches on my Y chromosome and may explain why I struggle so hard to find Y matches. There are only 6 Thompsons listed in my clade at FTDNA. It may be because of lack of testing, but still it's pretty daunting. So I feel good about my research and my hunches. I figured it out and then verified my findings.


When people wax poetic they say we are sea people. Water people who lived anywhere a longship would go. I've always pictured myself as more of a forest person and I've never been particularly drawn to the sea...but then your Y chromosome is only a small part of the multitude of people who make you up.

Some Followup on the First Levi Thompson of Interest

So my first Levi Thompson of interest in Ohio has some cool leads but one dead end. He's got a lot going for him, some family names, location, a tie in with the Davis family, but he get's shot down by appearing in the 1860 census in Scott Adams Ohio with his family. It's really hard to put this one away though so I'd like to review the evidence I have against him.

Here are the Levi Thompsons born from 1833-1836 in the 1850 Ohio Census:

 

You can see my two Levis of interest and one extra I hadn't counted on. Next here is the same search in 1860:

Damn. There's the Levi I was hoping would disappear...and he's the only one I can find! How about the rest of the family:

 

Not being able to actually see the census record behind it, here is what I have. Several of the Thompsons from 1850 indexed as Thomson by family search in the 1860. Levi, Mary, Mother Mary, Jesse, John, Joseph the invalid and even Amos all appear. So if this Levi were my Levi he would have to be in two places at once.

I know in the 1870 census this Levi is not with this particular family but I have no way of knowing where he goes or what he does. Here is where this gets really creepy though. If you remember my older post Levi Thompson alive in 1900? where I openly posed the question of whether my Levi had run off to Ohio and married a woman named Margaret only to die before 1910. I had thought he was a good possibility because he was a bit further east in Ohio...not too far from Celina.

Here is that Census record:

 

If you take a look at it you'll see that this Levi I suspected of being ours is a Gun Smith and that his father was born in Virginia..like Jesse Thompson and his mother was born in Ohio..like Mary Thompson. He also lives in Washington Township, Highland, Ohio which isn't too far from Scott, Adams Ohio. 

So I think, although I probably haven't found my Levi Thompson, I may have done a pretty good job of tracking this particular Levi Thompson...in a round about way...twice.

All the Levi Thompsons in Ohio sort of disappear in 1870. There is one dead Levi Thompson in Columbus, Ohio in 1873. Not sure who he belongs to. Since I know my guy is around in 1890, I can guess that it's not him. 

So I'll keep this Levi in mind as I move on, mostly because of that Amanda Davis record..I still want to tie Levi to those Brodericks somehow..I can't help it.

Next steps:

• Continue looking for the Cardington Morrow Levi to return..if not he may be the best choice to follow. 
• Search for any 1880 Levi Thompsons and compare to Cardington Morrow Levi parental records. 
• Search for Pennsylvania Levis and see what's new.

Another Ohio Thompson of Interest

Along the same lines as the first, this Levi Thompson came up in a general search of Levi Thompsons born in 1834. This Levi Thompson is in Cardington, Morrow, Ohio. Which is a bit farther away than the other Levi Thompson, kind of in the middle of Ohio, but it's much closer to Pennsylvania. Here is a google map:

 

Cardington is point A, Van Buren Indiana point B and Celina Ohio is point C. It's a nice straight shot and you could almost imagine a person going by this route and passing right through the Hopewell area on their way to Van Buren  Indiana.

This Levi Thompson record also comes with a Mary Thompson as an older sister and a younger brother named James so there are my two family names. Very common, but still there they are. Here is the census record for 1850. 

 This Levi Thompson's father is from Delaware and it would appear that his mother is from Massachusetts. Again, this Levi is born in Ohio, not Pennsylvania or Indiana, but beggars can't be choosers.

With my limited access to actual census records through Familysearch.org I can verify that John Thompson from Delaware moves to Galion, Ohio a bit further north in 1860. I also cannot find a record for Levi Thompson in the vicinity in 1860. In fact the Levi Thompson I find in 1860 is this Levi Thomson record from (GASP) Scott Township, Adams Ohio.

