Previously in DF95 All Together Alone, I gave some examples of how the Cumberland Cluster is striking for it’s differences. Thinking about the question of how we can all be so alike (in our STR results), but so different from others we examined the SNPs turned up by big Y. I talked about Y lines dying out, while others might thrive and how that might create gaps on the scale of a family. I gave some examples of the Y DNA trees of other haplogroups to illustrate all the missing branches from ours. I wondered out loud what happened to all the men who should be there given all the time that transpired between our first “cumberland” ancestor born around 2100BC and our most recent common ancestor (Mr. ZP86) born around 600BC.
We’re on our own and odd, but our circumstances are not exactly unique.
Alone in a Crowd
On the Z18 big Y results page (a listing for people who do not fall under the majority Z372 and it’s monster child L257), you’ll find several groups who show a similar pattern of runs of SNPs indicating that all the testers are more recently related to each other without any side branches coming from the ancient ancestors. I’ve highlighted them with darker red boxes.
Keep in mind that these groups were often named for the location given by the first few testers, so for instance Cumberland had two or three testers who traced back to Cumberland in England. The names become arbitrary as more testers are added from various locations. Also you’ll see some boxes that are blank, but a light grey. These were areas where there was not coverage in the test (Big Y is not “exact” in it’s coverage). The arrows are pointing to the level of the resident old guys in the cluster.
The East Anglia cluster on the left has about eleven SNPs in a run for all their testers. To estimate the gap we can think of them being a few hundred years from Mr. Z18, so again maybe 2100BC with a last common ancestor in 250BC. About 1800 years of gap time. Similarly the Swede cluster has 16 SNPs in a row and a gap of about 2000 years. Although with only three testers from that group it’s hard to take that as a hard and fast number, the run could be smaller or it could be that these testers were just lucky in matching someone and others from the group would prove more branches.
Taken for what it is worth today, we have at least three groups coming from the root of Z18 with long straight non-branching Y trees showing a pinch point (back down to a single man) for each group.
Timeline of Tragedy
Well. Who can say if it’s really that dramatic or not, but It would seem like, in the last few hundred years before 0AD, things turned poorly for all these clusters (except L257, they seem to have a lot of nice layers up top which I assume would be in this same time period).
Given the Penchant for all the Z18 groups to include members from Scandinavia and the penchant for Scandinavians (in the Cumberland group anyway) to be on the early branches of big Y (after Mr. ZP86 of course), I’m still betting on that area as a starting point. I feel especially bolstered by the oldest ancient DNA found for U106 being Rise98 found in Sweden. He’s on an extinct branch of U106, but at around 2200BC he shows that U106 had already made it’s way to Scandinavia fairly early on (U106 age estimate is about 3000BC).
Of course, we don’t have to worry too much about those most ancient dates and 4000 to 5000 years of history. All of the diaspora of Cumberland Cluster men (and by the look of their SNPs East Anglia and Swede Cluster men) happened after some series of events and everyone has to get to their current positions in about half the time (2500 to 2000 years maybe). We don’t have to account for any members with connections older than 500 or 600BC. In that time, we recolonize all the same areas that the rest of RZ18 lives in and most of the same areas that U106 men inhabit.
This evidence of a pinch point and late expansion agrees with what we’ve been noticing for years. There are very few of us and we’re really spread out. Like a remnant population scrambling to find new homes.
We have roughly 600AD to 0AD to worry about (assuming we’re going to include the Swede cluster in here). That marks the bottleneck and the beginning of the expansion for these three groups with the Swede group seeming to be the most extreme (coming in closest to 0 hour and having the most SNPs in it’s run). Each group would have been brought to it’s knees about this time, but it also marks the hopeful point where they begin to branch out again.
Cumberlands…the not so early days
In 458.2 Cluster Bomb and Thoughts about Migration I spent some time thinking about the push of Rome north and what it might mean for Z18 and the DF95 men in particular. In that time, my overarching idea was that we may have been pushed north by the Romans or the inter-tribal pressure created by the Romans, and then migrated from places like Denmark to The Isles, Poland, Sweden and Norway.
