Beyond Albion's Seed

I didn't read the post yet -- pretty sure that one's going to take some time -- but I skimmed and found that map of French emigration, and it's pretty darn great. I've never seen figures on that before and now I want to spend my day reading about it. Thank you for delighting me and contributing to my procrastination! :)

Also, Woodard's book is of course a good one. No major breakthroughs in it, but well-written and enjoyable.

The maps are fantastic, so much food for thought.

Bought it. I assumed I'd prefer the paperback to the Kindle version due to maps.

The Woodard book was one of those every-year-end-top-ten-list books when it came out, because the idea of multiple regional cultures in America influenced by past migration had apparently never occurred to the general public. Meanwhile, every great historian of yore did a few rolls in their grave.

I think I read something about someone, maybe the History Channel, planning a miniseries around it?

This reminds me of a question.

DNA test results show a big chunk of "Scandinavian" ancestry from (possibly) about 1700-1750. Yet the paper trail is mostly English & Scotch Irish: one guy who "could have been" Danish in origin; proven German; a couple from the Netherlands / low countries.

Is it possible the Ulster Plantation absorbed Scandinavian immigrants as well, who later moved on to America under Anglicized names?

I bought it for my mother too. I bought her Albion's Seed awhile ago.

I know that the reverse happened for sure -- Irish soldiers went to Sweden and served in the Army there. There were Danes serving in the Williamite forces, so that would be the late 1600s.

But the thing is, Irish, Scottish, and Scandinavian genes are all so interwoven dating back to the Viking raids that you honestly probably won't find anything. Most people don't. :/ In fact, we're so interwoven that my "Irish" red hair comes cplurtesy of the Vikings who raided Ireland all those centuries ago. (Shh, don't let our dark secret -- that the Irish and Scottish aren't the original redheads of the region -- out.)

So that "Scandinavian" could just be "really Viking Scots Irish," which is totally possible and common enough. You still get people in remote coastal parts of Ireland and Scotland who are more Scandinavian than Celtic in terms of their DNA. Likewise, you get people in eastern Ireland and southern Scotland who are more Anglo-Germanic.

Not editing because "cplurtesy" is my new favorite word.

Hatte, if she likes demography types of things, she might like Chinni's "Our Patchwork Nation." I *loved* that book, but it's really fact-heavy (Census data, whee!), so she may not like it. But it basically takes Woodard even further and says that while each county is indeed part of a separate nation in the U.S., they're not contiguous. Here's his map: http://journal.c2er.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/patchwork-nation...

(I love that file name, by the way.)

So here in Connecticut, with eight counties, we have four or five nations; I'd have to go get my copy to remind myself.

Anyway, *I* thought it was cool. But you have to be a Census data type of person, I guess.

Aha! Why look at someone's crummy screencap when you can explore the real thing! :)

http://www.patchworknation.org/content/patchwork-nation-map?m=1

Aaaaand here goes my next two hours or so.

So we're saying that the DNA tools that say - oooo, you're this Viking - are finding all the Scots / English / Irish / intermarriages of similar Viking ancestry, and smerging them together into the chunk?

Right, I had the same reaction to Erica's question as Ashley. Read http://www.amazon.com/Saxons-Vikings-Celts-Genetic-Britain/dp/03933... Brian Sykes Saxons, Vikings and Celts - The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.

I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that my mother's rare Northern Atlantic U4 etc. mtDNA is from Scotland having been brought there from Vikings. Who interacted with people from the Baltic.

I suspect that focusing too much on your substratum results is a mistake. It's all statistical similarity based on existing, inadequate collections. My mother is 5% Middle Eastern. I ignore that entirely.

Yep.

Hatte, we seem to have the same hypothesis. My mother is a U4c1 from the Baltic / Eastern Europe. I chased that for a while, trying to figure out how someone from there ended up in the Bahamas and no one seems to have noticed, and then I thought, "Well, maybe this connects to the theory about the famous Lowe family of the Bahamas really being the Loewens," etc. etc., and I spent all this time and effort before realizing:

"Wait, this is dumb. My mother's direct maternal line goes to Great-Great-Great-Grandma Jessima. Jessima McNEIL."

