I grew up just outside of Stirling, the longtime home of Scotland’s royal family before they shut-up-shop and took up a more lucrative gig in London. Its castle stands in the shadow of the Ochil Hills and the more distant Highland peaks. Bannockburn, Stirling Bridge, the Wallace monument and many other pivotal Scottish moments happened within earshot; even the early Scottish colony of Nova Scotia was ‘founded’ by the 1st Earl at the castle across the road from my elementary school.
Bannockburn an’ a that
When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me that Robert the Bruce was our ancestor—a story I dismissed outright. It took decades, supported by DNA evidence and parish records tracing several family lines, to confirm this claim. Sadly, Granny Yardley passed away when I was just 10, but I managed to verify the family story in time to share it with an aunt who was dying of cancer. To clarify—lest anyone think I harbor delusions of grandeur—thousands of Scots and numerous others around the world likely share similar ancestral links. Regardless, I strongly adhere to the philosophy of Robert Burns, emphasizing the value of humility and common kinship:
Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,He’s but a coof for a’ that:For a’ that, an’ a’ that, His ribband, star, an’ a’ that: The man o’ independent mind, He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.
A Man’s a Man for A’ That Robert Burns, 1795
There’s much controversy over whether DNA can be used against us. I decided to take the tests because I wanted to get something personally meaningful out of it before a likely future where it’s primarily a transactional security and health function of a privacy free life.
The beauty of DNA is that when it’s matched with parish records it shows how our ancestors climbed up, fell down and repeatedly crawled back onto life’s ladder. In short it’s a beautiful reminder of the human spirit; like Robert the Bruce’s spider we refuse to give up even if our individual lot in life is to suffer so our children do not. People are people and DNA proves opportunity, not birth-right, should govern us all.
In 2015, The People of the British Isles (PoBI) project from Oxford University published the world’s first subregional breakdown of ancestry based on genetic clusters of rural populations tested because all 4 of their great-grandparents were from the same area. This was followed up by the Irish DNA Atlas in 2017. The results are a snapshot of British and Irish genetics before the 19th Century and modern mass migration.
The vast majority of people on the islands of Britain and Ireland did not move around until at least 200 years ago, therefore your localised DNA is basically a map to where your ancestors lived before then.
Anyone with deep ancestry in Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales can probably learn where their ancestors lived in the ancient kingdoms that existed in the 6th century. These Kingdoms were the legacy of the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Does Locational DNA match the historical record? The answer is an emphatic yes
British company LivingDNA is the first to use the new data to provide a regional breakdown of local ancestry in 21 regions of the UK. They have still to include the newer information from the Irish DNA Atlas. Experience has taught me that Ancestry and 23andMe are currently the best places for locational data in Ireland.
So let’s see how the locational data compares to the records and ancient kingdoms and regions.
As you can see DNA can be a game changer, particularly for people who don’t know their ancestry or can’t trace records. Our internal DNA hard-drives can carry around 120 ancestors – 60 from each parent – so with each passing generation our earliest genetically traceable ancestors fade away. As a result the generations alive today are the last who will be able to confidentially use autosomal DNA to trace relatives before the age of discovery and the huge amount of global migration that followed.
Currently DNA is useless for tracing most – but not all – individual ancestors without known family trees; for instance my 5-to-7 percent Irish DNA can’t help me trace Irish ancestors before the late 1700s because records were destroyed during the Irish civil war.
The one thing all of us can trace even without records is our ancient DNA, long before surnames were even a thing. In recent years DNA extracted from hundreds of remains- thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of years old- proved modern people still carry the signatures of our most ancient ancestors. Only recently (2018) were the bones of a first generation Neanderthal/human child found in a cave in Europe. Until the early 21st century no-one knew the two populations bred let alone that most people indigineous to Europe or Asia had the proof in their DNA. Unlike humans and almost all other Homines, Neanderthals didn’t evolve in Africa; they evolved in Europe and settled much later in the Middle East, and parts of Western Asia.
“Neanderthals are not totally extinct. In some of us they live on, a little bit.”
Svante Pääbo, Director, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Neanderthals thrived in Europe for several hundred thousand years before modern humans arrived. The evidence so far suggests a relatively small wave of early Homo sapiens arrived around 70,000 years ago. Current evidence suggests Neanderthals died out about 40 thousand years after the earliest Homo sapiens arrived. The descendants of the two groups are the Early Hunter Gatherers (formerly known as Cro-Magnon). They were followed about 9 thousands years ago by the Early Farmers from Anatolia in present-day Turkey and about 6 thousand years after that the Metal Age horsemen from the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppes.
All of the above can be achieved with a standard autosomal dna test. But if you want to get into the weeds of DNA research you’ll need to get a male in your family to have a Y-DNA test.
What can Y-DNA tell me?
I’m not going to get into the details of what a Y-DNA test is other than to say it traces back your fatherline thousands of years; so not just your surname tree, but the individual branch.
If you want to do serious Y-DNA research, FamilyTreeDNA is the best place for trustworthy groups based on that.
Another interesting thing that can be achieved with DNA involves something called SNPs (pronounced “snips”); we each have millions of them. Occasionally they mutate creating unique genetic markers which are the biological postcode or zip code for male descendants. Thousands of males have these mutations but not everyone’s ancient ancestors have their DNA extracted by scientists.
So to the story that my family are related to The Bruce – and his early Stewart king descendants – DNA appears to confirm it via a known mutation in the Stewart Y-DNA.
The lesson from all the above is that DNA can tell you a lot even if you don’t know much. And if you do have family stories like me, then they can be confirmed by DNA. The moral of the story is do not dismiss your elders, they are living family history books. Listen and record everything they say; in our historically disconnected times they often know way more than we do. As for the Bruce and all those who seek to lead, I think the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 set the right tone.
If this prince [Robert the Bruce] shall leave those principles which he hath so nobly pursued, we will immediately endeavor to expel him as our enemy, and as the subverter of both his own and our rights, and will choose another king who will defend our liberties.
Indeed. A man’s a man for a that. And a woman.