Sadly. For all the promise of the first Ohio Levi he may be taken out of the running by this record. I find him, his brother John H and Jesse all listed as Thomsons in Scott Township, Adams, Ohio in 1860 precisely when my Levi Thompson is living with the Broderick/Davis family in Van Buren Indiana. It's not a total killer, as I said the Silcotts show up in two different towns in the same census..but by this point Levi has been married for a few years and has children.

On the other hand, the omission of Levi Thompson from Galion, Ohio does bump the Cardington Morrow Levi up in the rankings. It doesn't have the cool tie in of the odd Davis name, but it could make sense geographically and it makes sense in the timeline. This will be one to watch.

The next steps for this record:

• Attempt to track the other Thompson family members. Mother and daughter Lucy, sister Mary, brother James and sister Melissa. Especially Lucy and Melissa as they are the most likely to be present in 1860.

An Ohio Levi of Interest

Searching through familysearch.org I found a Levi Thompson of interest born in the 1834 range. I've gotten in the habit of looking for any Levi Thompson born around 1834 because of the confusion surrounding his birthplace in the census records.

The reason I didn't find him in earlier searches at Ancestry.com is that he is indexed as a 10 year old there while he is indexed as  16 year old at familysearch. He could be 10 it's hard to say, but from the census record he appears to be 16 to me.

 

Here is that Ancestry Index:

So in this case it pays off to check with a couple of sources. I never would have found this Levi on ancestry because he doesn't fit in my time range.

There was one other record..also from Ohio in Cardington, Morrow of a Levi Thompson who was 16. Both of these records are of interest because they contain a Mary Thompson. When I'm looking at family records I also look for repeating family names. So for instance I had to wonder about Levi's daughter Mary and Levi's son James. Well I think James is probably named after his maternal grandfather James Blades. So now I'm on the lookout for Albert, Mattie, Mary, Rena and Francis which seems to appear in the family more than once.

Mary Thompson is a pretty common name though so I'm really always hoping to find it in combination with one of the others.  Of course this family has two Marys which shows a pattern of Mary naming. Here is census record. It spans two pages:

 

Now the second page looks like Hary A Thompson but it is really Mary A. Thompson. 

Here is the Familysearch.org index:

Here is the ancestry.com individual index for Mary A Thompson in the same family:

And the Ancestry indexes for Jesse and Mary (the mother):

No idea about Jemmima Thompson in the same town but you can see Jesse and wife Mary sandwiching Jemmima in the index.

So this got my attention. I have a Levi of the right time. He's not born in Pennsylvania or Indiana but those are suspect because they're inconsistent and because I just haven't been able to find a record of him in 1850 in Indiana...yet. I totally missed this one before because of it's index, which has been the pattern with my Thompson records.

So, okay, it's worth looking into. Where is Scott, Adams, Ohio. It turns out it's not too far from other known Levi Thompson locations. Here is a google map:

 

On this map. Point A. is Celina Ohio (a town close to Hopewell where Levi Thompson is listed in 1890 in a veteran's roll. Point B is Scott, Ohio where this Levi Thompson lives in 1850 and Point C is Van Buren, Indiana where my Levi Thompson lives in 1860 with his wife and family.

Okay. Now, I'm extremely interested because this could go a long way to explaining what the heck Levi Thompson is doing in Ohio in 1890, but I'm stuck. My ancestry.com account has lapsed and although I'm free to search all I want, most records are closed to me.

Familysearch.org will show me 1850, but no other records. So what I really want to know is, does this Levi Thompson disappear from the 1860 record of this family. If Levi Thompson is still show living with the family in 1860, then it is less likely that he's my Levi Thompson. Not impossible because the Silcotts appear in two different census records, but, unlikely. Except I can't look at the 1860 records at either Ancestry or Familysearch.

So I asked for help from a newly met Thompson branch of my family, and they dug up the 1870 record for this family for me. It's helpful because it gives a clearer picture of the family and Levi is missing from that picture.

 

It's easier to read some of the names too. Jesse, Mary, John, Mary A., Joseph, Sarah, Amanda Davis and the last one looks like Amos Thompson. Now here's the thing that got me really excited about this particular record. Who is that little Davis kid?!

