Viking FGC23343

[benowicz]

So this possible connection between the Doreys and the de Forz family is just a coincidence. That Testa de Nevil entry showing a Geoffrey "Dory" at Holland, Lincolnshire in the Honour of Albmemarle is actually referring to one Geoffrey D'Oyry, son of Fulk D'Oyry, whose family were definitely from eastern France and not Poitou. They were long time adherents of the family of the wife of the first William de Forz, Awise.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Vl...Aumale&f=false

Not entirely unexpected, since the donor's family have only known a history in the Channel Islands, but a return to the start. Maybe an undocumented Gascon emigrant to the opposite shore of England, where the name is not uncommon, or maybe really part of the colonization of western Normandy from Ireland and Scotland after all, as hypothesized at the beginning of this whole process. Or maybe an NPE with some family like Jamouneau, who are supposed to have been Huguenot refugees of the 18th century from Poitou; the Doreys proper have been in the Islands since the 1500s at least.

https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Jamouneau

It would be nice to know whether Henderson and Dorey share any SNPS under FGC23343.

To my knowledge, that Dorey fellow from the old YSearch database had never been tested for FGC23343, so his apparent "near match" to some members of the FGC28369 could be an extreme example of STR convergence. Certainly there is some level of convergence going on, given the observed level of matching among the various members of the FGC28369 group--it's just a question of how extreme it is. The relationship could be as near as 1000 A.D.

Anyhow, there is one reference to a Geoffrey Dory in the Testa de Neville, at Holland, Lincolnshire, within the honour of Albemarle.

https://archive.org/details/liberfeo...1grea/page/548

The Testa was compiled in 1302 based on records of nearly 100 years earlier, when the de Forz family from Oleron, France that I mentioned earlier were earls of Albemarle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willia...l_of_Albemarle

Also mentioned in that entry from the Testa were the de Gresley/de Grelley family of Lancashire, who shared an interest in Ecclestone, Lancashire with the Garnet family at this same time (i.e., Henry III).

http://www.shissem.com/Hissem_Gernets_of_Halton.html

For a long time now the Dorey name has been primarily found in the Channel Islands and across the way in Dorsetshire, and there probably is no particular reason to believe that either of those branches relate to this Lincolnshire family. But it is interesting, may be worth noting as a place to begin future research. The de Gresleys were from Avranches on the Cotentin peninsula, as were the d'Aubignys with whom the Garnets allied themselves early on, so maybe that will become significant vis-a-vis the earliest recorded Doreys at Etourville in Manche.

[Edgeworth]

Benowicz! Thank you for all of your work unraveling the mysteries of FGC28369 and FGC23343. I too have been working on this mystery for some time, albeit from an Edgeworth-centric perspective. I'd like to send you a copy of my book, Domesday DNA, to see if you find some useful nuggets to help you discover the truth about FGC28369.

[benowicz]

Thank you kindly! I've just responded via email. Hopefully 2020 will be a year of answers for this clade!

[benowicz]

BigY700 results came in today for a kit I manage. Undifferentiated FGC23343. Given the level of uncertainty surrounding the donor's pedigree, I don't figure I have any useful observations that might shed any light on the clade's origins at this time.

But I did notice that the Big Tree had incorrectly assigned several SNPs to the wrong block. I guess that's probably due to some donors not updating for new SNPs, resulting in apparent--but not actual--mismatches that were consistently assigned to downstream blocks. Anyhow, this does effect my opinion of the age of FGC23343--TMRCA is probably around 2,000 years ago, rather than the 2,500 currently reported by the Big Tree.

I see that there were 3 new FGC23343+ donors since my last post, which is encouraging. Here's to hoping that this pace continues.

It would be nice to know something about these new folks' pedigrees, or at least their surnames, since they could tell us something about the origins of BY97678 and FGC28383. Unfortunately, BigY700 doesn't give me visibility to that information, so it kind of feels like an opportunity wasted.

