Ball 3: Results from Denmark

I attempted to contact four or five Cumberland candidates from Denmark. Some from Ancestry.com some from Ysearch and a couple from the Scandinavia project at FTDNA. Of the people I contacted three of them were definitely in the DYS458.2 section of the Cumberland cluster.

One of my contacts agreed to run the test for DF95 and just recently came back positive. So now we have a confirmed group member from Denmark, which to me was conspicuously absent in a group that appears to follow the migrations of germanic peoples so well.

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.

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.

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?

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.