I stopped worrying about it after that. Grandma Jessima had some Baltic kicking around in her genes. So does, like, every white person. Unless I want to go tracking down some longship sailing up and down the Dnieper in the Dark Ages to do some interviews, I'm not gonna figure that out.

DNA creates more problems that it solves, I swear.

The "middle eastern" could actually be from Jewish merchants families from Portugal intermarrying in Ireland.

In my case the "Scandinavian" is not a sub stratum - it's like 40%.

Yeah, mine is massive, too. So is my Irish. I actually do have a decent amount of Swedish ancestry (1800s, then recycling through more recently...yay tiny islands) and there's also Danish through good ol' Johannes Kaspar Richter von Kronenschieldt (1600s). It appears my father's father had to be mainly Irish with maybe some very recent Scottish thrown in (there are like three random close genetic cousins over there), and then Jessima was a Famine emigrant. So me having huge figures for both makes sense.

It's just funny to me the individual breakdowns on 23andMe vs. AncestryDNA swing so wildly. 23andMe explains my fondness for colcannon while AncestryDNA is all about my loganberry addiction. Which goes back to: It's all the same stuff. Differentiating it is silly. I think it's really only people *in* Scandinavia who are truly Scandinavian, and even then, they're really not.

Oh, and regarding the Middle Eastern thing, I think my immediate family is like the only one in the Bahamas DNA Project that doesn't have statistically significant numbers there. That's another mystery we haven't figured out yet. It doesn't match any plausible slave trade scenario, which had been my original theory until I revisited a map of that. It's weird.

Ethnic composition can get a little tricky because it is calculated differently on different websites.

One of the biggest differences is in size of the chunks being analyzed. If you're getting information from 23andme, you can look at the chunks in a graphic format and see you have maybe five big chunks they have identified as Scandinavian. But, you might look at a utility on Gedmatch and see just a gross number. The Gedmatch utilities are typically looking at much smaller areas and for distinctive mutations spread throughout your genome. So, you're looking at two very different types of analysis.

So, when Erica says she is looking at a "big chunk" of Scandinavian from about 1700-1750 my first question is where she seeing that. Because Erica and I are chums, I'm pretty sure I already know she's seeing that on 23andme. Because of the way 23andme does their calculations, it's probably safe to say that she really is looking at a particular Scandinavian ancestor, and she can calculate when he or she must have lived from the number and size of the chunks.

But, if Erica saw the same thing on Gedmatch, I'd guess not. Instead, I'd say it is more likely to be a far-distant Scandinavian distributed throughout. This wouldn't point to a particular recent ancestor but instead to several more recent ancestors who came from areas where Scandinavians settled.

To illustrate the point I'm making, I can use Ashkenazi since in my DNA it's easy to spot.

At 23andme I have a tiny little bit of Ashkenazi on chromosome 2. Maybe 1% of my whole DNA. And, I can verify it from the test results of an aunt, uncle, and some cousins. It's there or not there for them, but when it's there it's always in the same place, and for some of them it's a bit larger than mine and for some a bit smaller. The fact that there's an identified chunk, even this small, is a good indication that I have a fairly recent ancestor who was Ashkenazi. I don't know who it was, but it's someone, somewhere that I should be able to find and identify.

On the other hand, FTDNA thinks I'm about 5% Ashkenazi, Palestinian, etc. That's a distributed result. They're looking at my whole genome. Then, if I use the JTest utility at 23andme, I also get 5% Ashkenazi. Also a distributed resulted.

These numbers are higher than 23andme, but the two numbers mean different things. My overall ancestry back in the distant past is likely to be about 5% Ashkenazi (or something close enough that it looks like Ashkenazi), but among my close, identifiable ancestors only about 1% are likely to be Ashkenazi.

It's a 23andMe "chunk" of 49% Scandinavian, and a calculation from them of 1700-1750. We do have a GEDMatch analysis as well but I'm not sure how it compares.

We're getting a new test on my aunt only on 23andMe, there have been delay issues (getting her to mail the kit, then it was damaged ... :):).

