Genealogy > Thom(p)son DNA Project
Tried something new with my same old Y DNA
Michael Thompson:
Wow Mike, I have no idea what you said but I'm fascinated by what you did with it.
Booner:
Uneven Mike,
Ok! good post and I think I follow your logic.
There is one possibility to think about---genetically speaking, maybe you're "real" surname isn't Thompson. No offence ment on that. On the Sorrensen site, there is a James Thompson that I match 37 out of 38 markers. Theoretically, the closest we could share a common ancestor is something like 7 or 8 generations back. But I also get a lot of inquiries from O'Brians' and Kellys' as we have matched 35 & 36 markers out of 38. So what does this all mean?
I don't know how many generations back a "common ancestor" would occur for 35 or 6 out of 38; 12, 15 generations or more? And since I'm the 6th generation of Thom(p)son in the states, it means that the James Thompson I mentioned above is two more generations removed from me and this puts my line back in Ireland (James was born in Ireland in the early 1700's). So if you use 3 generations for ever 100 years, it means that sometime in the early 1600's, perhaps one of my ancestors enjoyed the favors of a couple of Irish lasses and left them in a family way with a son, and they later married an O'Brian or Kelly who gave that son his surname? Or I had an ancestor who was part of the army who subdued the Irish and did what soldiers do.
Anyway, thats one explanation how genetically speaking, my DNA closely matches someone with a different surname. If the number of generations needed to match 35 or 36 markers out of 38 goes farther back than, say, 15 generations, well I don't know then.
Anyway, I like how you think around a problem.
Regards,
Booner
uneven:
Thanks Michael and Booner. I really appreciate the opportunity to hear from others and hash this stuff out. Thomas has been particularly helpful in this search as well and given me many good ideas.
It's true, I could not be a Thompson at any point. There are plenty of people moving around the American west and lots of opportunity for things to go all wrong. Also it's not uncommon to be adopted at any point in history. Many people carry the name Thompson that aren't in any way British Isles residents. I could be a Thomsen and that would explain everything.
So far I'm also generation 6 in the U.S. and I haven't found the non Thompson yet.
Most places I've seen use 28 years as a "generation" so many of these people who "match" me are 500 or more years in the past some as much as a thousand. That predates any surname relevance. There is also fluke and random mutation to deal with. So in light of the depth of these "matches" I'm just looking at general geographic patterns and trying to see where those fit with history.
I really struggled with this one and there is not really good solid answer for it, so I'm always going to play the odds. Because I don't have any evidence to the contrary yet, I'm going to assume I'm a Thompson and that all these other people are Thompsons too, they just don't know it yet.
So here's where my DNA matching odds are at, I think.
There are at this point more than 10 million Thompsons in the world ( I read a book in highschool that put the number of Thompsons then at 9 million or so...it's been a while so..you know). Of those 10 million plus people I think less than 500 have tested their DNA with FTDNA. That is a really poor showing.
I could be the oldest Thompson line known to man and the odds are still against me finding a match.
The Irish have been studied hard for DNA, both in Ireland and in America. They're overrepresented in DNA studies and they are early adopters of DNA for genealogy so most of the people available to match are Irish. So now imagine that I've got a pool of Thompsons that's just a fraction of the actual population to choose from and I'm not native Irish. I'm not even on the "Basque" family tree of R1b like most Celtic people. The pool shrinks even further.
If I'm correct about where I fit. I'm on a branch of R1b that is about 25% of R1b. It's something like 13% of Britain and 6% in Ireland. I'll bet that 6% of Irish are in the North and along the coasts..right where I see my matches and right where Normans and British and random Vikings settled.
Now when I compare myself to that branch of the tree (S21) I don't match a lot of people there either. That's where the real bottleneck comes in to play. At this point in time, there are very few people who have been tested in the world that look like me.
My closest match at all is about 250 years away and they're Knowltons. I match most of the Knowltons that have been tested and are R1b (they have an interesting breakup) with about 3 or 4 for genetic distance and that's only at 34 markers. Right now, it's not so much that there aren't Thompsons (I've gotten used to that) there aren't any humans!
People that match me at 42 markers or more are at least a genetic distance of 5 away and their surnames are things like Coen and Corson and Dameron and I match several among their families at ysearch as well. On the Ancestry.com side I've got my Edwardson and Peterson and Knigge and Janke and Custy all 500 plus years back and those are my closest there. At Genebase I've got Eveland, Hawkins, Gawthrop, and Steiner all 500 years or more. At Genetree I have Knowltons again, Graham, Findlay, Johannson and Neilsen.
So when I look at just my closest matches I have people who are from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Pomerania (Baltic Germany), Latvia, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Knowlton (it's any town on a knoll you see).
This isn't a comprehensive listing because there are also various and sundry Chandlers and Chamberlains and Littles and Browns. Some murphys show up too. All of these are one off names. There are never many. Most of them that come in clusters are related to the same man in the 16 or 1700s. There are nine Damerons and Damrons among my matches but they're really all the same Dameron from Ipswitch England. The same with the Corsons and the Knowltons.
It's a daunting task trying to put all that together. Trying to sort this stuff out. That's when I started my mapping projects.
When I look at the maps I have for these people I do see a pattern and I think it incorporates what you're talking about Booner.
Here are some of those maps:
http://thompsonhunt.blogspot.com/2010/11/migrations-3-other-databases.html
To my untrained eye I see an ancient pre-surname migration of people from Austria and the Czech Republic north into Germany, Southern Sweden, Southern Norway, Denmark, Northern Poland and "Frisia". Along the way they developed their nice 16.2 at DYS458. They're hanging north of the R1b Celtic population in France and Spain, but also in Germany. They're hanging west of the R1a people and South of the bulk of I (Scandinavians).
