Author: Justin Durand

New mtDNA Test

New mtDNA Test

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I decided recently to have a Full mtDNA test at Family Tree DNA (FTDNA). This is something I’ve been putting off. I had the HVR1 test at Oxford Ancestors in 1998, and another at FTDNA in 2007. In between, I also donated a blood sample to BYU. Those results ended up at the now defunct Sorenson Molecular Genetics (SMGF).

I don’t have enough matches to make this more detailed test useful. No one is going to make a genealogical breakthrough by comparing results with me. I belong to Haplogroup V2, a common British group, perhaps with origins in Doggerland.

This full test gave me nothing new. I was (predicted) V2 at FTDNA, now I’m confirmed. But I was already confirmed V2 at SMGF. No new subgroup. I got a few new matches, that’s it.

But, I might need to back off a bit. I have my DNA results uploaded at WikiTree. They have mangled my maternal line–and they’ve been quite insulting about it. I probably need to pull my results so the link isn’t leading other researchers astray. What part of no evidence means no evidence? WikiTree does a hard sales pitch about requiring evidence. It’s even in the Honor Code. But when it comes to unsourced and inaccurate data, nothing can be done. They just shrug. Oh well. It’s not like evidence matters in genealogy.

All Things Cosy

All Things Cosy

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I’m intrigued by this article I found on BBC. “How did a bucolic dreamland became the perfect escape from real life? Anita Rao Kashi explores a whimsical world of nostalgia, tranquillity and folksy mysticism. A few weeks into lockdowns everywhere, a curious thing happened on Instagram feeds. More and more, they filled with images of pretty cottages adorned with climbers and flower-laden trellises . . . .”

“Much like Scandinavian concepts hygge and friluftsliv, the pastoral aesthetic of cottagecore is striking a chord.“

Nothing new here. We re-discover a romanticized nostalgia when life gets hard. Or, so it seems to me. When I was in college at Boulder in the mid-1970s, I was surrounded by a back-to-nature aesthetic. That’s the time in life I began wearing jeans and hiking boots. It wasn’t just the local zeitgeist; it was even stronger in Utah. There, the Mormon pioneer nostalgia is always a part of everyday life. Years later, I was still on the fringes of it. Missey and I looked at buying a property in Cedar Fort, where we wanted to build a cabin.

I’m not surprised to see nostalgia surging in this time of Trump’s virus but the fashion can be overstated. The kernel is an aesthetic of slowing down to live more deliberately. Here in Denver, we were locked down for 6 weeks. Life was deliberately slowed. I spent much of that time sorting and disposing books and bric-a-brac. I could look at that period and find signs of a nostalgia for rural life. However, that was only an erratic component. The stronger drive for me and for many others I know has been looking for a simpler life.

Mari Kondo more than Mother Earth News.

Becoming Indian

Becoming Indian

by Justin Durand

I’ve been chuckling about this video for a few days now.

  • the1491s. “I’m An Indian Too“. YouTube <youtube.com>. Sep 21, 2012, retrieved Dec. 12, 2020.

So then. When the laughing subsides for a bit, I’m ready to go on with some more reading around this topic. There’s a particularly active faux Red community on Geni.com. I have a long standing interest in the subject of racial identity, but these folx really lit my interest. A wide variety of pipe carriers, and vision warriors, and chiefs of various standing. They couldn’t bear to hear that they might not be as NDN as they want.

I remember reading a few years ago about White folx with a tiny bit of Indian ancestry weighing in on whether the Washington Redskins name is racist. Invariably, they’d (a) assert their claim to Indian ancestry, then (b) say they aren’t offended by the name. Can people be less self-aware than that? I don’t think so.

I was pulled back to this issue recently by Darryl Leroux (no surprise there) and his latest article about indigenization.

There are also these older articles, still on my radar:

In other words, some people are making a very basic mistake of confusing ancestry and identity. It doesn’t have to be this hard–I have Swedish ancestry but I am not a Swede. So simple and obvious but it might be easy to lose your bearings if the only culture you know is your own.

Ultimately, this approach acquires an ersatz legitimacy from a related debate about the U.S. government using blood quantum rather than culture as a determinant of Indian identity. I wrote about that a few years ago. It should take only a few moments of reflection to see the difference between saying if you have the culture blood shouldn’t matter, versus saying if you have the blood you can claim the culture.

I’ll be watching to see where this goes. From the resistance I’ve encountered personally, I’d bet the ranch that rationality loses this round, this generation. There’s a powerful undercurrent in the dominant settler culture of wanting to be indigenized, some way, some how.

Update: Now here’s a book for my reading list: Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The struggle over Cherokee identity in the twenty-first century (2011). Looks like it’s still available from UNM Press for $27, but twice that used. Should be half that. Something hinkey, there. I’ll put it on my want list and wait for the market to play out.