The big Y results and Rise98 have me wondering if I had the movement backwards. In the Cumberland cluster, those branches right off Mr. ZP86 and his descendant ZP85 contain men from Norway. Making it seem like Norway may be our home in the range of 600 to 400BC.
At the level of ZP86 (age estimate around 600BC), we have Skjennum (Koller) from Norway forming his own branch with multiple unmatched SNPs (arrow in the graphic above). At that same level, we have the Corsons (Sweden…or maybe Netherlands) who have their own branch. They have one SNP that was identified by Britains DNA or Scotlands DNA; S3525. That means at least one person at those test companies is on their line, but otherwise they are currently on their own (column to the right of the arrow in graphic above).
Down a rung at ZP85 (age estimate around 400BC) we have Lund from Norway on a branch identified by ZP193, it has two men on it, the other shows a last name of Rathburn which may be Irish or English. The ZP193 branch is the sibling of the ZP121 branch that many of us below ZP85 sit on. There are other isles origin ZP85 branches with a trails blazed by Ovens and separately Old and we’re waiting for another person to walk down those and define some group of shared SNPs for each man.
The presence of men from Norway at the top, near the pinch point is compelling to me even in a group like DF95 that is still dominated by the Isles and Continental Europe. Our diversity happens after the bottleneck.
East Anglia and the Swede Cluster
Among these three groups with long runs of shared SNPs right off the top, the Cumberlands have won a couple of victories in that you can see an “older” branch at ZP86. In the East Anglia group you have, at this point, a similar pattern. Their man from Sweden, Sahlstrom, is on his own branch at the base (East Anglia arrow in the graphic above) along with some isles testers like Davidson and Parker (to his left and right). The East Anglia cluster is dominated by the Isles but contains a man from Poland as well (Barkman). I have to wonder if he would end up on an older branch as would be expected in the normal east to west migrations or if (like the Cumberland Poland members) he would end up on a younger branch that went west to east. His panel test placed him at the same level as all the other East Anglia testers.
The Swede cluster, although it contains a man from Denmark (currently not tested for big Y) in it’s STR listings, has Swett from England as it’s resident old man, with Marksberry and Howell going a step farther together. All of these men are isles testers, so it would be interesting to get the Swede cluster person from Denmark tested. It’s hard to make a lot of determinations based on three testers who are so similar on the Y and geographically. I have to wonder how much of their 16 SNP run is part of a pinch point and how much of it is shared history in the isles.
A possible Scandinavian Location for the Bottleneck
Although these groups are biased towards the isles (with Cumberland picking up the most continental testers), the evidence we have from the two largest data sets (Cumberland and East Anglia) shows some affinity for early Scandinavian branches at the time of their bottlenecks. Given that other base branches of Z18 like Z372 also have a high incidence of Scandinavians and …again…rise98 showing an early U106 Scandinavian, I think I’m making the safe bet now in looking at 600BC to 0BC in Scandinavia for most recent common ancestors for these remnant groups. Like I said, we don’t have to account for all the diversity and migration of any group since 2100BC because, it would appear those other expected branches between 2100BC and 600BC or so are all dead. We really can think about the location of one man in 600BC for cumberland or 250BC for east anglia etc.
The general idea I come away with is that something big happened or several big things happened and they probably took place before the Romans made their presence known. The Cumberlands are a surviving branch along with what appear to be other sole surviving branches in Z18. We have to go back a bit and think about people who may have been in Scandinavia, but were not the kind of Scandinavians we think about today (vikings).
Based on age estimates, I’m specifically thinking about the period of time end of the Nordic Bronze Age and the beginning of the Pre-Roman Iron Age and, through big Y results, Scandinavia as a source or refuge.
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Hi there, I’m really enjoying reading your blog – I’m on FTDNA and recently did a YSTR test, and based on my results such as DYS385 11,11 marker results mentioned in one of your entries and having an administrator in another group I am involved in do a prediction test using an admin tool, he stated that there is a 100% prediction that I should be a part of the DF95 subclade. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to connect.