One interesting thing, though, that I can infer from the national distribution among these branches--the Shetland folks seem slightly more closely related to the Spanish donors--like maybe 250, 300 years. It may not mean much, but it did encourage me to revisit the general phenomenon of "Armada" legends of family origins in Shetland and Orkney. It still feels unlikely to me, given the management of the Earl of Orkney's estates from the southern end of the mainland, where the donors ancestors lived, but I was reminded that the fates of only 27 of the nearly 300 ships in the Armada are known--leaving the possibility open that one of the many small craft in the fleet landed unnoticed on Shetland, creating an opening for settlement.

I think I may have posted this article before, but I didn't pay as much attention before to the specificity with which the author deals with certain Armada legends, like the 'Dons of Westeray', where he lists some surnames traditionally attributed to Armada descendants. Unfortunate, the surname of the Shetland donor is not among them.

https://www.ssns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Anderson_1988_Vol_25_pp_42_57.pdf

There is also a new block above FGC28370--FGC28383. It would be nice to know something of this new fellows origins, to see if that puts the whole Garnett group's origins in better context.

Finally, there is an undifferentiated FGC23343 claiming British origins (not my family). I'd love to know whether there's any chance of Huguenot origins there.

[woolfie]

I'm from Orkney and familiar with some of the Armada stories. The surname Thallian is reckoned to have transformed into the modern Velzian but the surname is mentioned in Orkney records before the time of the Armada. A lot of the Velzians do have a darker tint to their skin however and were from the Yesnaby area so there could be some truth in it. There's also a wooden chest in Skaill house that they call the 'armada chest' as it was supposed to have washed up from the Spanish Armada.

[benowicz]

Thanks. That article mentions similar stories--one Dunrossness family supposedly received a Spanish sword as a gift from a dying sailor. That's the parish where the DNA donor's family is from, but no mention of anyone staying to settle. Seems to me, someone who's admittedly never been there, that a Spaniard would stick out like a sore thumb, just because the population is so small that the news would spread like wildfire, but the contemporary documentary records show the sailors maintaining quarantine until repatriation in an orderly manner. Plus, I think the Earl of Orkney's Shetland estates were concentrated there, so it (at that time) was maybe not the single most remote part of the islands.

[woolfie]

You're absolutely right, it would've been news all over Shetland and I'm sure the Spaniards would've been met with trepidation and probably made to quarantine indeed.
Dunrossness is to the south end of the mainland of Shetland (where the airport is now) and would've probably been the first place the Spaniards made landfall.
It isn't densely populated and I doubt if it ever has been. The main towns in Shetland are Lerwick and Scalloway (pronounced locally as Lerrick and Scallowa') and they are a lot further north.
The Earl would've had the land rented out to tenant farmers so wouldn't have been around there much himself, if at all.

[woolfie]

There's mention of Shetland in this site (mostly Orkney though).

http://www.orkneybalfours.com/HTM/spanish.htm

[benowicz]

You're absolutely right, it would've been news all over Shetland and I'm sure the Spaniards would've been met with trepidation and probably made to quarantine indeed.
Dunrossness is to the south end of the mainland of Shetland (where the airport is now) and would've probably been the first place the Spaniards made landfall.
It isn't densely populated and I doubt if it ever has been. The main towns in Shetland are Lerwick and Scalloway (pronounced locally as Lerrick and Scallowa') and they are a lot further north.
The Earl would've had the land rented out to tenant farmers so wouldn't have been around there much himself, if at all.

Thanks for that detail. The reports described by Anderson show officials meeting with the Spaniards at the Earl's estate in the south of the island before continuing on with them to Fife for repatriation proceedings. So I assumed that this was his caput, but I guess that isn't the case. An important detail. I still have the impression of a lot of the Earl's men escorting them during their stay around Dunrossness, but if so they were probably strangers to the place themselves, arrived only for the occasion.

[benowicz]

Maybe a new line of inquiry into the origins of the Vincents.

. . .There is a curious editor's note in the a Massachusetts Historical Society publication that may suggest that there was a known NPE in the line of the Great Smeaton Vincents . . .

https://books.google.com/books?id=jnoFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=history+Braithwell+Yorkshire+Vincent&source=bl&ots=ZA9NXxO-M1&sig=ceNIqA2VoMN79_l03RiBpJ6-fU0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiNtqm1147dAhUh6YMKHZpEAik4ChDoATABegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=history%20Braithwell%20Yorkshire%20Vincent&f=false

Page 88 describes a formal grant of arms to a member of the Braithwell branch of the Vincent family. It directly cites the curious fact that the arms he was granted do NOT match those of the established Braithwell family (i.e., argent two bars gules, a canton of the 2nd charged with a trefoil of the first). Rather, they are supposed to be those of a Coleby family. . .

