by Bryan Sykes
Next I presented the results of the DNA tests from the other families, and, like the Trollopes, they were identical within each one. But did any share the distinctive Thynne chromosome? The time had come. It felt almost like an Oscar moment when the Academy Awards are announced. “And the winner is . . . George Long.” George Long, a gentleman about fifty years old, rose from his chair and came up to be photographed with his now-relative, Alexander, Lord Bath. Both men were descended from the same man, one of Lord Bath’s ancestors, although no one knows which one. Speaking entirely formally it could have been the other way around, but to me this was proof of aristocratic diffusion, from Longleat to Horningsham. But it was not overwhelming. The other families in the village did not have the Thynne Y chromosome, so had not sprung from the loins of Longleat. Attempting to compensate for any disappointment on both sides, I reminded the audience that, powerful though it no doubt is, genetics cannot detect unfruitful ancestral seductions.
7
The World’s Biggest
Surname Project
Edinburgh, Scotland, location of the Gathering of the Clans, 2009.
In the summer of 2009 a remarkable event occurred in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. On the greensward overlooked by the volcanic outcrop of Arthur’s Seat and next to Queen Elizabeth’s official Scottish residence, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the greatest gathering of the clans for more than two hundred years sprang into life. The gathering was the centerpiece of “Homecoming Scotland,” an event that ran from Burns Night, the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s most celebrated bard, Robert Burns, on January 25, to Saint Andrew’s Day, the national saint’s day, on November 30. Genealogy and family history was one of the five major themes of the homecoming, which, as the name suggests, was designed to attract people of Scottish ancestry to visit the land of their ancestors. “For every single Scot, there are thought to be at least five more overseas who can claim a Scottish ancestry,” ran the blurb.
The gathering attracted 47,000 people from all over the world, a large proportion coming from the United States. In the tented “Clan Village” that spread across Holyrood Park were representatives of 125 Scottish clans, whose chiefs had convened the previous day in the nearby Scottish Parliament to debate the role of the clans in today’s world. On the evening of July 25 some twenty thousand people lined the Royal Mile to watch a parade of eight thousand clan members with their pipe bands march up the ancient cobbled street from Holyroodhouse to Edinburgh Castle. It was a magnificent and stirring spectacle at the end of a brilliantly sunny day, one I will never forget. The Duke of Rothesay, the title that Prince Charles uses when he is in Scotland, reminded the throng when he opened the gathering that clan life had quieted down over recent years. “Thankfully, in 2009, the lives of clan chiefs and their clansmen, both in Scotland and abroad, are somewhat less blood-soaked and unhappy than those experienced by thousands of their ancestors.”
Out of Oxford term time, I spend a lot of my year in Scotland, drawn by the wild beauty I first encountered when researching Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, and it seems to me that a lot of what happened in Scotland is relevant to this portrait of the United States. First from a practical point of view, hundreds of thousands of Scots emigrated to the New World and so have a solid genealogical connection with Scotland. This is fused with the strong emotional bond that motivates tens of thousands of Americans to research their Scottish ancestors and compels many to visit.
Jane, from Texas, posted this comment on the gathering: “I was an American visitor with Scottish heritage who visited Scotland for the first time. I am now and forever ‘in love’ with Scotland and I can hardly wait to return ‘home’ and see more of your lovely country.” Of course it’s easy to post a comment on the Web, but Jane’s comments are both sincere and to the point. They are repeated over and over again in remarkably similar fashion, not just by émigré Scots but by people of all nations who have come to live in America. Like German and Russian Jews; like impoverished families from Ireland, Sweden, and Norway; like Chinese, Japanese, and all the multitudes from other countries that flooded into America in the nineteenth century, the Scots share a devotion for America but remain deeply rooted to their homeland. “America first, Scotland always,” is how one articulate farmer from Wisconsin summed it up. For the most part descendants of these European immigrants, in common with their counterparts from Asia, present no great general mysteries that require genetics for the unraveling. Russians came from Russia, the Irish came from Ireland. But where genetics has had an impact is in individual quests, solidifying the arcane, almost mystical sense of connection that people feel with their ancestors.
In Scotland the scaffolding for this connection is articulated in the clan system, which has its parallels in every society at some point in its evolution. As the Duke of Rothesay hinted in his speech to the assembled clansmen and women at the gathering, the history of Scottish clans is one of almost unrelenting and bloody wars between rivals. The clan was the unit of allegiance and protection, just as it was for American Indian tribes. And just like them, Scottish clans raided their neighbor’s land for cattle, treasure, and slaves. Just like Indian or African tribes, too, membership rules were flexible depending on the circumstances, and this is evident from the genetics, as we shall see. Scottish clans, like tribes, infuse their members with the fierce loyalty once required in battle, now fought out in the gentler climate of tartan design and the issue of coats of arms by the Court of the Lord Lyon, Scotland’s chief herald. In my experience the fervor is even greater among the descendants of Scots who settled in America when compared with their counterparts who stayed behind. At the gathering it was the members of the American branches of the clan societies who dressed with that little extra attention to detail. Just as the Amana colonies in Iowa have preserved their German language, dress, and culture with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in Germany itself, Scots Americans perpetuate the attachment to their roots in all manner of ways—in dress, song, and even in cooking. It is said that more haggis—the Scottish national dish of minced sheep lungs and oats wrapped in intestines—is sold in America on Burns Night than in the whole of Britain. (Haggis tastes a lot better than it sounds.)
I first became involved in testing the genetics of Scottish clans at the tail end of my work on the surname/Y-chromosome association. I was aware that clan surnames were different from their English counterparts in that sharing a clan name did not necessarily imply a direct relationship to the clan chief. Indeed, there are so relatively few Scottish names that a tight genetic relationship between clan membership and the Y chromosome would have implied an impressive breeding effort by only a few men over several centuries. While by no means denigrating the invigorating properties of porridge or whisky, and the opportunities for easy copulation afforded by the kilt, I had never imagined anything significant would come out of a study on Scottish surnames—such was the high level of name adoption that I had assumed. I am glad to say I was completely wrong, but my lack of enthusiasm for investigating a link meant that I did not discover my error of judgment for two years.
I was eventually set on the right track when my research team and I set out to compile our genetic map of Britain, which went on to provide the material for Saxons, Vikings, and Celts. For reasons to do with the way our research budget was structured, we first set out to cover Scotland before moving on to England and Wales. Taking samples from volunteers at blood donation sessions throughout Scotland, we collected DNA from several thousand volunteers over the course of two busy years. We had their written consent, and thus their names and addresses, but originally only as a means of circulating the project results. At the end of the two years my colleagues and I sat down to analyze the enormous set of results. This is something I really like to do. It sounds terrifically dull, but seeing and then interpreting raw lab data in the form of squiggles on a sequencer read-out gives me a quiet thrill even now. Like my colleagues, I had developed a nose for the unusual. I h
ad noticed one particular Y chromosome that belonged to the clan of Sigurd, named after the Norse god. This was my own romanticized nomenclature, sadly reduced in my opinion to the far-more-prosaic-sounding “haplogroup R1a” by almost everyone else. This chromosome, of Norse Viking origin, was not common in Scotland. It was not confined to any particular region, but was, if anything, more frequently encountered in the Highlands and the Hebrides than anywhere else. Only when I got around to looking at the names of the volunteers did I feel even a flicker of interest. Men with the three surnames MacDonald, MacDougall, and MacAlistair were the only ones to have this particular chromosome. It was when my graduate student Jayne Nicholson pointed out that all three names were supposed to be linked to a common ancestor that I began to get excited.
This ancestor was Somhairle mac Gillebride, better known as Somerled, a twelfth-century Celtic hero who had rid the western seaboard of Norsemen. According to the traditional genealogies, all three of the clans were linked to Somerled through his sons and subsequent generations of patrilinear descendants. Over the next few weeks Jayne contacted dozens of men with these names while I concentrated on the five living clan chiefs. To cut another long story short—I have written about this at greater length in Saxons, Vikings, and Celts—all five chiefs shared the same rare Y-chromosome signature, as did a substantial proportion of our surname volunteers. This was a testament to the fidelity of the clan chiefs’ wives over the last nine hundred years, exceeding even the devotion of the Mrs. Sykeses. I did not discover a single nonpaternity event even though the clan chiefs’ ancestral lineages were made up of eighty seven independent father-son generations. But although the impeccable behavior required to maintain the correspondence of name and chromosome over such a long period might have been true for their wives, the chiefs had evidently not contained themselves quite so well. A high proportion of the men with the three surnames also carried the chiefly Y chromosome, even though none realized they were related to the clan chiefs and therefore also descended from Somerled. This was not so much aristocratic diffusion as saturation.
About a third of male MacDonalds in the study had inherited Somerled’s Y chromosome, while in the other clans the proportions were even greater. Among the MacDougalls 40 percent carried the chiefly Y chromosome, and among the MacAlastairs almost half were Somerled’s patrilineal descendants. I was puzzled by the clear difference in these ratios until I discovered that, historically, the clan fortunes had been very different. Clan Donald is, and has been for centuries, the largest and most powerful of the three clans. Clan Dougall, descended from Somerled’s eldest son, had once been much more influential but had most of their estates confiscated after attaching themselves to the losing side in the war that put Robert the Bruce on the Scottish throne at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Clan Alastair, sadly, had never been of much consequence. The proportion of men with the surname who also carried the Somerled chromosome was inversely proportional to the size and power of the clan. Clan Donald was the strongest, yet the proportion of genetically related male MacDonalds was lower than in the other two clans. Even so, at 30 percent it meant that an astonishingly large number of men carried the ancestral-clan Y chromosome. I had certainly been wrong to assume that there would be only a very weak connection between surnames and genetics among the Scots.
The inverse ranking among the three clans suggests to me that straightforward name adoption was higher in Clan Donald than in the other two. Name adoption was a widespread custom, as men were encouraged to take on the chief’s surname if they found themselves living on his land or fighting in his army. There was more scope for both of these in Clan Donald than in the others. Even so, large numbers of men were genetically related to the clan chiefs and had inherited Somerled’s Y chromosome, and their surname, from one of their ancestors. While some may have done so as descendants of one of the chiefs’ brothers, Maggie MacDonald, archivist for Clan Donald, conceded that the chiefs had engaged in their own version of droit du seigneur, often imparting their surname as well as their seed.