I’m happy to contribute, as well as learn more about the DNA research. Thanks!
Hi Mike, love your website!
Here is something for your interest-
I tested with FTDNA.
I live in Devon, England.
I have traced my Y-DNA through SNP tests and and Haplogroup reasearch from it’s origins in Kazakhstan (R-M343),
to northern Italy (R-L754, carried by Villabuna 1- 14,000 year old hunter gatherer),
The forming of the Germanic-Italo Celts (R-L11 + others),
Migration to west Europe (R-L51) where they branched off, some going south, others going west,
My bloodline go north heading towards Germanica,
from there I test positive for all the main North Germanic Haplogroups, R-U106, R-Z14, R-Z16, R-Z18, R-DF95, R-ZP86, and stop at R-ZP85 (my current haplogroup) with no choices to test anymore!
My thoughts are Angles being our tribe as they are both a North Sea tribe and Northern Germanic, but I stil have a deep feeling Scandinavian culture flows through my blood.
Here is some more interesting facts-
I have one match at R-ZP85 in the Big Y test, he is from America and matches the earlier branches of R-Zp85 too, he is from America, Mr William Eugene Mayne.
I have no “Exact” matches in Y111 or lower!
I have one match, a 1-step match, out of the the entire database at 25 Markers-
He is from Norway- Oivind Larsen.
At 12 markers I have 1 exact match, from an unknown location, William Seraile. (doesn’t show on map either)
The other 6, 1-Step Matches; 2 from Norway (including Mr Larsen), 2 in Scotland, 1 in Southern Ireland and 1 in the states.
Any other matches from Family Finder, etc, are all mostly Americans!
My Surname Atkins, is said to be possibly Anglo-Saxon or Scottish in Origin! Cumbria and Cumberland was taken over by Scots, Norse, Danes, back to English (Angle) control on multiple occasions in it’s history, we could ahve blood from any of those cultures. BUT, Atkins derives from Adam, Adam derives from Danish surnames such as Adamsen.
All I know is that before I started any tests, I felt a deep connection to Northern Germanic culture, Norse and Scandinavian Culture and I felt that my family would have come from Norther England around Northumbria.
I tested positive for North Germanic Culture and I ended testing (so far) as part of the Cumberland Cluster- Just to the west of Northumbria, but still in Northern England.
As an additional note, my surname also appears a lot in native American Ancestry records, I did pass R-M173 too, a large R haplogroup found in Natives.
Thought you would be interested to know this!
Hi Greg, good to hear from another ZP85. I highly recommend joining the U106 and Z18 projects at FTDNA if you haven’t already. If you’ve got a big y, each group will do it’s own analysis and comparison which have been better at matching than what you end up with from FTDNA. I’m from the U.S. so to me, there is nothing wrong with getting a second opinion, so I always recommend that people join both Z18 and U106 projects and submit their big Y results to each. Other than that, I’d recommend joining the Adkins/Atkins project just to see how they handle your results. It’s not uncommon for Cumberland Cluster men to languish in “ungrouped” categories because we tend to be few and far between. If you haven’t, I would also get in touch with your Mayne match to see if they have joined U106 or Z18 and had further analysis that might be important for both of you.
Hi Mike!
Yep, already part of the groups, Z18, U106, Adkins/Atkins, and dozens more relating, not a lot changed haha!
Facebook followed groups too.
What does “Cumberland Cluster” tell you? If you had to guess your origins before America, what do you vision?
Hi Greg. This may be surprising, but it’s an earlier naming scheme that stuck and is kind of unfortunate that way. One of the early testers had a family history from that area so the entire group was named the Cumberland cluster. At a certain point the Z18 admin went on to name groups by color or give them letters because geographic locations are misleading. For instance, some of the oldest branch testers are from Norway, but it would be misleading to call it the Norway Cluster because we may find earlier branches in other locations. So the naming scheme is a hold over from an earlier time in Y DNA testing that just sort of stuck. It’s just as relevant to the rest of our European testers as Cumberland Pennsylvania.
