Alexander Sinclair (1667?-1751) -- Drummond sperm?

[James Dow Allen]

Let me direct your attention to the DF13 Y-haplogroup tree. It shows the agnatic descendants of DF13, a Great King of Western Bell Beaker. [url]https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-DF13/[/url] Look specifically at Y32809.

Or don't bother. YFull has very little to say about it:
> R-Y32809ZS4588 * ZS4584 * ZS4582+13 SNPs formed 2100 ybp, TMRCA 550 ybp info
> id:YF09335
> id:YF06937

The "TMRCA 550 ybp" shows the most recent common ancestor of this clade to have been born 1450 AD (error bars = 1000 AD to 1750 AD). That's rather recent in genealogical terms, especially when we confirm that this man was Malcolm Drummond Chief of that Ilk, hereditary chamberlain of Lennox.

Refer now to [url]http://haplogroup-r.org/tree/R.html[/url] where this clade is called "ZS4584 ZS4586." This page shows THIRTEEN different men in this haplo-clade, divided into three subclades:
* two McRae
* three Sinclair/St.Clair, one Unknown
* six Drummond, one McRae

By consulting a 3rd source -- the public page of Sinclair Project Y-chromosome (group "12") -- we infer the Sinclairs are agnatic kin of Alexander Sinclair b. 1667? Glasgow, d. 1751 Virginia, an immigrant who lived to the age of 84. Unfortunately the Internet offers little opinion as to Alexander's parents. Do any famous Americans descend from him?

(I suppose Y32809 might be a smallish McRae cluster, with one bastard McRae who insists he's a Drummond sending in samples of all his uncles and brothers, packing the numbers. :-) But arguing against that idea is that R.Org is a huge database of Gaelic surname/SNP and [I]these six are the only Drummonds[/I] presented on the entire tree. I suggest we conclude that the key father of this clade is surely Malcolm Beq Drummond of That Ilk himself, the Seneschal of Lennox born about 1200.)

If we accept YFull's 1450 AD date, we can be blunt: Which Drummond cuckolded Alexander Sinclair's "ancestor"? Since Drummond appears monophyletic, we might guess the cuckolding occurred before Drummond fanned out. Be ready to rescind this as more Drummonds are tested.

If YFull's date is way off -- say that the Sinclair-Drummond split was 1150 AD or so -- we may guess it was Malcolm Beq's grandfather who played the two-headed game with Sinclair's wife or daughter. Note that Glasgow is almost adjacent to Lennox.

Note also from the subclade listing that a very early Drummond might have been sired by McRae. (This contrasts sharply with the old legend that Drummond came from Hungary. :-) )

[John Watson]

On Thursday, 3 August 2017 09:23:03 UTC+1, James Dow Allen wrote:

A Great King of Western Bell Beaker - what rubbish are you reading? Western bell beaker was a kind of neolithic pottery prevalent in the third millennium B.C. Nobody could be a king, great, or otherwise of a kind of pottery. How do you know that these new stone age people even had kings?

Regards,

John

[taf]

On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 1:23:03 AM UTC-7, James Dow Allen wrote:
> Let me direct your attention to the DF13 Y-haplogroup tree. It shows the
> agnatic descendants of DF13, a Great King of Western Bell Beaker.

How can anyone possibly know that the progenitor of a particular haplogroup was a Great King when we don't even know that the Western Bell Beaker culture had anything we would recognize as kings?

> The "TMRCA 550 ybp" shows the most recent common ancestor of this clade to
> have been born 1450 AD (error bars = 1000 AD to 1750 AD).

> If we accept YFull's 1450 AD date, we can be blunt:

1450 is not the date given. It is simply the middle of a 750 year range (and I have explained elsewhere why even such ranges are overly precise). There is no more justification for treating this as a real date than it would be to take someone born in the 14th century and use 1350 as their precise birthdate.

taf

taf

[James Dow Allen]

On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 7:40:36 PM UTC+7, taf wrote:

> How can anyone possibly know that the progenitor of a particular haplogroup was a Great King when we don't even know that the Western Bell Beaker culture had anything we would recognize as kings?

DF13 and his "brothers" were the agnatic ancestors of most of
Western Europe. Odds are good he was the Chief rather than a
stable boy. The fact that the procreations of his family was so
prolific makes it pretty certain the Chiefs of Bell Beaker were very powerful.

> > The "TMRCA 550 ybp" shows the most recent common ancestor of this clade
> > to have been born 1450 AD (error bars = 1000 AD to 1750 AD).

> 1450 is not the date given. It is simply the middle of a 750 year range...

::confused::
Was there something unclear about my mention of "error bars"?

