Adventures in genetic genealogy
Nov. 11th, 2008 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
transemacabreSomething I have rarely mentioned on this lj is my other great love, genealogy. It's a natural progression from my love of history to genealogy; studying genealogy forces you to measure history in human lifetimes. It's also given me a new appreciation of American history. My most recent immigrant ancestor arrived in 1800 from Ireland; do you have ANY IDEA how many James Kellys are in the 1790 Ireland census? Fuck's sakes, his parents couldn't have named him Barnabus or Xerxes or something?
Anyway, something exciting I've been researching lately is my genetic genealogy. My mtdna results from SMGF have just come in, and I'm in haplogroup H (aka "Helena" from The Seven Daughters of Eve). This is a huge haplogroup, so I'll need more testing to determine my subclade.
Obviously, since I'm female I don't possess a Y-chromosome, but it's still cool to find out my male cousins' results. My biological father's y-line is R1b, a common haplogroup in the British Isles, France, Spain, and Portugal. Another of my lines on his side is HUDSON, which turns out to be R1b1b2. The R1b group is extremely large, and very common throughout Europe and North Africa.
On my mother's side, her father is I1, a haplogroup common in Scandinavia. That side is almost certainly Scottish or from the borderlands of northern England, so it seems likely we had a Viking somewhere in there. The most surprising is my BROCK ancestors, originally from Germany, who tested J2B, which is found primarily in the Arab countries, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, Turkey, India, and Jewish populations. One of this BROCK family's closest matches was to a family named Abraham in Iraq.
Anyway, something exciting I've been researching lately is my genetic genealogy. My mtdna results from SMGF have just come in, and I'm in haplogroup H (aka "Helena" from The Seven Daughters of Eve). This is a huge haplogroup, so I'll need more testing to determine my subclade.
Obviously, since I'm female I don't possess a Y-chromosome, but it's still cool to find out my male cousins' results. My biological father's y-line is R1b, a common haplogroup in the British Isles, France, Spain, and Portugal. Another of my lines on his side is HUDSON, which turns out to be R1b1b2. The R1b group is extremely large, and very common throughout Europe and North Africa.
On my mother's side, her father is I1, a haplogroup common in Scandinavia. That side is almost certainly Scottish or from the borderlands of northern England, so it seems likely we had a Viking somewhere in there. The most surprising is my BROCK ancestors, originally from Germany, who tested J2B, which is found primarily in the Arab countries, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, Turkey, India, and Jewish populations. One of this BROCK family's closest matches was to a family named Abraham in Iraq.
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Date: 2008-11-12 01:24 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about names… Luckily, one of my great-great-grandfathers was called Caiaphas Nichol(l)s: he's the only one in England! His parents had strange taste in names: his siblings included Drusilla, Antiochus, Paulina Kezia and Caleb, as well as some more normal-sounding ones. Unfortunately, Aunt Drusilla married a man called Grimshaw, and named one of her sons after her deceased brother Antiochus…
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Date: 2008-11-12 07:50 pm (UTC)I'm descended from a NICHOLS family, as a matter of fact, but the furthest I can trace them is to about 1785 Kentucky. They seem to have been mixed Native/white, and the name is spelled NICHOLS or NICHOLAS depending on their mood, and so far have stymied my attempts to trace them back to England or wherever. I have my seize quartiers (all sixteen great-great-grandparents) but the generation after that the gaps start -- and multiply from there! Argh!