Which you can see again here. Ignore for the moment the Peterson in Denmark and the Steiner in Switzerland:
http://thompsonhunt.blogspot.com/2010/12/revenge-of-4582.html
Then, with the Belgic tribes that inhabited Britain and Ireland before the Romans or with the Saxons imported with the Romans or with the Anglo Saxon invasions after the Romans or the Vikings or the Frisians invited to England and Scotland as weavers and merchants, they move into Britain and Ireland before surnames are set. Patronymic names took longer to settle than job names. You could be a baker like your great grandfather but you would be Edward's son for only one generation.
So now we're "British" we're Germanic British. My Edwardson who is from the border of North Eastern Wales and my Thompsons are pretty close. Playing the odds again. My Thompsons are probably from Northumbria where most Thompsons in Britain live in 1891 not far from Alnwick I believe. It makes sense because we have a Germanic naming structure Thomasson. There we sit right on the border with Scotland mixing and matching with the Celts.
http://thompsonhunt.blogspot.com/2010/12/migrations-4-common-maps-and-ideas.html
We form new languages together and naming conventions of our own. At that point my Thom(p)sons would be indistinguishable from any other Thom(p)son. When you're raiding a village and stealing cattle, I don't think anyone is going to stop and ask you if your family came with the Danes or Saxons...in fact it might just be a given.
See the History section of this article on Scots language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
So Germanic influence in Thompson-land (north and south of the Scottish border) is pretty much historical fact. How could I explain my closeness to both an Edwardson from Northern England (right near the border of Wales) and the Peterson in Denmark about 500 years ago?
Well, I'll just claim them both. The Edwardson is just an Anglo-Saxon relative from Northern Britain who had moved west to the Northern Border of Wales or was part of a viking settlement in that area and stayed put. The Peterson I think is probably a result of the "Scots abroad". Many Scots and Borders English found good work in filling out the armies of both Denmark and Sweden as well as filling duties as bodyguards in Switzerland, France, Poland..pretty much anywhere there were nobles that could afford a personal army.
If Peter Thompson moved to Denmark in 1500 as a soldier and took up residence. He would follow the culture of Denmark at the time (up until the 1800s) and his son would be something like Ragnar Peterson. Scandinavians didn't settle their surnames until relatively recent history.
Now I move up to the time of the Knowltons. The Knowltons have an interesting family. Not many people match Knowltons and there aren't a ton of them. What makes them even more interesting (other than matching me closer than anyone else) is that they have a genetic split in their family...but only one family story which they share. I got this from reading some of their family sites. I know I'm telling it badly and it's semi-mythological so you have to take it with a grain of salt.
It's a story about two brothers who are the son of a man form Kent England who crashes in Nova Scotia and these two sons are the beginning of the Knowltons in America. The thing is, the two Knowltons aren't brothers. One is Haplogroup T and the other is R1b (most likely R1b-S21 which is where I think I'm at).
Everyone has paperwork and research going back to one or the other brother. So now they're trying to figure out what really happened.
So I match these Knowltons closer than anyone else even with all my odd numbers. They have 16.2 at DYS458 just like me. We're separated by only about 250 years. The Knowltons can prove that they aren't related to each other. They're a really small family and they have ties to Nova Scotia where Scots and Borderers were invited to settle from other New England colonies or directly off the boat from the Isles.
It could be that while my Thompson ended up in Pennsylvania after immigrating sometime in the 1700s a closely related boy was on his way to Nova Scotia as part of a totally different family.
So that's how I think I'm a Thompson and could explain these near and far away matches in the Germanic world. Instead of speaking Gaelic and putting an axe in some Briton's face, my family probably got off a longboat and put an axe in some Briton's face. After that point we Thom(p)sons would all have exactly the same history.
mike
uneven:
I thought I should include a couple of notes.
About TMRCA (Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor). The estimates are based on averages (like a generation being 28 years). I've read other people's posts at DNA genealogy forums and one guy in particular had a first cousin that should have been an exact match with him and his father and Uncle (All tested...not sure why). Anyway, this first cousin had a mutation at a single marker and it was one of the slow moving markers. So most sites assigned him a greater TMRCA than was warranted (It seems like they added 40 years or something between what should have been 0 distance people). DNA mutations don't happen at an exactly fixed rate. They can happen any time even between two brothers with the same father.
So if I say the Knowltons are a TMRCA of 8 generations from me, SMGF has that as 31 years per generation and figures they're about 248 years back. That's all a rough guess. It could be a lot more or less.
Another thing I wanted to point out more clearly is that Being U106 wouldn't necessarily make a person less "British Isles". Although it's associated with Germanic people Wikipedia shows it to be about 20.30% of England's population (I guess I was wrong on it's percentage in Britain) while it's 18.70% of Germany and only 14.40% of the U.S. european population. I've heard it referred to as both Northern Celtic and Germanic and I've been reminded on other genetics sites that even Julius Caesar (who knew these guys personally) couldn't sort out which was which when it came to these people. "Celtic" and "Germanic" are language and culture designations made by Romans, not genetic designations. Most of the Scottish clans I've seen in my wanderings through different DNA sites have some population of S21/U106/R1b1b2a1a "Frisians".
The final thing about DNA is that testing for DNA is voluntary and not everyone picks the Y chromosome test. Those results you see are based on personal interest in genealogy and the willingness or the ability of those people to pay for their own testing or to be paid for by some benefactor. These results are not going to be representative of a genepool or population necessarily and are constantly under revision as new things are learned and more people are tested.
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