James

[James Dow Allen]

On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 4:18:46 PM UTC+7, John Watson wrote:
> what rubbish are you reading? Western bell beaker was a kind of neolithic

> pottery ... How do you know that these new stone age people even had kings?


::confused:: make up your mind! Is Beaker a "kind of pottery"
or "new stone age people" ?

Prestige graves show that there was an elite, the Y-dna evidence
demonstrates that the elite formed an agnatic clan, and that
the procreation advantage was as seen with Khans or other Great Kings.
Obviously nobody knows what these Chiefs were called, or any
details of the political structure.

Oh! ... you'll sound more knowledgeable if you refer to the era
as Late Copper Age. DF13 himself lived just a few centuries
before the sudden proliferation of bronze derived from
Cornwall's tin.

Leave you guys alone for a few years and you become twice as
pedantic and irritating as ever! Congratulations, I guess.

[Paulo Canedo]

Hello Jamie my friend I'm here I'm your correspondent Ricardo Canedo.

[Ian Goddard]

On 03/08/17 14:22, James Dow Allen wrote:
> DF13 and his "brothers" were the agnatic ancestors of most of
> Western Europe.

I take it you're referring to a hypothetical individual here or do you
have a specific burial in mind?

--
Hotmail is my spam bin. Real address is ianng
at austonley org uk

[John Watson]

The bell beaker style of pottery first appears in north-western Europe about 2500 B.C. which was before the age of metal working when people were using stone tools. This style of pottery continued until about 1700 B.C. by which time copper tools and weapons had been developed, closely followed by bronze.

One sub-set of the bell beaker style of pottery is called Western Bell Beaker by archaeologists. It's an artistic style not a people or a tribe.

The great thing about pre-history is that there are absolutely no written records of the people or their culture, so anyone can suppose whatever they like about how these people lived. For all that anyone knows, they could have had a matriarchal society or have been led by shamans, or they could have been communists. If you want to believe that they were led by Great Kings, that's fine, but it seems to me that your belief owes more to Tolkein than to archaeology.

Regards,

John

[wjhonson]

Odd. It seems like J is trying to form a new DFA to some kind of king of the stone age.

I don't see how anyone can say that the Y-DNA evidence shows that the "elite" formed an "agnatic clan" from thirteen kits of DNA

If DF13 is the ancestor of *most* of Western Europe than surely that's not an elite group.

[nore...@san.rr.com]

having a hierarchical structure is standard to human culture, which would include a person at the top that we would consider a king

[wjhonson]

Your perspective is flawed.
There are no indications that *any* neolithic culture had a person who considered themselves the master of even say 1000 people

You should use the word Chief, as in, a small tribe

[John Watson]

If James had claimed that his ancestor was the chief of a tribe of the bell beaker people, I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. His use of the term a "Great King of Western Bell Beaker" is ridiculous. Where was the Kingdom of Western Bell Beaker?

Regards,

John

[nore...@san.rr.com]

this is a matter of semantics. my main point stands

[wjhonson]

Yes the semantics that you are trying to create a society which did not exist, because then you can claim to be descended from some Stone Age King or whatever.

It's much less thrilling to be descended from that one guy who had a large farm.

[taf]

On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 9:54:03 AM UTC-7, John Watson wrote:

> If James had claimed that his ancestor was the chief of a tribe of the bell
> beaker people, I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. His use of the term a
> "Great King of Western Bell Beaker" is ridiculous. Where was the Kingdom
> of Western Bell Beaker?

I would even challenge this. Even were we to accept that a given haplogroup was found among the Bell Beaker people, it is completely groundless to assume that the bearer of that haplogroup must have been a chief. We know there was social structure from differences in burial accompaniment, but we do not know enough about that we can conclude any one individual burial represents the apex of that structure, nor do we know that, just because one shares a haplogroup with a given burial that one descends from that precise individual, so even were we able to conclude a given individual was a chief, we cannot conclude that a modern person descends from that chief. Likewise, some haplogroups are found in ancient burial sites as widespread as Portugal and Ukraine, so just because we find a haplogroup in a western bell beaker burial does not mean it is an exclusively bell beaker haplogroup, or that a modern person with that haplogroup is a descendant of that bell beaker tribe.

taf

[nore...@san.rr.com]

---- wjhonson <wjho...@aol.com> wrote:

> > > Your perspective is flawed.
> > > There are no indications that *any* neolithic culture had a person who considered themselves the master of even say 1000 people
> > >
> > > You should use the word Chief, as in, a small tribe
> > >
> > this is a matter of semantics. my main point stands
>
> Yes the semantics that you are trying to create a society which did not exist, because then you can claim to be descended from some Stone Age King or whatever.
>

