Not just Who and When, but Where.

If you don’t like having your assumptions challenged, then don’t get into family history… or seriously study any history, full stop. I thought I had a reasonable idea about where my ancestors came from. 50% or more mainland Britain, 25% western Europe, 20% Scandinavian, and a bit left over for trace elements such as my one set of Irish GGG Grandparents. The Scandinavian bit would be a left over from the Vikings who ran north-east Scotland as an Earldom until the 12^th Century. I liked that idea. Then I got a DNA test to round out the picture I though I already knew the dimensions of.

First of all, I am, for the purposes of this test, 100% European (no real surprise there…) but then things started to get interesting:

Ireland 39%
Great Britain 20%
Europe West 17%
Iberian Peninsula 12%
Europe East 6%
Scandinavia 4%
Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
Italy/Greece 1%

Any thing under 6% falls within the range of statistical error…  Bye bye Viking bastards! … 12% Iberian Peninsula? (That’s Spain and Portugal) There is something going on here I have yet to get my head around, and I can’t wait to discover what..

Articles about places.

• Aberdeen

  The granite city of Scotland.

• Bio: Henry Nickolls

  The Master of Corra Linn On, or just before 7 December 1837, Henry Nickolls, master of the Corra Linn estate on the Patterson Plains, was punched in the head by a newly-assigned employee and warned by him that “there was more where that came from”. Which is something of an inversion of the typical master / …

• Leetown to Auchterarder

  When certain members of the Dyson clan chose to deny their Lancashire heritage of robbery and mayhem, they liked to pretend their antecedents came from Scotland (As you do.) However, some of them truly did: These were the Brough family from Perthshire, Scotland.

• Pavement Archaeology

  On the pavements of around where I live in a southern suburb of Perth in Western Australia, are many concrete slabs of various shapes, sizes, and marked with various esoteric designs. Show me anything with two or more variations on a basic pattern of anything and I’m going to want to understand why, or more …

• Rename Canning Bridge

  The unspeakable horror of Canning Bridge

• Stones in Cumberland

  I visit Cardurnock, Harby Brow and Carlisle in Cumbria.

• The point of no return.

  This was one panorama you did not want to experience on your visit to Van Diemen’s Land — back when it was Van Diemen’s Land. A small speck of terror amid the rolling canopy of green. Fire has cleansed it of much of it’s horror, so now it is Tasmania’s number one tourist destination once again for …

• Thurso

  The northernmost town on the the British mainland.