I settled some of these questions to my satisfaction when I researched the attached paper, and others raised in the paper have since also been settled--the Vincents belong to an entirely different subclade of FGC23343 than the FGC28370 group, and their common ancestor most likely lived as far ago as 250 A.D. Coincidentally, the Colebys whose arms were later granted to a branch of the Great Smeaton Vincents were indeed successors to some of the Lincolnshire estates of the FitzNigel family of Halton, Lancashire, but the Vincents' connection to them seems to be by marriage, and the FGC28370 group don't seem to have any direct connection to FitzNigel at all.

But there is one incredibly important point that I don't think I made very clear: The Vincents of Great Smeaton in Richmondshire appear to be of completely different stock of the much more prominent family of Barnacke, Northamptonshire, despite their later intermarriage. The earliest contemporary record I could find of any of the Richmondshire Vincents was of the William Vincent who married Margaret Clervaux (as his 2nd wife), and who died in 1450.

There have been many efforts to take the line of the Richmondshire Vincents back further, but none of the information I've seen to date seems convincing. In all of these internet pedigrees, I can't find so much as a reference to the earlier generations from any of the standard genealogical authorities, much less quotation from a contemporary document. Although the aforementioned William Vincent's will mentioned an interest in land at Barningham, from what I can tell the attempts to make the Vincents a branch of the de Barninghams appear to be based on nothing more than a single instance of the forename Vincent among the de Barningham family. British History Online's account of the manor of Barningham makes no mention of the Vincent family, so their holdings there must not have been significant. Indeed, the heraldry of the two families is completely different.

https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/north/vol1/pp39-42

But recently I noticed something that may eventually point to the origin of the Richmondshire Vincents--their coat of arms is IDENTICAL to those borne by a family named Lancaster, also living in Richmondshire.

http://users.skynet.be/lancaster/Lancaster%20Heraldry/Lancaster%20Heraldry.html

This excellent paper by Andrew Lancaster, who I believe is a co-administrator of the Lancaster DNA project, speculates that there may be strong circumstantial evidence linking the Richmondshire Lancasters to the main line in Kendal through branches located at Hartsop, Sockbridge and Howgill.

https://fmg.ac/publications/journal/volume-2/category/49-fnd-2-4

The connection to the Vincents may be a bit complicated by the fact that what currently appears to me to be the genetic signature of the main stock of the Lancaster family belongs to an entirely different haplogroup: E-M35.

https://www.familytreedna.com/public/Lancaster?iframe=yresults

So perhaps once again the Richmondshire Vincents had adopted the coat of arms of a family to whom they were connected only by marriage or other alliance.

However, that might still be useful information. It may be circumstantial evidence that the Vincents came to Richmondshire along with the Lancasters from the Kendal district of Westmoreland, when John, the brother of King Henry V, became earl of both Kendal AND Richmond in 1414. And perhaps the Vincents were, like the FG28370 de Garnets, brought to England from South Western France by Roger the Poitevin Montgomery after the Conquest. There are some gaps in the early records for the Kendal area, but it is generally believed that Roger held much of this area before his forfeiture in 1102.

And who knows? The Vincents may equally have come to England with the de Lancasters themselves. Their earliest known ancestor was a fellow named Gilbert Fitz Reinfrid. Nothing is known of his origins, but the first records of the de Lancasters in England date to the reign of Henry II--whose queen was Eleanor of Aquitaine. FT372222 probably originated there.

But again, this is all speculative. Unless there has been a major new development I know nothing about, there is no direct evidence linking the FT372222+ Vincent families to any of the historical families of England. Still stuck in colonial Virginia.