I am not the one trying to prove any such ancestry.to restate: chief or king, it doesn't matter what we call the leaders of these groups

> It's much less thrilling to be descended from that one guy who had a large farm.
>

doesn't matter what one's ancestor did or how many people he ruled, if any

[taf]

On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 6:22:49 AM UTC-7, James Dow Allen wrote:
> On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 7:40:36 PM UTC+7, taf wrote:
>
> > How can anyone possibly know that the progenitor of a particular
> > haplogroup was a Great King when we don't even know that the Western
> > Bell Beaker culture had anything we would recognize as kings?
>
> DF13 and his "brothers" were the agnatic ancestors of most of
> Western Europe. Odds are good he was the Chief rather than a
> stable boy.

Odds are that a person who could be descended from anyone across the social spectrum from king to stable boy will decide it must have been the king, and build an ad hoc argument to rationalize the decision.

> The fact that the procreations of his family was so
> prolific makes it pretty certain the Chiefs of Bell Beaker were very
> powerful.

No, this is not certain at all. We know virtually nothing about the social organization of the Bell Beaker culture other than that there was social organization, and we don't have enough DNA data to know how this or any other haplogroup was distributed across the social framework. The most prolific could have had such a social advantage, or they could have had a technological advantage, or they could have had a biological advantage, even a psychological advantage. Likewise, the haplogroup could have arisen in a period before that social structure developed, such that both chief and stable boy (neither of which may have been roles among the bell beaker people) could have shared the same haplogroup. For that matter, the culture could have been such that the 'chief' was simply the most respected man at a given time. There are many less-developed societies in which the leadership is more merit based than hereditary, and someone could start out as stable boy and end up as chief with hard work and a little luck.

> > > The "TMRCA 550 ybp" shows the most recent common ancestor of this clade
> > > to have been born 1450 AD (error bars = 1000 AD to 1750 AD).
>
> > 1450 is not the date given. It is simply the middle of a 750 year range...
>
> ::confused::
> Was there something unclear about my mention of "error bars"?

No, nor was there anything unclear about you 'accepting' the 1450 date and using it in reaching a conclusion, as if it was an authentic data point as opposed to what it is, simply a midpoint in a 750 year confidence interval. It is completely unsound to use this date as if it meant anything real to then conclude who must have cuckolded whom. The date 1450 has no value whatsoever in reconstructions other than being the midpoint. It is like saying "we know he is from the 12th century, so let's say he was born in 1150 and see what generation of the family that puts him in" - a completely invalid approach.

taf

[joe...@gmail.com]

My limited knowledge of medieval genealogy tells me that 2500 BC is outside the typical range of what is considered medieval and on topic for this group.

Although there are many other groups that address this time period.

Joe C

[John Watson]

On Thursday, 3 August 2017 18:40:59 UTC+1, taf wrote:

We also appear to be forgetting that the bell beaker people in the British Isles, who built Stonehenge were pushed out, assimilated or marginalized by later waves of Celtic invaders. Nobody even knows what they called themselves. The Irish called them Firbolgs, but that just means "bog men" probably because that is where they were reduced to living after the Celts arrived. We know nothing about their language, but it has been suggested that their word for river (or water) still survives in several European river names such as Ure, Loire, Eure, etc.

Regards,

John

[nore...@san.rr.com]

---- John Watson <watso...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 3 August 2017 18:40:59 UTC+1, taf wrote:
>
> We also appear to be forgetting that the bell beaker people in the British Isles, who built Stonehenge were pushed out, assimilated or >marginalized by later waves of Celtic invaders. Nobody even knows what they called themselves. The Irish called them Firbolgs

based on what? re irish name

[taf]

On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 11:14:34 AM UTC-7, John Watson wrote:

> We also appear to be forgetting that the bell beaker people in the British
> Isles, who built Stonehenge were pushed out, assimilated or marginalized
> by later waves of Celtic invaders. Nobody even knows what they called
> themselves. The Irish called them Firbolgs, but that just means "bog men"
> probably because that is where they were reduced to living after the Celts
> arrived.

'fir' is men, 'bolg' is hard to translate, but it shares the same Indo-European root as bulge, as in a full bag or bulging in a more metaphorical sense, such as with battle fury. Some have even suggested that it represents the name of a tribe, the Belgae.

That the mythology surrounding the Fir Bolg actually represents authentic historical memory of a real peoples that can be identified with prior settlers of Eire, as opposed to simple mythology, is disputed.

taf

[wjhonson]

It actually does matter if we call a chieftain a King or say a Count or Duke or Bishop or Schoolteacher.

