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It's interesting that researchers have identified Y chromosome SNPs associated with so many important lineages in Irish history, but to my knowledge nobody has put forth a credible hypothesis about the Fitzgeralds, perhaps the single most powerful kindred of them all.
The Fitzgerald DNA project shows a few small clusters, but no convincing overall pattern. There are some interesting folks in haplogroups I and E. But there appear to be several, widely diverged subclades of I involved, and while their surname is derived from Norman French, the evidence for a Scandinavian origin is ambiguous. Their earliest securely documented ancestor was Walter Fitz Other, whose family may have been among those very few Normans whose presence in England preceded the Conquest. The name Otho makes it sound as if Walter's father could have been a Saxon, and perhaps this family only culturally assimilated to the Norman elites.
The particular subclade of E that these individuals seem to belong to might be shared by a fellow named Barry, as you'd expect. But the wider problem is that it seems to be far better represented among the Roche family of Munster, whose origins supposedly lay in the Low Countries and have nothing at all to do with the historical Fitzgerald dynasty. I would be really surprised if that signature turned out to represent the core stock of the FitzGeralds.
Contemporary records show an enormous number of landed families named Fitzgerald in the Medieval and Early Modern eras. So the lack of a clear modal signature seems really weird to me. Has one actually been identified somewhere else but I just haven't seen it? This reminds me of the case of the Dillon family who, despite a similarly enormous volume of historic cadet branches, present a bewildering variety of Y chromosome signatures.
The Fitzgerald DNA project shows a few small clusters, but no convincing overall pattern. There are some interesting folks in haplogroups I and E. But there appear to be several, widely diverged subclades of I involved, and while their surname is derived from Norman French, the evidence for a Scandinavian origin is ambiguous. Their earliest securely documented ancestor was Walter Fitz Other, whose family may have been among those very few Normans whose presence in England preceded the Conquest. The name Otho makes it sound as if Walter's father could have been a Saxon, and perhaps this family only culturally assimilated to the Norman elites.
The particular subclade of E that these individuals seem to belong to might be shared by a fellow named Barry, as you'd expect. But the wider problem is that it seems to be far better represented among the Roche family of Munster, whose origins supposedly lay in the Low Countries and have nothing at all to do with the historical Fitzgerald dynasty. I would be really surprised if that signature turned out to represent the core stock of the FitzGeralds.
Contemporary records show an enormous number of landed families named Fitzgerald in the Medieval and Early Modern eras. So the lack of a clear modal signature seems really weird to me. Has one actually been identified somewhere else but I just haven't seen it? This reminds me of the case of the Dillon family who, despite a similarly enormous volume of historic cadet branches, present a bewildering variety of Y chromosome signatures.
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