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I agree that Skien certainly 'became' a commercial center.? However, as your article reference notes, until 1979 it was believed that it was not founded until the 1300s when it became a market town.? Since then archeology found that it's history did go back to the Viking age (800s) when it was a meeting place for farmers inland.

I don't see anything to suggest that Skien was of any significant size in terms of population in the 800s.? Some estimates have the total population of Norway as between 100,000 and 150,000 at the start of the Viking age.? A meeting place for farmers in rural Norway does not suggest it seeing a lot of travellers from other countries.? Norway was pretty isolated until they revolutionized their boats and Vikings became a dominant force.? The fact we know so little of Norway before the Viking age attests to that.? This would give 700 years of isolation (from 86 CE for R-S5245 clades) till a few years before 793 CE when Lindisfarne was attacked.? No doubt that the area rapidly expanded after that as Halfdan the Black and the kings of Dublin are said to have come Vestfold.? Wealth would have been now pouring into the area.

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For what it's worth, the Kincaid's nearest neighbour and holder of some Kincaid lands were the Galbraiths.? They are a sub R-Z159 clade (Z159>S8368>FGC15450>FGC15439>FGC15440).? As some of you may know from Raymond Wing's work, R-Z159 sub clades appear in a few ancient dna samples of Viking origin.? A most interesting thing about the Galbraiths is that they also have a huge gap in their history with 27 snps between them and their nearest branch.? Again, rightly or wrongly, this to me suggests isolation.

Furthermore, the Kincaid's other closest ancestor (flanking them on the north and south) were the Stirlings of Glorat and Cadder (the former deriving from the latter).? Their dna results are inconclusive as they have several competing haplogroups and no lines with any connection to the Scottish lands.? However, paper research has long ago shown they descend from one Thoraldus of Cadder in the 12th century.

The Kincaids themselves derive their coat of arms from a branch of the Crawfords who I have shown were in the adjacent lands of Baldoran since the late 1300s ().? Based on the Ragman Rolls one suspects they were there from at least the late 1200s.? The Crawfords were long claimed to descend from Thorlongus of Ednam in Roxburgshire.? They are I-A1612 which is an I-M253 clade.

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Hi all,

There's a lot here to unpack, so let me start from the beginning:

FTDNA's TMRCAs are likely to be significantly better than what's currently on the Big Tree. There are several reasons for this to do with larger numbers of kits, utilising new TMRCA calculation methods (including some of mine), being kept up-to-date and using additional data from STRs. The split of R-FGC12993 can therefore be dated to the first few centuries AD, while R-A321 is late medieval (probably 14th or 15th century).

>First of all, I assume that the gap and lack of other associated surnames suggest isolation. ?Is this a valid assumption?

Long blocks of unbroken SNPs can arise from several different causes. Blocks are broken only when a population is either sufficiently large, or sufficiently well tested, to show up in commercial databases like FTDNA's. Long blocks can therefore either indicate a population whose other branches have died out (or nearly died out), or a population that only exists in regions that are not well-tested. The further we go back in time, the more likely it is for branches to have died out (the Galton-Watson process), while haplogroups splitting closer to the present will be more likely to remain in the same place as their origin.

For surname-era haplogroups, this can also extend to the fraction of the family moving out of Europe (Europeans don't test as much), socio-economic factors within the family itself (which dictate whether or not the family tests), or an historic change in reproductive success: it is true that richer people had more sons surviving to reproductive age, but this is only a weak correlation, so I wouldn't necessarily link it to the events of 1424.

Instead, I would invoke the alternatives. For example, we would normally expect that long branches like this did not form in the British Isles, and only split once they arrived here. We see a lot of R-U106 haplogroups in the British Isles that date to the period between the post-Roman Germanic migrations and shortly a couple of centruies after the Norman conquest. (Some day I should make an updated graph of these.) So we might use this long block as weak evidence that the ancestors of R-A321 only arrived in the British Isles at some point in the few centuries preceding its formation. This is, as I say, weak evidence - especially if we invoke a Scandinavian origin, as Scandinavia is also well tested.

If we look at the Time Tree for R-FGC12993, we can see a lot of activity with a typical European pattern before 1000 AD, and a lot of activity in the British Isles after 1400 AD. Allowing for uncertainties in the TMRCAs, this probably indicates a generally European population before the Viking Age, and a wholesale migration to the British Isles before 1400 AD. Such generalisations across whole haplogroups are just that: general. They may not apply to R-A321 or any other specific sub-clade. But they do also give weak evidence that a wholesale migration of R-FGC12993 occurred around or shortly before 1400 AD. We know the Kincaids have been there since 1238, but it appears they and their immediate ancestors and cousins didn't flourish during the surrounding centuries.

None of this says as much as I'd like about the gap between R-FGC12993 and R-A321, but that's the nature of such gaps. This gap is sufficiently close to the present that it's likely to be filled in with future testing. Currently, we only have one test for every 800 men in the British Isles, and one for every 1200 men in Norway and Sweden. Roughly speaking, that means we respectively sample only about 1% and 0.6% of the lines that existed in 1700. Everywhere else the situation is worse. So there is definitely mileage in future testing. This remains our best opportunity for progress here.