But what it's "looking like" is that we might have an unidentified (to us) Scandinavian immigrant among all those Scotch Irish. So I'm taking a closer look at my 1800s or so tree.

It would be too recent an event to be accounted for by the semi mythical "John the Dane.". But I have both Lawson & Larison (multiple) names in my tree, either or which easily derive from "Laurensen / son," so perhaps we've mistook an "isolate immigrant" for a "member of the clan."

I'm trying to picture a Scandinavian among the Scotch-Irish. Not succeeding, even though think we all know a few odd souls pop up in every culture. Many people have told me that Huguenots were a significant minority among the Scotch-Irish, and maybe they were, but every time I've tried to document one of them the line has led back to a family in Scotland or Northern England with an origin myth that doesn't prove out.

On the other hand, it's easy to find Scandinavians settled among the Dutch and Germans. I'm not sure they'd be distinguishable in Colonial America after a generation or two.

A significant part of my dad's ancestors were Germans in Colonial Pennsylvania. I keep getting these odd DNA Swedish matches to people in Sweden. I think that tells me somewhere in those Pennsylvania folks was someone who wandered over from New Sweden (Delaware). Just can't figure out who it was yet.

Where were your guys?

There's an odd piece of "oral tradition" I saw somewhere about the Larison's (married into Barnes in KY & Stewart in NC and / or Burlington NJ) - "they talked funny." They were not Quakers but seemed to travel with the Quaker migrations; by the time the Barnes came to Estill KY they seemed to have not been very involved with the Friends.

Possibly came over from New Sweden. The original Larison settlement was New Ansterdam & then NJ. But it would have been several gens before KY - would have lost accent by then? A cousin from the old country joining?

Justin I have "documented" Huguenots in Virginia married Scotch Irish (Reno & Cargile).

Yes, I also have Huguenots marrying Scotch Irish in Virginia. That's why I'm interested in times and places. Huguenots assimilated quickly in America. What I haven't found is a Huguenot settling in Ulster, before emigration.

Pettigrew is of course supposed to be Huguenot (or not). My understanding was that there WAS a significant Huguenot immigrant to the British Isles and specifically to Scotland and the border regions.

And my Pettigrew cousins (not my Petticrew branch) in SC married into a famous Huguenot family, founders of Abbeville. Petticrew (my branch) has a story that we are French.

Hatte, that's what people say. I just haven't found a case yet where it's actually true. The Huguenot migration I've found goes to London, then to America a generation or two later. They could be up in Northern Ireland, but I haven't seen them there yet.

Check the Huguenot Society of Dublin.

See? I think we're talking about very different things.

I'm thinking I'd like to see evidence of Huguenots among the Scotch-Irish. By that, I mean the ethnic group of Scots settled in Ulster, many of whom came to America, say about 1710-1775.

There is no doubt about Huguenots in Dublin. I have some of those myself. And there is no doubt about Huguenots in America. I have plenty of those. But the Scotch-Irish are a different axis. Different social environment. Different migration pattern.

When I look for Huguenots among the Scotch-Irish, I see things like this:

http://books.google.com/books?id=U0EL9Z4DY-cC&pg=PA217&lpg=...

Settlement in the south, mostly Dublin and Wexford. A hint for places like Belfast and Monaghan, but a cloud of doubt and nothing certain. Ideally, what I'd like to see is a specific family or families who are documented in France and can be followed along a typical Scotch-Irish migration line. Say LaRochelle 1680, Glasgow 1710, Pennsylvania 1730, Valley of Virginia 1780.

OK.

I'm on a totally different question:).

Why do we show 40% Scandinavian, from a grand parent about 1700-1750, and no known Scandinavian ancestry in the American paper trail?

OK, back to that. I don't think it's going to be a Scandinavian settled in Scotland or Ulster among the Scotch-Irish. Could be, but I prefer to try first for the easy and logical answers.

When you say 40% Scandinavian (at 23andme), do you mean 40% on one chromosome? Or 40% overall for a living cousin? Either way, how many segments are Scandinavian?

Out of the field of possibilities, is there anyone who lived in Delaware, New Jersey or Pennsylvania?