What I think we see in isles families…and this is just me… is that there is a lot of diversity of newer branches there. So for example, we’ve got ZP85 which appears to be about as old as the DYS458.2 STR. It’s something like 2500 years old and probably marks an expansion point for our Y. You’ve got people on one side of that marker and on the other. Those that have it and those that don’t. In England, we can see those families split by 2500 years living side by side in southeast England. They’ve got 2500 years of history separating them. Their current location and culture is meaningless in that context.
Meanwhile closer relatives, for example, on my own personal branch are in the low countries just 1600 years apart. We’ve got at least one person whose family is likely Irish whose closest match is in Norway. People on the other side of that ZP85 divide are in the same boat with Irish families lining up best with German families. I personally think what we’re seeing in the isles are the waves of migration from the mainland and figuring out which wave of migration is most likely for our Y DNA will rely on finding our closest matches and moving back along the tree.
As a concrete example, we could say that it’s most likely a family arrived with the Romans and Saxons, but another DF95 person in the same general location may have more likely arrived with the Danes and still another family may have showed up hundreds of years later with the Normans or even after that with waves of trade and immigration. All of them being homogenized into English families well before the common use of surnames among regular people.
Things are not always what they seem, so it’s hard to say what we’ll know next year that we don’t know today. There was a time where the prevailing thought was that the Polish testers were the oldest group based on their STR mutations, but big Y showed us that they are a younger branch also amazingly closely related to testers from Belgium and the Netherlands (like 1300 AD, closer than my Elmer family is to the Knowltons). So they get together with their Belgian counterparts and figure out that the most likely migration for them is the ostsiedlung.
My gut feeling is still that the current groups of DF95 testers come out of Scandinavia at the end of the Nordic Bronze age, during or after a pretty bad weather change. To me that is where the trail picks up after we were nearly wiped off the planet. The origin of DF95 is very old and likely not in Scandinavia, but I think our cluster probably survived there and then took part in the migration period as numbers increased. All personal speculation, but recent finds of R-Z18 men as far away as Hungary during the migration period, with roots in Scandinavia according to chemical analysis, give me some comfort.
My best evidence for my own family is that we have about 93 years of being Thompsons and before that we were Elmores and Elmers back to 1610-ish. I personally think our guy was a husbandman farmer from the area of Braintree or Chelmsford based on his relative wealth here in the Americas and some research into Elmers in England in the 1600s. Genetically it looks like we split from the Knowlton family well before surnames were common, around the time of the Norman invasion. You have to go back a few hundred years before the Norman invasion to tie us to the Lunsford family, which is apparently named after a location in southeast England. So we’re looking at 700 or 800 AD for the convergence of the Elmer/Knowltons and the Lunsfords.
So what you think is we may have gone through Europe, up through Germanica, sailed up to Norway, settled there until the Nordic Bronze age ended, moved back to North Germanica/Jutland, then moved to England in the big migration?
Or do you think we lived in the North of Germanica, moved to Norway for a while and then moved to England after the Anglo-Saxons?
And you mention Saxons as supposed to Angles, do you think we actually lived in Cumberland/Northumbria areas? where the Angles first arrived?
Very interesting mate, really is.
Right now, the oldest U106 man is found in Sweden in about 2200 BC. He’s got several SNPs below U106 that are not currently shared by anyone else. The oldest Z18 man I think is the sample from Hungary around 500AD. He’s Scandinavian (based on chemical analysis) which sets him apart from some of the others in that dig. Another Z18 man showed up in iceland around 900AD. Iceland’s national story is about colonization from Norway.
