From a Branch to a Twig

An earlier blog (28 January 2016) noted that patrilineal (direct male) descendants of Henry Tapscott, The Immigrant, likely all belonged to R-Z8, my haplogroup and a branch on the Y-Chromosone phylogenetic tree. Further testing now shows that my sublclade (a smaller branch, “twig”?) is R-S18890 (also known as R1b1a1a2a1a1c2b2a1b1a1a2b2). Going from the very large branch of M343 to the twig at S18890, we have M343 > L389 > P297 > M269 > L23 > L51 > U106 > Z381 > Z301 > L48 > Z9 > Z30 > Z2 > Z7 > Z8 > Z338 > Z11 > Z341 > Z12 > Z8175 > FGC12057 > S18890, where green indicates positive tests (my verified branches) and brown indicates presumed positive tests (my presumed branches). R-S18890 is probably the haplogroup for all patrilineal descendants of Henry the Immigrant.

A few days ago I received a letter from Annie Barnes, wife of Harvey Barnes, informing me that Harvey, a product of Cornwall, England, also has the haplogroup R-S18890. It is highly likely that Harvey and we Tapscotts have a common patrilineal ancestor, possibly before family names were used, explaining the two different names, “Barnes” and “Tapscott”. And since Harvey and we are known to have matches with Family Group 5 of the Family Tree DNA Bolling Project (http://www.bolling.net/family-group/5), members of that group presumably also share a common ancestor with us.

At that point, I would have stopped since my major interest is in relatively recent history and I am no expert in ancient genealogy. But, it turns out that Annie Barnes is much more knowledgeable than I am in that area. She has published a very informative posting on the migration patterns for Haplogroup R-S18890 and their progenitors (http://www.hibbitt.org.uk/dna/y-dna-barnes.html) and though the posting is for Harvey, it probably applies equally well for patrilineal descendants of Henry the Immigrant. Read it. It’s a great piece of writing.