If you remember from one of my earlier posts about Rosa, Levi and the records fire, Levi, Rosa and the kids are living with the Broderick/Davis family in Van Buren Indiana. I could not find a way to tie George Broderick or his wife Piety Davis to Levi or Rosa. The Brodericks live with a family of Thomases in Mill, Gates, Indiana in 1850. Thomas is a Thom name but it's not exactly Thompson. I couldn't find Piety before 1850 because in the 1840 census children are just tick marks. I knew she was from Ohio but all I have to go on are their marriage records and her really interesting name to tie them together and confirm that she is a Davis:

 

So I was kind of left to explain the Thompsons and the Brodericks living together as random chance.  But now I have to wonder if there is some deeper family connection between the Ohio Davis family and my Indiana Thompsons.

So it's time for more research into the 1860s. Trying to see if this Levi Thompson from Scott Adams Ohio totally disappears from the Ohio records in 1860. It's also good to note that there is another Thompson family from Pennsylvania in the same 1870 census sheet as Jesse Thompson. It looks like a Sarah Thompson with two children in her household lives just up the road from our other Thompsons. This could indicate a broader family group and bigger groups are easier to track. 

 

Next steps:

• Levi Thompson 1860s headcount. Time to count all the Levi Thompsons I can search for in Indiana and  Ohio to see if the numbers change and how.
• Track the movements of Jesse Thompson from Virginia. He marries his wife in Ohio I imagine since that is where she's from so there's a good chance he's lived there for 20 or more years and possibly get a marriage record for them.
• Check 1880 census records for Levi Thompson activity in the Western Ohio region. If he's there in 1890 was he also there in 1880?

While I'm waiting...yet another map!

So I'm waiting on 23 and Me now for that Y snp. I decided in the meantime to shore up some of my matches. This time I disregarded just the "top" matches and drew my list from those that shared the most markers in common...from 29 markers up to 39 in common. I pulled from Ancestry.com, Ysearch, Ybase, and SMGF.

For many of my matches I was able to get a better handle on their location because SMGF and Ysearch contain some family information in their results. So I was able to google the last known relatives for a few and get better information. Some though are still bald faced guesses based on world family names listings for most common locations.

Here is my most recent map. I was happy to place Elmer correctly in East Anglia. Corson is still kind of a mystery. They live in New Netherlands (New York) but they believe they are Swedish. They believe they stem from Caerston Jansen. Jansen is really popular in the Netherlands and Norway, but I know from my research with Thompsons that people change the spelling of their name to suit the place they live, for example SMGF matches me up with a Johnson who is really a Johannson from Sweden that anglicized his name.

Here is the 29 plus marker map. I had to short change the Ancestry.com matches because there are so many. As would be expected since we have the exact same tests. Customers from Genebase or FTDNA are at a disadvantage for matching me because SMGF/Ancestry tests different markers than they do.

I tried my best to place my matches from Prussia and Switzerland. My Custy and Bruemmer top matches are based on world family names ranking. The order of matching goes from highest solid yellow to lowest blue dot.

As I've said, my bet is Anglo Saxon or Viking..mostly because of these maps and the really scattered nature of my matches. Many are in England but not all of my closest. So my guess is that I match some dudes who get around. For kicks, here is a viking settlement map stolen from Wikipedia.

Of course there's nothing firm to base any of this on and even if my SNP comes back U106 as I suspect, it won't tell me much about whether there was a viking that made the rounds or hundreds of years of Saxon movement cause my map. Making maps of where people lived in the 19 through 1500s isn't scientific proof of anything, but it is interesting to me.

Also for fun, here is another map of viking England in the 10th century. 

At first I thought this was a pretty good match, but then I was concerned about my Knowltons in Kent. It turns out that the vikings were very active in Kent early on not far from Knowlton residing on the Isle of Thanet...which is apparently not an island...if the maps are correct. Also by the 11th century it looks like they have taken over all of Kent and Northumbria...home of the most Thompsons in England.

Here's a closeup of Britain and Ireland:

My Irish matches are interesting. Most of them are R1b-U106 which is seen as an invader marker. Coen is definitely, and I imagine Custy is as well. 

Over in Cumbria is a 34 marker match Hogarth. They are from Ireby which is picturesque. Cumbria is a borders area. Ironically Ireby is said to mean town of the Irish Vikings. 