Thinking about those examples, U106 man predates Germanica. He’s part of the battle axe culture. There is a 2700 year gap between him and the Z18 representative around 500AD who was taking part in the migration period. That is a huge gap. The best age estimate is about 2300BC for Z18 which means they exist at the time of the oldest U106 man found in Sweden. Z18 also predates Germanica. Here’s a time map with the rough cultural map of europe around 2500BC: https://www.timemaps.com/history/europe-2500bc/
R-DF95 is both young and old. Every living DF95 man is related to the same man that I think lived around 500BC. Just about the time that the time map picks out some differences between Germans and Scandinavians: https://www.timemaps.com/history/europe-500bc/
That is a huge gap from the beginning of R-Z18. We’ve got almost 2000 years of blank slate. DF95 actually represents 2000 years worth of SNPs not shared by anyone else, which led me to make a few graphics showing a descendant tree where every other “DF95” line dies out except ours: http://thompsonhunt.wanderingtrees.com/2016/08/df95-all-alone-together.html
We’re a remnant population.
No one knows where those intermediate steps happened between 2300BC and 500BC. So really anything is possible. I speculate that our specific living branch of DF95 people expanded out of Scandinavia and are part of the formation of Germanica and part of the push for the Germanic migrations, not a product of it. That might be too simplistic, but I think several of us left Scandinavia at different points (and some didn’t leave at all), just like that Z18 guy in Hungary, and we became whatever we needed to be to survive.
like this image of a river delta where the river is pre-germanic people housed in Scandinavia and the delta may contain scandinavians, germans, celts depending on our own individual trail: https://www.worldatlas.com/r/w728-h425-c728x425/upload/45/7e/c4/1024px-line5066-flickr-noaa-photo-library.jpg
Oops. Second part. Again just my own speculation, but I think we expand out of Scandinavia after 500BC and form the Germanic tribes and the migration peroid rather than the other way around. I also think it’s possible we pre-date the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. We’ve got almost 1000 years to get to Britain between our starting shot in 500BC and the Anglo-Saxons taking control of Britain. I think it’s very likely that other lesser known migrations took place long before the Romans were recording the movements of people. We’re basically Pre-historic before the Romans. I think we suffer from a lack of evidence and it’s hard to tell local culture from trade based on grave goods. Y testing ancient remains is difficult and DNA evidence doesn’t seem to be a goal for many digs. That leaves a lot up to interpretation.
At the risk of spamming my own blog post, it also occurred to me to mention that no matter what the heat maps say R-U106 does not constitute Germanic Y DNA. What they found a long time ago was that U106 occurred quite a bit in areas that are now Germanic speaking, but it’s not the dominant Y haplogroup in any of those areas. That is still R1b-P312. In the past I did some rough tallying and it seemed like the only place U106 approached half of the Y population was in some specific provinces of the Netherlands. It didn’t quite make half though. So R-P312 is Germanic Y DNA by bulk. As a “for instance”, in that Lombard study with the one guy with Z18 from Scandinavia, There were 21 R1b samples, but only 6 were R1b-U106. 10 of the samples were in haplogroup I2a. So again, just plunking out there that we don’t define Germanic, but Germanic and can’t even claim the bulk of the migration period Y DNA, but Germanic may have applied to us at specific points in time.
Wow, that is an amazing view.
So to summarise:
You think we where the first Scandinavians, either Norwegian or Swedish,
Who decided to migrate south to what was at the time becoming Germanica, and even Hungary.
Chances are Jutland would have been a big potential first location after moving.
Possibly then; we moved over to England- either as a hidden migration before the Anglo-Saxons,
or with the Anglo-Saxons as part of the actual written migration.
But it is hard to tell at the moment due to that huge blank space in time where we have 2000 years of SNP’s no one else would have (AND THAT IS SO COOL BY THE WAY).
The fact we could possibly be the first Norse culture, and then the first North Germanic’s is amazing.
The other side of this is your family of; R-Z18, U106, DF95, ZP85- could have all come from different places to my family. My family could have come from Sweden then moved to Germanica initially, your family could have coem from Norway to Germanica, and either of our families could have settled and moved with the Anglo-Saxons, or could have moved way before then.
I feel my family may have spilled Roman blood on Germanic soil and then moved with the Anglo-Saxons to England.