The genetics had shown that the clan genealogies were surprisingly accurate and that the ancestors of the five living clan chiefs had chosen remarkably well-behaved wives. But they had also discovered a telling example of medieval public relations. The clan genealogies emphasize Somerled’s Celtic credentials by tracing his own ancestors back in time to a long line of Irish kings. However, his own chromosome is so typically Norse that I can only believe the invented Celtic ancestry was a deliberate ruse, by Somerled or one of his ancestors, to bolster the claim to the chiefship of the Gaeltacht, or indeed to the crown of Scotland. It didn’t succeed: He was killed at the Battle of Renfrew in 1165 as he launched an unsuccessful invasion of the Scottish mainland. Nevertheless Somerled’s ancient Irish lineage, back to such semimythical predecessors as Colla Uais and Conn of the Hundred Battles, was a cherished attribute for the acknowledged headship of the Gaeltacht and the Lords of the Isles, as later chiefs of Clan Donald were to become.
As my research into Clan Donald was drawing to a close, an American clan member, Mark Macdonald, a Texas lawyer from Dallas, had become aware of the potential of genetics. Like Bennett Greenspan in Houston, Mark had read the Wall Street Journal article on the Cohanim and, like Greenspan, had begun to wonder what genetics might do for his own historical clan research. He got to hear about my earlier work on Clan Donald and the identification of Somerled’s Y-chromosome signature, shared not only by the five living clan chiefs but also by a substantial proportion of clan members. He then set about organizing the Clan Donald DNA Project, since when it has grown to become the largest genetic genealogy project in the world based on a single family group. It is coordinated from Illinois by Professor J. Douglas McDonald, a professor of physical chemistry at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. By February 2011, one thousand members of the clan had joined the project and sent their DNA for testing.1 The Clan Donald project serves as a fine example of the way in which DNA has helped to map the structure of a large group of men with something in common, in this case their membership of a clan. It also acts as an example of how a relatively small-scale academic study has been adopted and amplified not by scientists like me but by the individuals most concerned with the outcome.
Apart from its importance as a prime example of public participation in what is, after all, a heavily science-based project, a major question is to what extent the DNA results have influenced the historical account of the clan history. The clan has always had excellent historians who have had access to the extensive archive of the Clan Donald Centre at Armadale on Skye, not far from where I am writing this section. From the 1400s to the present day, or at least until genetics raised its head, the firm consensus among Clan Donald historians was that Somerled was descended from the Irish king Colla Uais, who lived around AD 330 and whose kingdom was centered on the northwestern province of Ulster. Ancient Irish histories linked Colla Uais to another important Irish king, Niall of the Nine Hostages. Niall lived around AD 400, around the time that the Romans abandoned Britain to save Rome, leaving the west coast vulnerable to raids from Ireland. Niall, as his sobriquet suggests, made his living by capturing and then ransoming. His most famous captive was Saint Patrick, who went on to become the patron saint of Ireland. Both Niall and Colla Uais were, according to the body of Irish history, descended from Conn of the Hundred Battles, who was High King of Ireland around AD 175. The accuracy of Irish historical accounts suffers from a lack of written evidence, largely because, unlike most of Britain, Ireland was never occupied by the Romans. The Irish language, Gaelic, was not written down at the time, so everything was passed down by word of mouth.
Even written records can never be entirely relied upon, however, as authors were dependent on sponsors who were as much, or more, interested in creating a favorable impression than in historical accuracy—so much so that some modern Irish historians question whether Conn of the Hundred Battles was a real person at all or a mythic
al sun god. Others have questioned whether the common descent of Colla Uais and Niall of the Nine Hostages was a later invention of the O’Neills to legitimize their invasion of Ulster. Inventing claims like this was widespread in medieval Britain, and none was more brazen than that of Edward I who deliberately linked himself to the legendary King Arthur to back up his attempted invasion of Scotland, which he justified as an honest attempt to reunite Arthur’s fragmented kingdom.
Unlike King Arthur, we can be quite sure that Niall of the Nine Hostages did exist, and that he was the founder of the eponymous Ui Neill clan. A team at Trinity College, Dublin, led by Professor Dan Bradley, compared the Y-chromosome fingerprints of Irishmen with surnames linked to the clan, principally O’Neill, and found that they often had a chromosome in common, indicative of shared patrilineal descent.2 The Ui Neill chromosome is extremely common in Ulster today, with 27 percent of men having inherited it. Not all of these were O’Neills or had surnames with a genealogical connection to the Ui Neill, so it looks to me like another example of aristocratic leakage, Irish style. The Ui Neill dominance in Ireland, and Ulster in particular, squeezed the other Irish clans and many left to establish Gaelic settlements in western Scotland around AD 500. There followed a seesaw conflict with the original Celtic inhabitants, the Picts, which only came to an end when Scotland was united under its first king, Kenneth mac Alpin, a Gael, in AD 843, as a response to the threat from Norse Viking raiders.
