DNA analysis through The Genographic Project has implied the existence of our earliest identifiable male ancestor: a man (M168) who lived in or around the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania some 45,000 years ago, The total population of Homo sapiens, all of them in Africa, was perhaps 10,000. Hunters and gatherers with no permanent home, these early humans were constantly on the move, following the herds of animals across the grasslands of north Africa. Until the climate changed, bringing warmer temperatures and rising sea levels and closing the land bridge to Asia a few millenia later, a number of people would leave Africa, but only the descendants of this "Eurasian Adam" would survive, making him the ancestor of all non-Africans.

Some 200 generations later, a second genetic marker arose with one of his descendants, a man (M89) who was born in North Africa or the Middle East around 45,000 years ago. Over thousands of years, his descendants, who account for as much as 95% of the world's non-African population, followed the big game and expanding grasslands out of the Middle East into the steppes of Asia and eastern Europe. Some of his descendants, including my ancestors, moved north through Anatolia and into the Balkans, adapting from familiar grasslands to forests and mountains.

Around the onset of the last ice age some 21,000 years ago, a man was born in Asia Minor or the Balkans with a new genetic marker (M170) — my grandfather removed eight or nine hundred generations. This paleolithic ancestor was progenitor of genetic Haplogroup I and ancestor of about one in five of all Europeans. The Geneographic Project has this to say about him:

The dramatically lower sea levels during the last Ice Age meant that land bridges kept the British Isles connected to each other and to continental Europe until some 9,500 years ago when the melting ice turned Ireland into an island again. Within another thousand years, Britain, too, was an island, but by then a human population was permanently established. The earliest signs of permanent human settlement have emerged from shortly after this period, with the round houses at Mount Sandel in Co. Derry in Ireland and at Howick in Northumberland being among the earliest.

Genetic researchers continue to debate the proportion of the historic population of both islands that was descended from these ancient hunting-gathering people and the proportion that was descended from later invaders. The oldest human remains found in Britain are those of Cheddar Man, who lived some 9,000 years ago near the village of Cheddar in Somerset. In 1996, DNA research of area residents found two schoolchildren with exact matches to his mtDNA and one with only a single mutation.

There is also continued debate over the so-called Neolithic Revolution of agriculture, domesticated livestock, and permanent settlements that began in Britain around 4,500 BCE and whether it was brought by invaders or simply adopted by local populations. Some argue that the example of Cheddar Man and his descendants demostrate that agriculture was an idea adopted by descendants of the paleolithic hunter-gatherers who repopulated the British Isles after the last Ice Age rather than being a product of waves of immigration from the Middle East. David Miles' The Tribes of Britain and Bryan Sykes Blood of the Isles are good reads on all that.

By the beginning of the Iron Age around 800 BCE, many but not all of my ancestors were probably already in Britain or Ireland among the several large Celtic tribes that are thought to have emerged there in the first millenium BCE. Greek writers in the sixth century BCE were noting the "Keltoi," the word used to describe the barbarians generally across northern and western Europe. Consisting of a wide array of people, the Celts were not an ethinic group, but were rather a number of tribal groups who held certain cultural and linguistic attributes in common.

The Greek geographer and explorer Pytheus was the first to describe the "Pretanic Isles" during his voyage around northwest Europe about 325 BCE, although their existence was noted by classical writers two or three centuries earlier. By the time Strabo published his geography of the known world early in the first century CE, the terms "Britannia" and "Ierne" were both in use.

In 55 and 54 BCE, Julius Ceaser led the first Roman expedition into Britain, and in the early 1st century CE, four-hundred years of Roman occupation began. The Romans identified some twenty-seven tribes in the British Isles, but there is no way yet to know which of these might have included my distant ancestors.

My ancestors suffered through appear to have had most of their roots in England, Scotland, and Walesthe Scottish Lowlands and Borders, Wales, England, and northern Ireland with a single thread German ancestry found in my 6th-great-grandparents Heinrich and Mary Weidman, who left Holland for America in 1761. She died in childbirth while at sea, but their son, my 5th-great-grandfather, was one of the rare infants that survived the voyage to America. Heinrich is thought to have been born in or near Kassel in the German state of Hesse. This was the ancestral hearth of the Chatti, one of the more obscure Germanic tribes encountered by the Romans, and among that tribe might have been some of Heinrich Weidman's ancestors.

The remainder of my ancestors had long, probably ancient roots in the British Isles, mostly in England, Scotland, Wales, and, after 1600, Ulster. They were, almost without exception, Protestant, mostly Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian. Nearly all of them were in the American South before the Revolution, and they were all in the Georgia Piedmont south and southwest of Atlanta by the time of the Civil War. If they fought in that war, and not all of them did, they fought for the Confederacy but more than one of them thought the whole thing "a rich man's war, a poor man's fight." Until the South's agricultural economy collapsed after World War I, they were all small farmers, most of them owning their own land, but a few living the hard-scrabble life of the tenant farmer or sharecropper. Not all of them were literate before the advent of public schools, and none of them went beyond high school until after World War II.

assorted

ancestral

threads:

Jones

Hart

Moore

Lee

Davis

Graham

Burdette

Eidson

Wesley

Suttles

Graden

Brown

Sewell

Coleman

Brassell

Richardson

Distribution of Haplogroup I, with darkest areas indicating heaviest concentration of this group. Some 20% of modern Europeans share this group's genetic marker.

An Iron-Age roundhouse of a type that might have been encountered by the Romans in Britain in the first century BCE, reconstructed at Flag Fen Archaeological Park near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

Map of Europe two thousand years ago from Strabo's Geographica.

Map showing tribes and tribal centers in late Iron-Age Britain, from Miles' The Tribes of Britain

Roman Britain, c. 410 CE

Anglo-Saxon Britain, c. 900 CE

Buell's "New and correct map of United States of North America," 1783

Jones, Davis, Coleman, Wesley, Brassell, Drennon, Trimble

(Fayette County, Georgia, in 1850; Jones in Abbeville County, South Carolina, by 1780; Jones, Davis, Coleman, Brassell in eastern North Carolina before Revolution))

Hart, Graham, Graden, Brown, Stovall, Glover, Nash, Chandler, Abercrombie, Linley

(Fayette and Henry Counties, Georgia, in 1850; Harts in Virginia before the Revolution)

Moore, Burdette, Sewell, Anderson, Wideman, Roberts, Harris, Prather, Obendorf

(Heard, Troup, Coweta, and Meriwether Counties, Georgia, in 1850)

Lee, Eidson, Holder, Suttles, Richardson, Browne, Harbin, Ford, Childs

(DeKalb and Campbell Counties, Georgia, in 1850)