Yep. I think that’s where I’m at today. Thinking specifically of the Y line. My family could live in the same county in England with another DF95 family separated by 2500 years of individual migrations, cultures, circumstances and identities, but ending up in the same place. Meanwhile, we are genetically more closely related to a family in Poland with an entirely different culture, circumstances and identity. Like you said, the intervening several thousand years of movement of individuals make it hard to pinpoint a location for that one guy we’re all related to 2500 years ago, I just suspect that it’s scandinavia and that he survives a Y line collapse.
I talk a lot about that collapse for us, but we’re not the only one. I just think we’re particularly isolated and that our expansion hasn’t been as robust. Here is Dr. McDonald’s U106 timeline. http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~mcdonald/genetics/tree.html
If you search the page (ctrl f on windows) to find DF95 and scroll to the left and you can see the long line of time where we’ve collapsed to a single man and then begin expanding after that. If you scroll up or down the page you can see that other branches of Z18 are also pretty sparse, but some branches of U106 fare much better (having more branches) at different times. You’ll also find striking examples of collapses in some other branches of Z18 and greater U106 too.
I like to imagine that each of those collapses comes along with a story of survival that allowed us future generations to scatter in the wind.
Doing a bit more digging, if I said Frisian to you, would that make you go “That sounds like home”?
OH !!
You know I said I traced my ancestors beginning from the Kazakhstan area before going into Italy?
A tribe, by the name of the Lombard’s did something very similar.. From Southern Scandinavia!!
This makes links to what you have deduced, about starting in Scandinavia.
The Lombard’s migrated from Scandinavia into North West Germanica, they joined the Suebi. Later on the Lombard’s migrated to Pannonia, right next to Italy, in between Italy and where Kazakhstan is today ( give or take a few thousand miles lol)… (Would have all been closer before the earth changed)
Problem is, My initial beginning haplogroup in Kazakhstan may not link to the Lombard’s because they didn’t really go near Kazakhstan, how did I go from Northern Italy (maybe with the Lombard’s- although they didn’t move after Italy) back to Germanica…
Hi Mike, it’s me. Chris Wright. I know it’s been a long time. But I’m just fascinated by your blog. It’s so full of information!! But I will get to the point because I’m sure you’re busy. I saw on the post of yours that I’m related to two men one in Holland and the other one is in Belgium. All three of us share a common ancestor who was born between the 11th and 12th centuries. my question is With this common ancestor have been a Flemish speaker or Dutch speaker. And my second question is with my ancestor have gone to England. From either Flanders or Holland change his name. And adopted in English lifestyle. Because this would have been after the conquest.. And another interesting fact. After the Big Y test a mr Winnie. Is Predicted to be my fifth cousin… This is all rather strange. It’s getting curiouser and curiouser. The only person who has any clue to what all this means is is you. And I’d be very interested in to hearing your reply… You’ve done a great job on this site for a lot of people. Please keep up the work and be glad to hear from you. Take care Mike??
Hi Chris. You’re branch of the tree in ZP125 has several sub branches. Two people who are fairly closely related in Belgium and the Netherlands are estimated around 1500AD and share ZP187 for a common ancestor. A few SNPs back from them is a man from Poland, who is estimated to be related to the two of them around 1200AD which works out nicely because he has some evidence that his family is part of the ostsiedlung. The branch for those three men is ZP150. You are farther back branching off on your own at ZP125.
Very recently, after my most recent posts, The U106 group gave out a rough way to estimate ages between two testers. Since I don’t know the specifics of each man in ZP187 I am going to use the information on the block tree at FTDNA which is averaged, so I can only treat them as a single person. They have an average of 4 SNPs to themselves and it takes them 6 more SNPs to get back to ZP125 where you split from them. So they have 10 SNPs. The U106 group is using 125 years as an average for years between SNPs in Big Y 500 tests. So the ZP187 men have 1025 years back (from 1950) to ZP125. In the block tree, you have 14 private variants back to ZP125 so 1750 years.
