FTDNA Results

At my last post  I was waiting for my "upgrade" to 37 markers with FTDNA. I'm excited to get news that they are in. Ironically, a project manager contacted me before the FTDNA company email went out. The shocking bit is that with these new results all the Knowltons and Emerys and Damerons completely disappeared. Even the Boettcher who matched at 24/25 was gone. At Ysearch they all dropped like flies as well. The only one left was the Elmer. At FTDNA I match an Elmer at 35/37 and at SMGF I match an Elmer at 34/37.

With these results and the relative proximity of the two different Elmer families (one with a late 1700s brick wall in New York the other from Vermont, Connecticut and Massachusetts) I think it's highly likely that they are related. At this point the SMGF Elmer and FTDNA Elmer would only mismatch by 1. FTDNA and SMGF use different markers but it would probably be a pretty close match for them regardless.

Where does that leave me and Levi Thompson? Well, broadly speaking, I think it would be safe to assume that we're from the British Isles as the oldest man in the family says. It would also be safe to say that we're English like my father has always said. I would probably go a step further and say that we are most likely Saxon English.

Without something extraordinary cropping up, I think my Y DNA bids the Swedes, Danes and Finns farewell sometime between 2000 years ago and today. That's a lot of ground to cover of course but it's just my way of thinking about it. There are many Finns, Swedes and Danes in the Z18 project that I hope to also be a part of, it just seems to me that at the end we have been in a see-saw battle between Germans and English. For now, I think the English have won.

The odds for Thompsons in general are in favor of being Scots Irish and I think for the vast bulk of Thompsons that plays out. Early on, that seemed to be the way we would go too.

Having played this game for a while now though, it seems to me that even if we lived at some point in Ireland or Scotland we are more likely to be the stereotypical English Thompson that the (p) was added for. At this point I don't even think I can get us close to the border with Scotland, at least not with our Y. We look like some subset of people who live in Norfolk or Suffolk England. This is the reason my Y DNA brings all the Germans to the party.

What about my closest match? Well, the closest is the Elmer from New York, but that brick wall is pretty well in place. The oldest man in that line is listed as Daniel Ephraim Elmer. The other Elmers go back to John Elmer in Connecticut born 1778 and then a few trees run him back to Edward Elmer from Braintree England in the 1600s...and other trees run him back to Samuel (Aylmer) Elmer, b. 1546/1557, Tilney, , Norfolk, England .

Since that is not too awful far away from other matches of mine labelled "channel English", it seems reasonable enough.

What about Tilney? This from the Wikipedia article: The village of Tilney St Lawrence did not exist in its own right at the time of the Domesday Book although the settlement of Islington, which lies in the very northeast corner of this parish, is listed. Today very little is left of the settlement of Islington,^[5] which is thought to have been a populous and a valuable Late Saxon settlement.

Be sure to check it out and note the famous person listed in the article. From a different wikipedia article we get the etymology of the name Islington..this article was about Islington in London: Islington was originally named by the Saxons Giseldone (1005), then Gislandune (1062). The name means "Gīsla's hill" from the Old English personal name Gīsla and dun ("hill", "down"). 

So would I bet my life on it? No, the world is full of too many weird quirks and wonderful coincidences. Do all the signs seem to point in this direction? Yes.