DNA-R1B1C7-L Archives

Archiver > DNA-R1B1C7 > 2007-12 > 1198583547


From: "Edwin Mcamis" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA-R1B1C7] r1b1c7 on the Continent?
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 06:52:27 -0500
In-Reply-To: <122420071604.13911.476FD870000B33B90000365722007613940A049D0A0304@comcast.net>


Linda, Good for you! You are right to bring everyone back to historical
reality. Sometimes the DNA people forget history.

That may have happened to Barra when he said that my closest matches are
centered in the Raphoe barony. Even if that is true today, and not just the
result of spotty testing, nevertheless my ancestors may have walked there
from Innishowen or somewhere else.

Cheers,

Ed

-----Original Message-----
From:
[mailto:] On Behalf Of
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2007 11:04 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [DNA-R1B1C7] r1b1c7 on the Continent?

Hi All,
>There were also reports that r1b1c7 appears in Europe.
Of course. How could it not be otherwise? People evolved legs some time ago
and used them as well as boats and horses to move about. Sometimes they were
aided by historical events. The word 'historical' here limits us severely.
Most of human history is prehistorical! Most human migration is
prehistorical.
However, historically speaking, in the early 1600s after the Flight of the
Earls and the O'Cahan Rebellion, the English rounded up as many warriors as
they could. This class of Irishmen were not interested in farming. Farming
traditionally was what the lower class did. It's a problem with a
'professional' class of warriors, as opposed to warriors who are farmers
most of the time. There are eye-witness accounts of boatloads of men being
sent off from Derry. See your copy of Hanna "The Scotch-IRish". They were
being shipped off to Sweden but it is believed most defected to the other
side, which was the Catholic side. Europe was engaged in one of its last
religious wars at the time.
I would suspect more than 20% of these men would have been R1b1c7 since more
of them would have been clansmen. Back then, there would have been fewer
Scots and English genes in Ulster anyway, and no doubt the percentage of
R1b1c7 was even higher.
Some of these men lived to breed. As mercenaries, they went where they could
get paid to fight, ideally with people of the same religion as themselves.
The few I have read about settled in Holland and Flanders, marrying local
gals. You can sometimes find traces of them in church records. Of course you
must be aware of how the religious geography of Europe changed in the 15 and
1600s. Otherwise, you are mystified as to why certain DNA and names appear
in certain places.
In addition the newspapers reported an influx of "Irish beggars" at the time
into England. Some of these unfortunates were r1b1c7 and a few survived to
deposit r1b1c7 in England.
Moving forward, the so-called Williamite Wars at the end of the 1600s tend
to be viewed in Ireland as a local event. Ditto for England where they are
hailed as a 'bloodless coup'. Right, bloodless in England but as usual not
in Ireland. Actually if you read some European history, it was a small part
of a large European war. In one account that I have read, in Ireland both
sides tended to ship Irish recruits off to Europe because the Irish defected
very quickly. And spied when they were not defecting. Consequently you had
lots of Irish, both foot soldiers and officers, in Germany and Holland. They
shipped foreign soldiers into Ireland. If you check it out, you will see
many of the generals on both sides are not Irish. Ditto for the foot
soldiers.
Some of the Irish in Europe at this time undoubtedly remained. They'd
contain less R1b1c7 since the Williamite Wars drew men from all over
Ireland, not just Ulster. The men brought to Ireland often remained. You
find many Dutch and German surnames in Ireland from this time, as these men
were then naturalized by King WIlliam. Irishmen fighting on the losing side
were sure to be less welcomed back in Ireland -- more would have stayed in
Europe. Again, probably fewer of these were R1b1c7 since the war drew men
from all over Ireland. There were far more Irish in Europe by 1700 than
just the Wild Geese.
But in at least one case in historical times, large numbers of north west
Irish males of breeding age were deported from Ireland for the continent. No
one knows how many. Most survivers of the war who would not become farmers,
basically.
A small amount of R1b1c7 in Eastern and central Europe could have come from
Scots. Again in I think it was the 1500s, the king of Poland convinced a
large number of Scots with trades to settle in Poland. I think the number
was 40,000 or so. He needed a middle class. At that time large portions of
Poland were Protestant and it seemed Poland would remain so. There are still
many Scots surnames and even placenames in Poland. I got wind of this in two
places: the occurance of Polish first names in Scottish parish records and
secondly a Polish genealogy book.
Before the Union of the Crowns, Scotland traded independently from England.
She traded with the Hanseatic league cities, each of whom had a small Scots
colony, later absorbed, Russia, Poland. If you look at a map you'll see
that these places are 'close' to Scotland. England favored other countries.
In the process of trading, a small amount of R1b1c7 would have been
deposited, but given the low amounts in Scotland, probably far less than the
deportation of Irish soldiers from Ulster in the early 1600s.
If these are the standard explanations:
>The standard explanation offered for the presence of R1b1c7 in Germany
>(or really anywhere but Ireland and Scotland) are:

