Hmmm, that’s the difficult bit, the fact that different analysts organise their data differently. Personally, I think adding England to Wales makes sense, given the flexible border and millennia of cross-traffic. One analyst I saw separated England out of the UK and made it a separate data group, which didn’t seem sensible to me at all.
My DNA linked me to a half-brother I never knew existed. So that blew all those ‘historical facts’ about me being the eldest of 3 out of the water. It actually shifted our whole family dynamic.
sorry Aran I posted that to you by mistake and can’t fix if
Wow… I found I might have a half brother through other research, but he hasn’t taken a test and he doesn’t seem to want to get to know me without scientific proof we are related. I think I will have to find the money to send him a test kit to actually make that happen. He is much younger than me and used to being an only child, I think, and that change of dynamic might have something to do with it - in addition to the fact that he doesn’t seem too fond our our birth-father for reasons I can sort of understand because he might be kind of a shady character from the research my sister-in-law did for me… although I have never met or spoken to him myself. Anyhoo, it is interesting to hear other stories. When I check my DNA results, I there’s always a part of me wondering if a new half-brother or sister will show up.
It is all so complicated, isn’t it? I am living proof that there was cross-traffic! I am very Celtic with strong links to pre-Roman Britain that I am still just scratching the surface of with my resesarch, but I have found that I also have a good dose of Saxon and a smattering of Viking, with a chunk of Norman too. I think it is fascinating… it sometimes feels like I am a walking, talking history lesson… but we all are!
Yes, WE are the history books! The DNA don’t lie! You can choose to believe or disbelieve whichever version of history you’ve been fed, but no-one can beat the DNA! Apparently the Romans didn’t have a border between ‘England’ and ‘Wales’, we were all Britannia Superior to them, with the Scots being beyond the Pale and Ireland about to be added to the Superior family before it all went pear shaped in Rome.
All of us Brits are Norman, Viking, Saxon, ‘Celt’ etc, in varying proportions. I get really twitchy when people try and create false divisions between us, I find it sinister. But anyway…
It is a profoundly unsettling but very exciting experience when you discover the truth about who you are vs what you’ve been told. Your view of yourself, your place and role in the family, all can experience a radical, seismic shift. The unfolding of it exposes all the fault lines in the family, all the delusions. It’s brilliant.
I haven’t experienced so many of the unsettling feelings from finding out I have been told the wrong things about my history (I literally knew nothing about my history for almost 40 years), although there have been times when my ancestors’ roles in history have made me squirm a little…!
No one I knew had any information to give me about my family history before the mid-twentieth century. I was adopted, and when I found my birth-mother I learned she had been adopted too… in a super-tightly closed 1950s Catholic adoption… she passed away 3 years ago knowing nothing, not even her own mother’s name, but her passing unsealed the records and now I am learning what she could not. It is totally crazy to think that I have gone from nothing before 1955 to having names associated with dates going back to before the Common Era… it absolutely blows my mind.
The amount of leg-work it will take to verify all of the genealogical information I am finding is more than a dozen people could do in a lifetime, but I am benefiting from the work of others as well as my own, and doing my best to be as accurate as I can in the gathering of the information… but honestly, going back 2000 years, who really knows? I still can’t help learning all I can, because it is just too interesting to finally know.
Take it as far as you want to, is my advice. Its relatively easy to trace ancestors as far back as the early 1800’s. I’ve done it. I don’t feel the need to take it back much further because before the industrial revolution, people didn’t migrate quite as much, so you can assume that if someone’s family, with a Devon surname (for instance) lived in Devon in 1800, their ancestors did too - probably for 1000 years or more.
