Very recently, after these posts, The U106 group’s Iain McDonald gave out a rough way to estimate ages between two testers. This calls into question my rough estimates here, especially for the ZP125 group which didn’t have a full set of age estimates to look at.

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. 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 Wright splits 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, Wright has 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.

Which is about 600 years older than my guesstimate based on number of SNPs between blocks.

This aging equation is similar to one I’ve seen recently from my own test at Yfull. 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

About the same range we get using the U106 group method for common Y ancestors.

You wrote the 1^st of January in the ‘My Big Y 700 Community’ : That means the Wrights from England have a shared ancestor with men from Belgium, Netherlands and Poland around 1200AD… If my hypothesis would be correct, that common ancestor is either likely around 870 or the Wrights are a family descending from continental Europe if the common ancestor would be more recent than that 870.

But let me start my hypothesis with a historical fact: there is a family Burchgrave documented in Ghent around 1380 and those were the Castle Wardens of Vijve (I probably wrote that before that the name Burchgrave, in its many variants, means Castle Warden). At about the same time period there are Burchgrave’s in that very same Vijve with the same armorials as that Ghent family, and a few Burchgrave men in Tielt with also the same armorials. All belong to their respective city/area alderman’s or upper class. So documents cannot prove it, as there is little archive of the era’s preceding, but it is not a big leap to assume these are 3 branches of the same Vijve family.

It is also a fact that we see the castle wardens of Vijve changing their name from ‘Vijve’ into Burchgrave around 1250 (or at least before).

Now assumptions… My fully documented genealogy runs dead with the brothers Pieter, Gillis and Wouter, born about 1490 (but this is the ‘latest’, they could be born up to 10 years before that). But their father Legier and his sons Pieter, Gillis and Wouter could well fit in timing and given names of his sons with the Tielt family (1380 – 1500). The names do not fit with Ghent, Vijve, nor Kemmel. And there are no known Burchgrave’s before that time in other places. So we cannot link my Legier with Ghent, Vijve or Kemmel, but they do fit with Tielt. Also, but that would fit with Vijve and Ghent as well: my family arrives into Passendale and immediately marries with the local magistrate family of the Ypres area, and they have the financial means to buy some properties in Passendale. Son Wouter became bailiff of a small local lordship.

So back to the larger hypothesis: my family is a very branched-out family of descendants of the old castle wardens of Vijve. That family is recorded since 1040, they were also the lords of Vijve, hence why they get called ‘Van Vijve’ meaning from Vijve. When things turn for the worse (politicly) around 1127, they keep the castle wardenry, but it gets downgraded and they no longer are the lords of Vijve. That could well be the reason why they now get styled Burchgrave and no longer Van Vijve instead.
 
Stanuszjek was of the opinion that his family descended from the Germanic settlement into Polish areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung , that would not contradict my hypothesis, as that Ostsiedlung had Flemish people among them and a family who got their fortunes a bit turned down would have been a primary source of youngsters looking for better chances elsewhere.

How Winne would fit into this… Well, the family Winne came from Ghent and left it with the religious wars (at least our Winne descending from a protestant branch). At that time the Burchgrave’s of Ghent were part of the political class of the ruling protestants and I’m guessing a non-paternal event. Although Ghent was a protestant republic for some time, the vast majority of inhabitants remained catholic, the group of protestant not being that big Winne’s and Burchgrave can easily have come into contact.

And now going back further in time, really hypothetical The castle of Vijve is known as of 900, so it could well have been older but not that much. The local historical amateurs look at it and talk about the Vikings… Well, we know the Heathen Army attacked Ghent 879 and in 880 went south to Kortrijk (Vijve been smack in that path between these two cities). And we do know of Vikings been appointed lordships in turn to defend of their fellow Norsemen from further attacks (Frisia, Normandy…). So it is not impossible that a Viking warlord took or build the castle in Vijve and got bestowed with the castle wardenry in return promising to defend the area. That could be a possible explanation why the historical records seem to esteem the mother of the castle warden Lambert in 1080 higher than his unnamed father (the local Lady coming from a family being Christian for some time, while the Viking descend’s father’s family would have been heathen not so long ago).

But that would very likely put our relation with Wright further back in time, before 875. Unless some of this castle warden’s descendants went back to England?

The Great Heathen Army was largely a new invasion into England, with new Norsemen/Vikings, but they did not get the chance to do much there, they got rather quickly expelled out so they then went to raid the coasts of France, Low Countries and so on. Could this explain that Wright is more recently related to us than those other ‘English’ families that descended from earlier invasions into England?