Down in Wales is a Thomas from Swansea. Swansea is a viking settlement in Wales. Thomas is my only Thom in this list and he's at 29 markers. Also R1b-U106.

The one known L21 person here is placed in Bristol. L21 is like U106 but a different branch of the R1b tree. L21 occurs all over continental Europe, England and Ireland. For a long time I thought I might be L21 (probably wishful thinking on my part). Who knows though, maybe I am.

The waiting is the hardest part. Mostly I'd like to see if my logic is sound and if I've done my mapping correctly, or at least to the best of my ability. It's been a fun distraction and a good enough reason to learn about northern Europe. It may also give me clues on finding the rest of my Thompson family. Maybe I should take those Danish Thompsons in Indiana seriously after all?

23 and Me

Okay so I promised myself that I would do my next test with FTDNA because I'm not real excited about being stuck at plain R1b. The thing is, I'm a cheap knob. 23andMe had a great deal recently. The same basic family finder test I could get at FTDNA, but at a quarter the cost.

That paired with a friend using the service was enough to push me into it. So 23andMe promises to place me in a Haplogroup and subclade for both Y DNA and MTDNA. They promise to check all my chromosomes for specific disease risks and give me access to some ancestry painting thing that will give me an idea what parts of the world my genome is most likely from. All for about $100.

It sounds like it will be right up my alley. My bet is that I'm  R1b1a2a1a1a or R1b-U106 aka R1b-S21 given the people I match on various sites. Even if I'm wrong it will be nice to know because I can choose to take some matches more seriously than others based on their testing.

Unfortunately I have to wait 6 more weeks to see if my guesswork is correct.

Remote Relatives or Random Matches

In Ysearch my top matches are almost always Greater Germania or British Isles. So I see Danes and Swedes and Germans as well as a few Irish, Brits and even names normally associated with Wales. Just looking at the top matches.

If I take those top matches and compare them to my top matches as Ancestry.com and Genebase and Genetree many of them repeat, but definitely the areas repeat. I have some generally Norse/Germanic people and a few Isles scattered around.

Many of them have patronymic names like mine. I have Peterson, Corson, Edwardson, Janke (like Johnson), Johannson and Thomas. The Thomas is especially interesting because it's a root Thom name and the closest to Thompson I come across. Also, like Edwardson, it's classified as "Welsh". Peterson and Corson are Scandinavian and Janke is German/Pomeranian. I have a few close town names like Graham and Knowlton. I also have some unknowns like Jost, Heemsoth, Knigge, Custy, Coen and Findlay. Custy and Coen are Irish and Findlay is Scottish. Heemsoth, Jost and Knigge are all German.

The Knowltons have always been the top of the list but, at this point in time, it appears that I have more markers in common with the Corsons who I haven't looked at in any great detail.

Like the Knowltons they have a bit of a mystery. They don't know what their founding member was doing in New Amsterdam. He wasn't dutch, the researchers believe he was Scandinavian his name was Carston Jansen. His sons were Carstonsons which was shortened to Corson. Carston Jansen lived under English rule for 36 or more years and seems to have been involved in local English families more than local Dutch population as his sons have English names.

All of this is not to say that we are Corsons, but to illustrate that we appear to have a lot in common with those who follow Scandinavian patronymic naming conventions and that even as close as the 1700s in America patronymic names were not fixed.

Like Thompson, Corson is also seen as a Scottish name and there are many Scottish Corsons but in the case of this family who share many of my genetic markers, a scandinavian name can and will easilly pass for British Isles.

What's in a Name?

In my Ancestry.com hunt for Levi Thompson, I've rarely come across a record where he is indexed as Levi Thompson. In fact I've come across a lot of Thompsons that are not listed as "Thompson". My own Thompsons are listed as Thompon and Thampson and Levi is often indexed as Lin. So if you're looking for Levi Thompson you may not readily find the real record indexed as Lin Thompon.

Census takers did their best to spell names and handwriting is easily misinterpreted. A person with an accent my sound like they're saying Thampson or Thampsen. Also it appears that Thampson and Thompon are both actual names.