My family seems to have been the exception to this… I’ve found migrations in the 1600s (I’m a Daughter of the Mayflower, apparently), migrations in 1066 (descended from William le Batar… I mean William the Conqueror), descendants among the Saxons who migrated in waves (Hi Great-Grandpa Alfred the Great, and others, apparently also true), Vikings who came to Britain in waves… alongside the Scottish kings, Welsh kings, a king of Ireland, Frankish kings, kings of Sweden, never mind all the saints… it is absolutely mind-blowing how many interesting people are in my family history - some make me proud, others make me cringe… but in branch after branch, line after line, once you go back a few centuries, my ancestors are all over the history books and the suprises just keep coming. One thing I noticed though, alongside those who were rooted in one place for millennia, there were a lot of people on the go! I am a crazy mix of European migrations, and possibly an African man or woman taken to America during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, based on my DNA test.
A thousand years ago, there were so many fascinating characters in my family tree that I have finally resolved the life-long question that has been waiting for an answer: What should I write my books about? Weird, but I have been an author waiting for a story, and now I have found more than I know what to do with! I am just glad I am not part of some big powerful family NOW; that wouldn’t really suit me, so thank goodness! If I get published, I intend to use a pen name because fame is not for me, so I am glad that people in my family started getting a bit “less interesting” after a while… although some lost treasure and a castle would be nice! (There actually are stories about two hidden treasures in ancient castles so far, now where are my torch and map…)
Ive seen a bit about the counting system in the media including a country programme on TV where a youngster was learning from it from his dad. However, to be fair, I’ve yet to come across it in in real life - although that doesn’t prove anything.
I would imagine that if there was ever any group of people who would naturally keep traditions alive then sheep farmers, who maybe unknowingly continue practices since before the Romans would be right up there.
Perhaps the question of who are the original Britons should start by looking at who are the people who have been living and farming on the hard uplands since so long we can’t even be sure - people perhaps who are now more at threat than ever before.
If we are going to talk about sheep-counting, then I will make my customary mention of Cumbric:
There is very little evidence for Cumbric, but the existence of sheep-counting systems is one piece of evidence, although I think some are sceptical. My personal interest is that most of my ancestors (plus a small addition from Ireland) over the last few hundred years would seem to have come from the area where this language may have been spoken (an area somewhat more extensive than the modern county of Cumbria).
As for DNA, I would say that DNA is just a piece of data, and of course, data cannot lie as such. But it’s always capable of multiple interpretations, especially when trying to determine the results of population movements hundred or thousands of years ago. So, I am cautious. Having said that, from time to time I do think about getting my DNA tested for ancestry-type reasons, although have not done so up to now. I assume the result would show some mixture of Celtic, Scandinavian and continental Germanic heritage, but in what proportion, I have no idea. And of course, there might be some surprises.
I took various bits of data that’s out there and sorted them based on various haplogroups in lots of different ways, just out of interest and not to try to prove anything, because I’m no expert on these things.
Depending on how you do it you can get lots of different results, but the groupings that popped out commonly seemed to be Wales, Asturias, Galicia, Brittany and Basque - the sample sizes for Brittany tend be quite small. I couldn’t manage to contrive to group Wales together with Scotland or England, whichever way I sorted the data, but I could get Ireland sort of close.
I hadn’t thought of Asturias before, even though it borders Galicia, so I looked it up and it’s an interesting place.
Clever article, although I didn’t enjoy the tone all that much. I spent forty years knowing nothing at all except for those very generalizations anyone can assume - otherwise I had no facts whatsoever, not even the name of my own mother (until age 21) or my own grandmother (until age 39).
Yeah, so I am descended from Charlemagne, it’s true. I have been working to try to link the genetics with genealogy to find some kind of connection to my past when that was kept a mystery to me for so long. It has brought up countless fascinating stories for me about how I got here. Do you really want to take that away from me? I hope not, but don’t worry, I wouldn’t let you even if you did.
Thanks for the article, but I didn’t read anything I didn’t already know.
I am very Celtic with strong links to pre-Roman Britain that I am still just scratching the surface of with my resesarch, but I have found that I also have a good dose of Saxon and a smattering of Viking, with a chunk of Norman too. I think it is fascinating… it sometimes feels like I am a walking, talking history lesson… but we all are!
