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.
As it turned out, we are S21 (which is U106) and even closer to home yet, we're below R-Z18 and R-DF95 and ZP124 and we sit on a branch with the sons of Edward 2 Elmer at A2284.
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