>1. The Wild geese
>2. Wandering Irish monks/Irish monasteries on the continent

They suggest who ever made them doesn't have a very good understanding of
history. Wandering and corrupt monks in particular is a mighty poor source
of breeding stock <grin>! Unfortuntely even when reading history you must
'read between the lines' since 'history' generally is a retelling of
political events. Migration can be a political event, but is rarely
historically significant so it isn't discussed. Huge amounts of migration
can occur in response to a political event, like World Wars One and Two,
without historicans paying much attention to it except when it becomes
political.
It's hard to get details on how many Irishmen (largely from Ulster and thus
disproportionately R1b1c7) left with or after the Earls, never to return,
who lived their lives as mercenaries, settling down with local women in
France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany. There simply were no records
kept by men who were escaping repression and death in Ireland and
governments never have records of potential victims who escaped their
clutches -- or even of victims they caught. No one even knows what
percentage of mercinaries were killed in battle and what percentage lived to
retire and marry. Presumedly the latter ones produced more offspring than
the former. No one knows how many children drunken mercinaries fathered on
prostitutes and rape victims in the Hundred Years War! Yet this is kinda
germane to determining if our understanding of DNA distribution in Europe is
accounted for or if we're still missing significant scenarios of infusions
of DNA.....
Real historians could probably provide a few more scenarios within
historical times. We'd have to rely on statistics to tell us if these
account for the distribution or if there were significant pre-historic
migrations -- because there are no records, although we know these folk had
legs and boats and so could have moved to Europe at any time.
Over and over I see on this and other lists geneticists, people doing family
history, and others trying to make sense of data with only a very populist
understanding of history. You need to partner with very good historians. The
populist versions of our histories are generally wrong. They may be 'right'
on a 'big picture', but when you need details, they are inaccurate or simply
missing the data we need. So you need to ask questions about wars and
famines, two events that cause migrations. The excellent historians might
not have thought about this stuff at all.
There are a lot of really good histories out there. One of the better ones
for our purposes here (figuring out where our ancestors were and who they
were) is Elliott's "Catholics of Ulster". She exposes a lot of info on
migration to and from Ulster as well as inside it, as well as cultural
realities that frankly debunk many popularly held notions of Ulster.
Lastly, serious genealogists that I've conversed with, at the luncheon
tables of genealogy conferences, for example, often comment on how the study
of individuals and families is a check and balance with history. Although
we're getting better at writing history based on primary evidence (records)
most history before the 20th century was simply the winning side's story of
how it was. Often when genealogists consult primary records they find it
conflicts with the standard story. One example is the argument over whether
Cromwell actually murdered everyone in Drogheda, etc, or not. One person (an
Irishman) has written a book claiming he did not. In fact, Cromwell is being
re-written, not as a monster as the Royalists claime he was but as a
moderate. I can supply some books for any one interested in this to read and
decide.
The point is, the historians are not always right. Often they are wrong. In
any case their version of the past may not address the issues the
geneticists need to know to reconstruct the history of a gene. However
standard or populist history is usually wrong. It reflects the political
agendas of someone, who? We usually don't even know!
So we're stuck with either becoming better consumers of history ourselves or
enlisting a good historians on our teams -- always. Because standard
history has no answers. It views the past with a very bad, very dirty lense
with very low magnification. Genetics views the past with an electron
microscope! Of course the two views don't match up. Of course genetics can
learn little from 'standard history' or populist history. It requires
reading between the lines of even the best history -- history constructed
from primary evidence because our interests were hardly ever part of
history.
Happy Holidays!

Linda Merle

-------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to
with the word 'unsubscribe' without the
quotes in the subject and the body of the message


--
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.17.8/1195 - Release Date: 12/24/2007
11:19 AM

This thread: