DNA testing?

[Salvianus]

It's an interesting and ever-improving field and participation is what keeps it improving.

I had my Paternal line tested a few years ago as a gift from my wife, by "oxfordancestors" a spinoff company from Professor Bryan Sykes' team which did a lot of the early work in trying to make genetic trends with respect to geography more intelligible to the public, probably most well known for book "The Seven Daughters of Eve" (2001). They were very professional, have a follow-up website community, can do the maternal line and offer a simplified cheaper test if you are looking specifically at a likely long British association. One slightly off-putting side effect of the popular influence is that they (like other such outfits) attach easier-to-remember supposedly culturally representative names to the different Haploid groups, which I find a bit silly, but they do give you the proper genetic names and outline the considerable uncertainties involved with trying to pin down an attachment to what we think of today as ethnicities and nations based upon genetic mutations which happened before Britain was an island and vast migrations were occurring across the Old World - so long ago we couldn't even say what language the people were speaking, let alone what sort of group identities people might have had about themselves beyond their immediate community, if any.

The point in my case was that my parents had already traced my paternal line back to the end of the 15th century for certain on the English side of the Welsh Marches and thence from the genealogical work done for the College of Arms into north Wales to the 11th century and possibly a good deal further, which in all honesty should be regarded with some scientific caution.

The puzzle was that while our surname was a popular recurring name in Wales in the Middle Ages and gave rise to a number of Anglicised variants, some of which are well represented in Scotland, linked to Pictish ancestry, the origin of the name is ascribed to a particular 5th century West Saxon whose father seemed to bear a British (or Brythonic, if you prefer) name. So in our case, we were quite interested in finding out if the actual line suggested a "Germanic" or "Celtic", i.e. Western European "origin" (either of which might fit that association) or if things had gone astray (as statistics tells us is quite common) and we had the name but with "origins" in Scandinavia or elsewhere.

At the level we looked at I (pleasingly to me) turned out as bog-standard western European, Haploid R1b, which increases pretty evenly from the south-east of England (naturally, with the most cross-channel intermix, but still a majority - 65%) fanning out in sedentary families as you go west across the British Isles and highest in the west of Eire, into the upper 90%, but also well represented in more static communities in Wales and Scotland and of course common in continental western Europe as well, particularly down the Atlantic coast of Portugal & Spain. This is what most people call "Celtic" ancestry. Yes, to repeat, most English men have "Celtic" rather than "Anglo-Saxon" paternal lines, as we understand it today. The "replacement" or "Anglo-Saxon ethnic cleansing" theory based on an early study doesn't seem to have held up, however much it echoed Gildas' anguish.

At this level of detail, the national boundaries within the islands seem fairly insignificant, because they are just too recent and too permeable to have made much difference, however we might notice the accents and rightly cherish our various traditions :-)

I recently attended a lecture by Alistair Moffat, touching on material from his books "The Scots: A Genetic Journey" (2011) and particularly his new "The British: A Genetic Journey" (2013), which he was prompted to write after an innocuous lecture looking at Scottish pre-history was widely and wildly misrepresented as suggesting there was a deep genetic divide between "the Scots" and "the English".

He debunks a lot of these sort of attempts to use genetics improperly and presented some of the newest insights into how the strong concordance of DNA between Britain and parts of modern Spain might confirm the existence of population "refuges" in the last ice age, how they identified the murdered family of the Russian Tsar through other descendants of Queen Victoria, how modern populations really do have a surprising amount of DNA in common with Neanderthals and how a few participants in the BritainsDNA project have been surprised to find they have recent, probably 18th century African ancestors, but largely he explains the large scale movements of ordinary people, suggests a tie-in between the genetic evidence and the rise of farming in western Europe and emphasises the most the astonishingly close blood relationships of humanity in it's long and oddly bottle-necked expansion from Africa.

He says they are close to cautiously attempting to differentiate a "Pictish" population residue from the standard British population, which obviously will be of great interest to many of us, and confirms that they still can't differentiate between Scandinavian ancestry which might have arrived (as it did in some concentrations like Dublin, The Wirral and the Isles) during what people call Viking times from the debatable proportion of the "Norman" elite who were installed by William the Conqueror who actually had Scandinavian origins themselves (as opposed to those genetically indistinguishable from the "Saxons" "Welsh" and "Scots" that they ruled).

He still had to admit that despite his professional understanding of the melting pot nature of human and especially British ancestry, he still felt some chagrin that despite being a proud Scot, with a good Borders name and historic genealogy, his prehistoric ancestors were Germanic, what most people would called "Saxon".