In their equation, we add the two sets of years together and then divide by 2 (the number of people since I can only count ZP187 men as an averaged person). So that would put a common ancestor for you and the ZP187 men at 1388 years or roughly 1400 years before 1950. So (10*125) + (14*125)/2 or 1025 + 1750 / 2 = 1388. 1950 – 1388 is 562 so Around 500 or 600AD for a common ancestor.
This aging equation is similar to others I’ve seen recently. YFull limits the amount of the Y they look at (so they limit the number of SNPs they get). They use an equation that adds 144 years per SNP and then adds 60 to each year set and divides the total of all of that by the number of testers. So Yfull might give an estimate like (1025+60) + (1750+60) / 2 = 503 so about the same range for common Y ancestors.
I would suspect that the connection to our friends from the Netherlands and Belgium are continental (which is up for some debate) but given some actual age range math to do now, it looks like your Y line probably split from theirs during the migration period.
That leaves open a lot of time and a lot of possibilities.
Chris, I posted a similar comment on my big Y 700 community post https://wanderingtrees.com/2020/01/01/my-big-y-700-community/ that talks about the ZP125 block. I’ll have to post some updates with corrections now that I have a more accepted way to calculate age estimates. Thanks for the heads up and the opportunity to re-think it.
Hi, Mike, just read your post. Very interesting. Now the two men you mentioned one from Holland and the other from Belgium. I’m assuming these two individuals originally spoke Dutch. You say my line split away from them during the German migration or during the migration after the conquest.? It’s just a lot to take in. I’ve been wondering whether he was Flemish my line and just went to England and took on the surname sounded English.!! And is there any coincidence that me and mr. Winnie is my fifth cousin and we share the same haplogroup. Is it possible that my name is not “Wright” but really Winnie! And also at some point you mentioned on your post that me and you Share a common ancestor in the 5th Century. I don’t know if I read it correctly… Nonetheless if it’s still very exciting. I’ll look forward to your reply and again, once again, thanks Mike. You’re about the only one. On the post here that makes any sense whatsoever with all this..
The first thing to get out of the way is that I don’t know enough about the families to give a good answer. The short best guess answer is that ZP125, which your family branches directly from currently, is older than autosomal DNA can match and probably older than common surname use in either the low countries or England.
I would look at your Winnie match’s family tree for 4th great grandparents (5th cousins) to see if there is some overlap there with your family, even geographically because people are people. Your autosomal match would likely be in the 1700s or 1800s with a 4th great grandparent. I would look there at all branches of your family and theirs and find other people who match them and you to see if there are patterns of ancestors in their family trees.
Just trying to recall from past conversations, but I think you match other Wrights on the Y STR level, but you’re the only Wright among those matches to test big Y. It’s a lot of work, but you could tackle that the way I tackled the Thompsons and Elmers, by recruiting your Wright STR matches to test Big Y, or your individual private SNPs at YSEQ and by examining family trees to see where you meet up. That would give you a point in time where you know a surname and Y DNA and paper records match.
Just read your post Mike very informative and very interesting. Thank you… You have a wealth of ideas for my small mind to get around, but I’ll try to Fathom them out… I know you have a life to get on with. So I won’t burden you with my questions any further. This will be the last one. I promise you… In your educated opinion, roughly speaking.!! And this is purely conjecture.?? Given that I share a common ancestor with the person in Flanders and mr. Winnie. In Flanders as well.. Does that mean I come from the continent? Have Europe and then went back to England or vice versa.!! Or is it you do with the Danes who came earlier… Or more importantly your educated guess of where my point of origin is from.
Sorry it has been so long to respond Chris, work and school and current events being what they are have eaten a lot of time. There are enough ideas to overwhelm anyone. I think our cousin Peter had an interesting perspective on our shared origins, so I posted that with his permission here: https://wanderingtrees.com/2020/02/09/zp125-conversations/ It is just as good as anything I might come up with and has historical regional relevance that I wouldn’t be aware of.