So when I'm looking for Thompsons I have to also look for Thampsons, Thompons, Thomsens, Thompsens, Thomassons, Thomsons and Hampsons. Because a handwritten Th looks a lot like an H.

I should also note that it wasn't me who caught the record for Thampson and Thompon and corrected it. It was some other nice person. One excellent thing about Ancestry.com is that they let you suggest alternates for names right there when you're reading the census. Someone else found my Levi Thompson in the Lin Thompon and corrected it.

Now I try to do the same for others I find. There are so many ways one might spell Fenimore!

Levi Thompson 1900?

Every time I've tried to pin a death date on Levi Thompson I've been wrong. Now I've listed his death as before 1900, but that's just a guess. I have no idea when he died. I do have these two clues though.

Levi Thompson's pension case is dropped in 1902. In the past I attributed that to the slow progress of government machinery in handling his case. Since he didn't appear in the 1880 census with the family, I imagined that he was probably dead for 20 or more years by the time they got around to closing his case. Then I found him in 1890 in Ohio.

The second clue is Rosa Thompson's 1900 census record.  She is living with Rena Thompson Tyler and is listed as Widowed. Usually that means what it means, but I've been told that it could mean that she is divorced.

So trying to keep an open mind, I wondered what if the government wasn't really that slow and he actually died sometime after 1900. Could he be living somewhere in Ohio?

So I did a cursory search for Levi Thompson in Ohio born around 1835 and found one good candidate that I couldn't find in earlier census records from the area.  There are a few Levi Thompsons around in Ohio but they seem to be pretty tied down to their areas.

I can't say it's him, because I don't know, but I found a record of a Levi Thompson living further east in Ohio about a hundred miles from Tama/Hopewell with a woman named Margaret. This Levi is in his 65 or so. He has no children with him. It says that Margaret has 6 children, but they don't appear in the census so I assume they are 6 adult children. Margaret is born in 1844 which makes her a 10 years younger than Levi. I didn't find the couple together in 1910, which leads me to believe that Levi Thompson husband of Margaret died or split from her somewhere between 1900 and 1910.

It's unfortunate that the census doesn't list the number of children a man has, although in this case it would also be 6 so it may not be helpful.

So now I have a few more questions. Did Levi Thompson RUNNOFT?

Would Levi Thompson leave his family and move east to begin a new life. What evidence could support that?

Well, oddly, even though this information was eluded to in the order process from the national archive, his pension request has no information about his wife and children.

He appears in Ohio in 1890 for unknown reasons. I can't account for him for about 18 years before 1890 (since his last child is born in 1872, I imagine he was there until nearly that time) or after that time.

His daughter's husband John Silcott, disappears around 1880 and shows up in Utah. From experience I know that once one person breaks their relationship, it becomes easier for others to follow suit. Maybe 1880 was a really mobile year for Levi and the census missed him altogether?

Later Thompsons seem to have a hard time settling down. Levi's grandchildren through Albert (who dies before his last child is born) are often missing from their families lives, married to several people at the same time or not married at all and leave a wake of scarred children (my grandparent's generation) behind them.

Families are complicated and hard to maintain. Could it be the case that this family is just broken and now I'm scrambling to find the pieces?

Silcott Puzzle

Along with the disappearance of Levi Thompson in 1880 is the disappearance of Emily Thompson Silcott's husband. As I've mentioned before, I believe I have Emily/Emma Silcott with daughter Nina and husband John A. Silcott in Muncie Indiana in 1880 (when Nina is 1 year old). I also have Emily Silcott living in Alexandria  with mom Rosa in 1880 census records. So what happened to these people?

Over the past couple of weeks I've tried to piece things together with the Silcotts thinking it could help me find Levi. It's possible that father and son in law went on some wild business venture looking for a better life.

In searching through Ancestry.com though I think I've found the path that John Silcott was on. It looks to me like he left the young family in 1880 and headed west eventually residing in Utah in 1900 and then Colorado in 1920 and 1930. He is listed as divorced. In the end I see him listed with a woman and child in the Census, both the woman and child have different surnames form Silcott. The child is listed as his child.

Unfortunately I lose Emily after that. I'm not sure if she gets remarried or takes on the Thompson name again.