Cheers,

Iain.

Thank you Dr. Iain McDonald for your input.? Just to be clear there are a couple of points perhaps misunderstood that I want to be clear about.

1) Kincaids emerge in Scottish records in 1425.? The year 1238 is the year the name of the lands of Kincaid appear and they were granted to a Galbraith.? Kincaids and Galbraiths are not the same family dna wise.
2) Ftda has R-FGC12993 breaking off about 86 CE and R-A321 breaking off about 311 CE.
3) No modern Kincaid lines go back before the 1420s in terms of MRCA.
4) Only Kincaids have R-A321 and ftdna states they also have the following snps between them and R-FGC12993 that nobody else has: A324, FGC17173, FGC17175, FGC17176, FGC17177, FT108610, FT108671, FT108701, FT108780, FT108969, FT109170, FT109451, FT199952, FT199953, FT199954, FTB33546.? Thats 16 additional snps or 1328 years (83x16) of potential genetic branching unaccounted for so far.

I understand that about 20% of the current population of Norway are immigrant families.? That will impact discovery of medieval Norwegian lines.? I was also thinking that a current test represents several related males in a current population.? My surname is rare here, but my haplogroup would be the same as 40 to 50 other males here now.? Some patriarchs have a huge number (easily 10x) of current males representing them today.? So my thinking was that even though we may have tests for 1 in 1200 male Norweigans one particular test may represent a significant part of the existing male population - thus reducing the number of 'new' haplogroups to emerge.

Thanks again for your input.

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Hi all,

> Kincaids emerge in Scottish records in 1425. / Ftda has R-FGC12993 breaking off about 86 CE and R-A321 breaking off about 311 CE.

These are the formation dates of each haplogroup, but it's more normal to talk about the TMRCAs. In terms of understanding origins, you should be looking at the geographical distribution of a haplogroup and its TMRCA together to understand where its founder lived. To trace it back where its founder came from, you should be looking at the same combination but for the parent haplogroup. When a single date is given, it normally refers to the TMRCA.

> Only Kincaids have R-A321 / Thats 16 additional snps or 1328 years (83x16) of potential genetic branching unaccounted for so far.

The number of years a given number of SNPs corresponds to is very, very uncertain: 16 SNPs count account for anywhere between about 800 and 2300 years, and even then 5% of haplogroups will be outside this range. We can be more precise by considering the ages of the brother haplogroups and TMRCAs from STRs, which is why Discover's dates give a more precise estimate. R-FGC12993's TMRCA cannot be dated more precisely than the first few centuries AD, while R-A321 probably dates to the 1300s or 1400s.

Since this date is so close to 1425, it may be possible to constrain the TMRCA of R-A321 better by triangulating individual Kincaid family histories back to common ancestors.

> I understand that about 20% of the current population of Norway are immigrant families. That will impact discovery of medieval Norwegian lines.

Not significantly. These 20% of recent, self-reported immigrants will know they are immigrants, so will not list their origins as Norwegian and not be counted as ethnically Norwegian by population studies. The more significant problem is the unknown percentage of families who have emigrated to Norway in the previous 1000 years, but who don't know that their family isn't Norwegian this many centuries back.

> So my thinking was that even though we may have tests for 1 in 1200 male Norweigans one particular test may represent a significant part of the existing male population - thus reducing the number of 'new' haplogroups to emerge.

This is true: the older the haplogroups we consider, the greater the fraction we have tested. For example, we have tested only 1 in 16,000 of the haplogroups that exist worldwide today, but 100% of the haplogroups that existed a million years ago and still survive today (i.e., one).

It's an interesting question to consider how that fraction changes between these two extremes, but one that doesn't have a clear answer. We can set a limit if we consider the number of haplogroups found in a country at a certain date and the number of men alive in that country at the time. Very approximately, we have a Y-DNA test from descendants of one in 1-in-135 of the men living in Norway in 1700, so we must have sampled at least approximately 1-in-135 of the haplogroups that existed in 1700. However, only a fraction of these will have left descendants today (maybe a fifth). That would mean that we have sampled only about 1-in-27 of the still-existing Norwegian haplogroups from 1700, and maybe 1-in-10 of them 1000 years ago. These numbers are extremely rough. The ones with lots of descendants will be well-sampled, but there will be many smaller ones yet to be discovered.

> It is interesting to note that in the mid 14th century, aside from the Bishop of Glasgow, the Galbraiths and the Lennoxes, a good chunk of the land in Campsie, Baldernock and Strathblane parishes were held by families that appear to be all I-DF29 clades

I-DF29 accounts for approximately 7% of Scotland as a whole and is a 4500-year-old haplogroup, so this is probably only significant if they are much more closely related.

> Linda: Since there are so few testers from Germany, I believe his line has not tested but comes via the Danish line, which may have come via the Viking raids.

The relative bias (assuming 18th century MDKAs) in Denmark is about 3.4 times worse sampling than the British Isles. For Germany, it's about 6.2 times worse, so less than a factor of two. However, Germany has a population during that time that was 20 times the size of Denmark's so, statistically, this still favours Germany by a considerable margin - even if you can narrow down the parts of Germany you'd be interested in.

Cheers,

Iain.