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.