[benowicz]

Yet another family in the Kendal neighborhood sharing the identical coat of arms of the Vincents of Richmondshire is the Preston family of Preston Richard and Preston Patrick. The Prestons were definitely owned by Roger the Poitevin de Montgomery during the Domesday survey. So this explanation acquires a documentary plausibility.

http://users.skynet.be/lancaster/Lancaster%20Heraldry/Lancaster%20Heraldry.html

https://opendomesday.org/place/SD5384/preston-richard/

[benowicz]

So my earlier hypothesis that future British FGC23343 would be Huguenot seems to take a hit with the latest observation--another member of subclade FT372222, named Saddington. Nothing that I see remotely suggestive of a Huguenot origin.

https://www.familytreedna.com/public...frame=yresults

All pretty closely related per their STR profiles, and all huddled around the south Leicestershire village of Saddington, as seems always to have been the case, per this excellent write-up by the administrator of the Saddington project, Rowan Tanner.

http://one-name.org/name_profile/saddington/

He wrote a pretty cool blog dedicated to the name, too, but mostly focused on collecting recent documentary evidence rather than an exploration of their earliest origins.

http://saddington.blogspot.com/

I can't find too many references to the name before 1600, so it's not exactly like the case with the Edgeworth, Gerard and Garnetts of FGC28369. However, it is a name with a history. The most famous person of the name, Robert de Saddington, was Chancellor to King Edward III in the 1340s. His line quite definitely daughtered out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sadington

It seems, though, that Robert's was not likely the sole remaining branch of the original stock of the name in the 1300s. A generation earlier, a number of family members were members of the household of Queen Isabella--the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that Robert's father, John was among them, but two other academic sources also list a Nicholas and a Richard de Saddington as members of the queen's household in the year 1311-12. Richard and possibly two distinct Roger de Saddingtons appear in charters concerning nearby Mowsley, Leicestershire in the 1270s or 1280s.

The village of Saddington seems to have left the hands of the family quite early. By the late 1200s it had been given by the King to one Almaric de St. Armand, apparently no relation.

Although I can't draw a documentary line of continuity to any branch of today's Saddington's, the earliest use of the surname seems to belong to a branch of the de Rollos family from Roullours in western Normandy.

https://books.google.com/books?id=xH...los%22&f=false

The Saddingtons would be only extremely remotely related to any of the other FGC23343+ folks identified to date (i.e., FT372222 founded maybe around 300 A.D.). But it's still interesting that, like the Gerards and the Norman Doreys, they were vassals of the earls of Chester. And like the also FT372222+ Vincent family, there was a connection to the Richmond area of Yorkshire.

[benowicz]

I think I closed out the "Neel de Saint Sauver" inquiry a long time ago, but it is still curious that one of the Norman fiefs of the de Rollos was at La Boutiere--immediately adjacent to La Roche in the district of La Colombe, where the Saint Sauver family had one of their principle fortresses. Map on page 18 of the Eric Van Tourhoudt article.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ckI5XFb4WhoC&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=%22Naissance+de+la+Normandie%22+Musset+%22Saint-Sauveur%22&source=bl&ots=UzRajbFlqE&sig=sCk8Z1oD5D_op4nHzshpSHoxB6g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiFvZjI3qHZAhWul-AKHdQ-BIYQ6AEIOjAC#v=onepage&q=colombe&f=false

[benowicz]

. . . But there is one incredibly important point that I don't think I made very clear: The Vincents of Great Smeaton in Richmondshire appear to be of completely different stock of the much more prominent family of Barnacke, Northamptonshire, despite their later intermarriage. The earliest contemporary record I could find of any of the Richmondshire Vincents was of the William Vincent who married Margaret Clervaux (as his 2nd wife), and who died in 1450.

There have been many efforts to take the line of the Richmondshire Vincents back further, but none of the information I've seen to date seems convincing. . . .

I think this edition of the Baronetage linked below may be responsible for the misconception. A branch of the Barnack family did indeed inherit Great Smeaton in the 1600s--but only through marriage to an heiress of the distinct family that owned Great Smeaton in the 1400s. Agnatically, in the direct male line, the two Vincent families are completely distinct. This chronology of the Barnack family is completely incompatible with the original stock of Great Smeaton, beginning with William Vincent m. Margaret Clervaux and who died 1450.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ll...ord%22&f=false

https://books.google.com/books?id=X8...ton%22&f=false

. . . It may be circumstantial evidence that the Vincents came to Richmondshire along with the Lancasters from the Kendal district of Westmoreland, when John, the brother of King Henry V, became earl of both Kendal AND Richmond in 1414. . .

