From: rail@greywall.demon.co.uk   
      
   On 21/04/2019 17:09, Ian Goddard wrote:   
   > On 20/04/19 17:24, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:   
   >> With possible exception of people who've immigrated from Africa or   
   >> Asia in the last generation or so we're all descended from William the   
   >> Conqueror.   
   >   
   > This keeps coming up from time to time.  There seems to be an assumption   
   > that because we have 1024, 2048 etc ancestors in a given generation this   
   > means 1024, 2048 or whatever different people and that at some point   
   > this proliferating number of different people meets the proliferating   
   > number of descendants of William the Conqueror (or Edward III, another   
   > popular alleged ancestor).   
   >   
   > The problem with this is that the assumption doesn't hold up.  A good   
   > many of the same surnames in both may parents' families crop up again   
   > and again.  What's more, although they came from villages only a few   
   > miles apart there isn't much overlap between them.  On my father's side   
   > there are better medieval records and I can find a couple of surnames   
   > going back into the late C13th; they derive from local place names.   
   >   
   > Where there are comers-in to the area they're largely from relatively   
   > local areas and seem to be from the same sort of background.  We seem to   
   > be largely looking at limited interchange between areas with a medieval   
   > populations of a few hundred in various locations within a few tens of   
   > miles..  The largest geographical moves seem to be those where a   
   > medieval magnate was able to transplant a tenant or servant.   
   >   
   > This pattern seems to account for Pennine communities prior to the   
   > Industrial Revolution which finally brought in former Ag Labs.  There   
   > simply isn't the large fan out of ancestors that the William I   
   > hypothesis requires.   
   >   
   > OTOH those claiming descent from this or that royal or aristocratic line   
   > usually seem to be able to count several lines of descent.  That should   
   > be a warning: William's descendants married other descendants - the   
   > fan-out of descendants wasn't a large as required.   
   >   
   > The one DNA result which is of some significance here is the Nature   
   > paper of a few years ago.  What that showed was what I call the big red   
   > splodge where one of their groups (colour-coded red) covered most of   
   > lowland England.  The West country, the Pennines, Wales and Scotland   
   > fell into a number of much more local, distinct groups.  It seems to   
   > point to relatively free movement within the splodge but less soe   
   > elsewhere so that the William I hypothesis probably looks reasonable to   
   > the splodgians and quite ridiculous to the rest of us.   
   >   
      
   Have you taken the 14th century into account?   
      
      
   --   
   Graeme Wall   
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