Slaver Profits in Scotland

Slaver Profits in Scotland

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

There has been a flurry of activity around a new study linking the Atlantic slave trade to the Highland clearances. 18th and 19th centuries. Fascinating stuff.

I read the Smithsonian article first. “Sure,” I thought, “we knew this already.” Or at least some of us could easily guess. If you read history, at some point you start to notice bits and pieces that aren’t being highlighted. One of those pieces is likely to be the prominence of Scots in the north Atlantic trade, and, of course, the slave trade. As soon as someone says the profits went back home, for example, to estates in Scotland, you think, “Of course. That’s exactly how it would be.”

“Between roughly 1750 and 1860, wealthy landowners forcibly evicted thousands of Scottish Highlanders in order to create large-scale sheep farms. Known today as the Highland Clearances, this era of drastic depopulation sparked the collapse of the traditional clan system and the mass migration of Scotland’s northernmost residents to other parts of the world.” McGreevy.

OK, sure. But the surprising part isn’t the connection. It’s that the connection matters today.

The research is presented as a “discussion paper on land reform” for Community Land Scotland (“We believe that we cannot create a more socially just Scotland without tackling land ownership. Half of the country’s privately owned land is held by just 432 owners and a mere 16 owners hold 10% of Scotland (Wightman 2013) – we want to see more of Scotland’s land in the hands of more of Scotland’s people“).

The real meat here is in the Bella Caledonia article. “It’s likely that somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 acres of the western and northern Highlands today are in the hands of families which have benefitted from the profits of slavery.“

Scottish Land and Estates, “a representative body for large landowners and country businesses,” brushes off the research as irrelevant: “it is a bit of a stretch to leap from a review of social history and ancient connections to slavery as being a reason why communities should own land today. (Ooo, this is getting good.)

I like the response: “Landlords consistently seek to benefit from the historical traditions and stories associated with their land and with their houses and castles. Past connections are readily, and understandably, utilized by Scottish Land and Estates to enable heritage tourism and generate a particular version of the Highlands and indeed Scotland in general. Dismissing one element of the past as irrelevant while promoting and deploying another version as key to the contemporary economic and revenue basis of many landed estates is not conducive to a fully informed and effective discussion of land, land use and community in the Highlands.“

This is an issue that should interest the American and Canadian descendants of Scots who lost their homes in the Clearances, as well as any potential heritage tourists looking forward to visiting romantic Scotland with its castles and kilts.

I’ll never look at any of it the same way.

More Gunns

More Gunns

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I’ve written about the Gunns before: Recovering the Gunn Lineage (Jan. 31, 2019), so we already know I’m an admirer of Alastair Gunn and his work putting the Gunn lineage on a firmer footing. I still haven’t done the work of cleaning up my own notes. Some day. Soon. I promise.

I saw recently on the Facebook page for Clan Gunn that Alastair Gunn has published The real history of (Clan) Gunn. It’s an abridged version — 59 pages, a very quick read — of his earlier The Gunns: History, Myths and Genealogy. I didn’t know about that one either, until now.

Summary: “Gunns are the original, non-related inhabitants of northern mainland Scotland.  They have no Orkney islands origin. Gunns are not a Clan as they had no founding father and nor did they have historic Chiefs. The first Gunn known was Coroner Gunn of Caithness (often wrongly called Crowner Gunn) who died around 1450. His eldest son started the MacHamish Gunns of Killernan line which still exists today and whose line is explored in detail in this book.“

I love this stuff. Any time someone does the work to firm up the facts, they have my heart.

So, I grabbed the chance to ask Mr. Gunn how his theory makes the Gunns any different from other Celtic tribes that coalesced around a chiefly family. In other words, why aren’t the MacHamish Gunns just as chiefly as any other Highland family? If the Gunns are, as he argues, the unrelated “people of the country”, doesn’t that mean they the old tribe gathered around and adopting the surname of a leading family?

I’m broadly interested in the various ideas of this subject. I’m often asked to give my opinion about why this family or that doesn’t match the yDNA signature of the clan whose name they bear. It’s a difficult question to answer, not because the answer is unclear, but because the answer contradicts beloved myths. The question is frequently a prelude to a complicated and highly speculative DNA scenario.

The answer I would give, nearly always, is that clans were “artificial” groups. More like our modern notion of tribes than like families. But God help anyone who uses the word artificial in a context where it can be misinterpreted to mean fake. So, mostly I waffle.

Alastair Gunn responded to my question by writing a new piece on his blog, “DNA testing and Scottish families / Clans.” ‘Clan Gunn’ history or, more accurately, Gunn history <https://clangunn1.blogspot.com/>. Nov. 20, 2020.

The meat of his answer is this. “[T]he majority of people who lived in a Clan area – or drifted into such an area – simply accepted the Clan name for convenience. This is different for the Gunns who had their surname applied to them by outsiders.“

I like that answer. It’s a subtle distinction, and no doubt he will elaborate in future posts, but for now it’s short and easy to understand.