Well, that theory can be dismissed. The original stock of Great Smeaton definitely owned land at Barningham, and these documents put them there at least from 1380.

http://www.calmview.eu/SheffieldArch...d=JC%2F14%2F18

Interestingly, from the 1330s the Scrope family had an interest in Barningham, and the Coleby family whose coat of arms were later assumed by a branch of the Vincents of Great Smeaton track these Scropes pretty closely in their migration from Barton-on-Humber to Wensleydale, as outlined in that memorandum I wrote.

https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vc...h/vol1/pp39-42

Swinging back to the new kids on the block, the original stock of the de Saddingtons, who, like the Vincents, are FT372222, they were from the Cotentin peninsula in western Normandy (i.e., Roullours, La Boutiere). During the Domesday book, the original lands of BOTH the Colebys AND the Scropes were owned by the Fiz Nigel/Fitz Neel vicomtes of Saint Sauver in the Cotentin.

https://opendomesday.org/place/SE8919/coleby/

https://opendomesday.org/place/TA032...n-upon-humber/


So, despite the ultimate origin of the ancestral clade Z209 in the Basque country, maybe there was indeed a significant presence of FGC23343 in western Normandy before the Conquest? There is an interesting paper from 2016 by Kerrith Davies suggesting that at least some part of the original viking settlers of western Normandy belonged to the so-called Loire fleet who had a rivalry with the much better document band led by Hrolf the Ganger on the Seine. Maybe these FGC23343 people were local people recruited during a viking incursion in the south, and followed them north when they settled the Cotentin peninsula?

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:60...of_work=Thesis

Maybe. Something seems off. FGC23343 definitely has an origin in France or Spain, and not local to the UK. But it seems odd to me that so many should have apparent roots in western Normandy. And they're not particularly closely related--most recent common ancestor born maybe 300 A.D., maybe even further back, maybe 200 A.D. if you count the FGC28370 group, who could plausibly have contemporary documentary evidence for an origin much further south, in Poitou or La Marche. It would have to have been a pretty large group of recruits for so many distinct lineages to survive.

[benowicz]

. . . Something seems off. FGC23343 definitely has an origin in France or Spain, and not local to the UK. But it seems odd to me that so many should have apparent roots in western Normandy. And they're not particularly closely related--most recent common ancestor born maybe 300 A.D., maybe even further back, maybe 200 A.D. if you count the FGC28370 group, who could plausibly have contemporary documentary evidence for an origin much further south, in Poitou or La Marche. It would have to have been a pretty large group of recruits for so many distinct lineages to survive.

I co-administer the third FT372222 kit. Based on the info currently published for Vincent at Big Tree, our kit has a no-call on one of Vincent's private variants, suggesting to me that it's really positive, and therefore that my current estimates of TMRCA may be significantly longer than is actually the case. Still investigating this, but I've already encountered one SNP that was a false no-call across all the FGC23343 donors. A full examination of everyone's results could make the TMRCA for FT372222 significantly more recent.

I think this may be worth pursuing. Not only did the Coleby-Vincents inherit FitzNeel estates, but the de Roullours-de Saddingtons were definitely descended from the vicomtes du Cotentin. This feels like they should have a MRCA born much later than ~300 A.D.

https://books.google.com/books?id=5RkXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA593&lpg=PA593&dq=%22Richard+de+la+Haye-du-puits%22+%22Richard+de+Rollos%22&source=bl&ots=DKvxJb9qEd&sig=ACfU3U2lBiB03G6KKPPkFU8JmtpBVRGCkA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV0OWlgJLsAhUaXM0KHVgfCfoQ6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Richard%20de%20la%20Haye-du-puits%22%20%22Richard%20de%20Rollos%22&f=false

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turstin_Haldup

There is a huge disparity in the currently reported number of private variants among individual donors. I'm sure that some of that is normal, but clearly some of it is not. Based on my aging calculations, even if there were no further alterations to the tree, there is still an 11% chance that all the FT372222 people have a MRCA born 800 A.D. or more recently, instead of the ~300 A.D. currently estimated at the 50% confidence level.