Year: 2019

Doggerland

Doggerland

by Justin Durand

There’s an area of land under the North Sea that was above water thousands of years ago, connecting what is now Great Britain and Denmark. The sea is relatively shallow in this area. Fishermen have dragged up remains of land animals and prehistoric tools. It’s been called the British Atlantis, but its formal name is Doggerland, after the Dogger Bank.

Now switch gears. Mitochondrial haplogroup V2, relatively rare in Europe, is a British group. And there’s a theory it originated in Doggerland. Pretty cool. This is my group, so also my mother’s, my maternal grandmother’s, my sisters’, my sisters’ children, and so on throughout my whole female line.

This is all old news. What has my attention today is that I was leafing through a book by Diana Paxson, and noticed she has a brief bit about Doggerland even though she doesn’t call it that.

“An interesting, if much debated, theory holds that during the earlier part of the Bronze Age a ‘northern Atlantis’ developed on islands off the west coast of Jutland that were known as the Electrides, or Amber Isles (Spanuth 1979), dominating the lands around the North Sea until it was swamped by a tsunami somewhere between 1500 and 1220 B.C.E. Some speculate that its people were the Haunebu, who traded amber to the Egyptians. After the disaster, the fleeing inhabitants may have displaced the Sea Peoples, whose attacks are described in Mediterranean records of the later Bronze Age.” (Diana Paxson, Essential Ásatrú (2006), 15-16.)

Paxon is citing Spanuth who believed Doggerland was not just the “British Atlantis” but also the original for Plato’s Atlantis. Probably not likely. A better candidate for Atlantis (in my opinion) is Santorini. And Paxson’s dating is quite a bit later than the current idea that Doggerland sank between about 6500 and 5000 BCE.

Nevertheless, there is probably more material to be mined here. The Greeks, or some of them, believed Hyperborean Apollo came from a land beyond the lands of the Celts, behind the North Wind. The traditional identification is Britain, but some writers now suggest the legend is old enough for it to have been Doggerland.

More Information

Revised July 16, 2019, Oct. 22, 2019, and July 13, 2020 to add additional sources.

Scotland to America, 1596

Scotland to America, 1596

by Justin Durand

“An entry in a late sixteenth-century register has revealed that a ship known as “William” of Aberdeen made a voyage to “the new fund land” (Newfoundland) in 1596. It is the earliest documented reference to a Scottish ship sailing to North America.“

This one catches my eye because it reminds me that somewhere in my files I’ve started to gather some notes for an article about genealogical claims to ancestry in Newfoundland before the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620.

I don’t credit the idea, but my thought is that it would be an interesting footnote to the standard genealogical advice — no British in America before 1607 Jamestown and 1620 Massachusetts.

I’ll leave the debates about Prince Henry Sinclair, the Newport Tower, and the Westford Knight for another day.

Geni Projects

Geni Projects

by Justin Durand

These are a few of the projects I started at Geni.com.

Many of my Geni projects reflect the work I did many years ago in graduate school about fictional genealogy in the Middle Ages. Back then, my primary interest was in the chansons de geste, the Arthurian legends, and the Scandinavian sagas.

Nowadays, my interest has broadened to include all forms of fictional genealogy, as well as ongoing academic attempts to find the Holy Grail of genealogy — a verifiable Descent from Antiquity.

I’ve mostly left the projects in other hands now, but many of them still contain good research summaries and sources.

America and the American West

There are many interesting stories in the world without resorting to fake genealogy.

Biblical Links

There are no proven links between Western Europe and biblical genealogies. There is a possible link through Paloma, but it’s controversial, More importantly, there is no proven descent from Makhir of Narbonne. The connection to Makhir was an academic theory that didn’t stand up to further research, but it is still alive in Internet fantasies.

Chivalric Orders

Descents from Antiquity

Despite what you might find on Geni, there are no proven descents from antiquity to western Europe. The oldest line generally accepted as proven is the O’Neill family back to about 600 — not quite far enough to reach Niall of the Nine Hostages himself. If you find a line on Geni that shows you are a descendant of Roman emperors, the kings of Troy, King Arthur, Cleopatra, King Herod, or Alexander the Great, it’s a known fake. These lines are on Geni only because so many people keep trying to add them back.

DNA for Genealogy

DNA is one of the best modern tools we have for investigating ancient stories.

Family Projects

Fictional Genealogy

Western Europe has a rich tradition of genealogies invented by different royal families as propaganda to create the illusion of antiquity. Some of the projects in this area are:

Heraldry

Irish Kingdoms

Jewish Genealogy

Locality Projects

These are places that have captured my attention, where I am interested in almost any connection someone has.

Modern Nonsense

  • Fake Titles. Geni has a few dozen users who are fake knights, princes, countesses, and so on. They are generally engaged in personal projects to prove they are the heirs of old royal families, descendants of Jesus, Grail princes, or members of a holy bloodline.
  • Holy Blood, Holy Grail. An idea drawn from popular culture, not history, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, had children with her, and was the ancestor of the Merovingian dynasty.

Mormon History

Mythology

It should not surprise us that many tribal cultures believed they were descended from their gods.

  • Odin’s Kin. Descents from the Norse god Odin to the kings of Scandinavia, England, and Scotland.

The Scandinavian Sagas project isn’t one I created, but it’s pivotal to work in this area. The saga genealogies, some good, some bad. Most of them will start a shouting match between opposing camps.

New Age and Metaphysical Connections

Occupations

Royal & Noble

Saga Genealogies

Scottish Clans

The umbrella project for Scottish Clans was created and is administered by June Barnes.

Swedish Genealogy

Miscellaneous

Recovering the Gunn lineage

Recovering the Gunn lineage

by Justin Durand

I don’t have any known Gunn ancestry but I got interested in them a lifetime ago. Someone at the Family History Center in Salt Lake City suggested the Swanstroms, if they were originally Scottish, might have been Gunns.

Actually, I think the idea was that the Swanstroms absolutely, positively had to be Gunns for a variety of reasons, but we won’t worry about that because they’re not. Nevertheless, I was left with a lifelong interest in the Gunns.

A tradition that evolved only in the past few hundred years claims an illustrious descent for the Gunns. They are said to be descended from Sweyn Asleifson, poetically called The Ultimate Viking.

However, this descent is known to be nonsense. It’s endlessly repeated because so many people prefer romance to reality. I’m not immune myself. For many years, I carried Eric Linlater’s novel The Ultimate Viking (1956) on my list of use books to find and read. It was long out of print, so I had very little hope of finding it. It was only a few years, with the advent of the Internet, that I was able to find and buy a copy.

As I struggle to break the addiction to romantic fantasies, I’ve come to admire the work of Alastair Gunn, whose no-nonsense style is bringing Gunn history into the light of reality. His idea is that the first known ancestor of what became the “chiefly family” was George Gunn (“Coroner Gunn”), died 1464. Everything before him has been concocted out of unconnected bits and pieces.

There’s a Facebook group for Clan Gunn that posts occasional updates. See it here. I haven’t watched it long enough yet to know the general feeling about the legendary origin of the Gunns, but on Geni.com, which is supposed to be a respectable genealogical site, there has been quite a bit of vitriol around conforming the Gunn line to the facts. I created a Clan Gunn project there a few years ago and did some cleanup. It hasn’t been an easy sell.

Some day I need to go back and clean up my own notes.

Side note: If I have any Gunn ancestry at all it would be through Bessie Rorieson [Gunn], mistress of John Sinclair, Master of Caithness (d. 1575). They were the parents of Henry Sinclair of Lybster, speculative father of immigrant John Sinclair (d. 1700), of Exeter, New Hampshire.