Why not just call this unknown "big man" a "leader" and be done at that

[taf]

The Irish foundation mythology tells of 5 successive settlements the first three of which proved short-lived and let to abandonment of the island. The fourth was by the Fir Bolgs, descended from one of the previous settling populations, but at the time slaves in Greece, were freed about the time of Moses and went to Ireland, where they lived for 37 years before a new group, the Tuatha De Dunann, the people of the gods, arrived and forced them to give up 3/4 of the island, but they are allowed to retain Connacht.

That these represent the Bell Beaker peoples known to have inhabited Ireland is, of course, speculation.

taf

[Ian Goddard]

On 03/08/17 18:40, taf wrote:
> the social spectrum from king to stable boy

Actually I'm not even sure the Bell Beaker culture had horses so the
stable boy's job would have been something of a privileged sinecure ;)

[Ian Goddard]

On 03/08/17 20:30, wjhonson wrote:
> It actually does matter if we call a chieftain a King or say a Count or Duke or Bishop or Schoolteacher.
>
> Why not just call this unknown "big man" a "leader" and be done at that
>

The title is only half the problem. The other half is that we're
looking at a smallish population thinly scattered across a large slice
of the continent. To suggest a leader of that population requires that
it could be organised into a single entity to be the leader of. That's
another issue.

As far as I can see the basic problem is this: you take a collection of
data (DNA in this case) and throw it at a program whose function is to
cobble together links to form a tree - or clade if you want to be posh.
It will produce such a structure because that's how it was designed to
treat the raw data.

I was playing around with some of this stuff back about 1970 and
realised that there was no harm in it provided you didn't start
believing the results were real. They're just hypotheses and often, as
in this sort of case, hypotheses that can't be tested.

[Kelsey Jackson Williams]

On Thursday, 3 August 2017 09:23:03 UTC+1, James Dow Allen wrote:

Leaving aside the Bell Beaker discussion for the moment, and concentrating on this Alexander Sinclair: DNA hardly seems likely to present the solution you're looking for. Would it not be better to start with documentary research into his origins? Judging from some of what I've seen after a quick Google search, it's by no means certain that he was a Glaswegian or, indeed, even an immigrant (see some of the speculation at http://www.genealogy.com/ftm/s/t/o/John-E-Stockman/GENE19-0001.html).

Looking for an appropriately prolific Drummond is taking the cart before the horse, to say the least.

All the best,
Kelsey

[Kelsey Jackson Williams]

To follow this up, there are more or less good abstracts of some relevant primary sources concerning this Alexander Sinclair at

http://www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us/getperson.php?personID=I063170&tree=tree1

It looks as if the first document definitely relating to this man is a deed of 18 March 1734 in which he is described as being of Stafford County, planter, and in which he purchased 377 acres in Prince William County (the above website citing PW Co. Deeds, Liber A, pp. 412-415). They also speculate - reasonably, given what I understand of population movement and boundary shifts in this part of Virginia - that he is the Alexander Sinclair named in a lawsuit in Richmond County from 1704.

What seems to me most interesting, though, is a citation to a manuscript land title book in the Virginia State Archives which apparently contains a deposition by this Alexander Sinclair dated 7 September 1745 in which he states that he is aged about seventy-nine years. This is, no doubt, the origin of the widely-repeated claim that he was born circa 1666. It's worth pointing out, though, that there's still nothing which definitively links this man with the indentured servant from Glasgow who went to Virginia in 1698, though I can see why interested researchers would have been quick to make the connection.

Again, I would want to see much more work done on this man's origins before it even began to be worthwhile speculating about a supposed connection with Drummonds.

All the best,
Kelsey

[Paulo Canedo]

Not exactly Jamie later gave a possibility of what happened genealogically if the middle of the range was far off.

[Kelsey Jackson Williams]

But regardless, this is all hopeless speculation. At absolute best, the evidence seems to be telling us that there *may* be something unexpected in the ancestry of this man. To attempt to move from that to a specific genealogical connection without any further evidence is to pull a story out of thin air.

All the best,
Kelsey

[James Dow Allen]

I have no further use for this thread myself, but want to rescue other readers from some of the ignorances shown here.

> > Prestige graves show that there was an elite, the Y-dna evidence
> > demonstrates that the elite formed an agnatic clan, and that
> > the procreation advantage was as seen with Khans or other Great Kings.
> > Obviously nobody knows what these Chiefs were called, or any
> > details of the political structure.

On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 9:47:08 PM UTC+7, John Watson wrote:
> > ::confused:: make up your mind! Is Beaker a "kind of pottery"
> > or "new stone age people" ?
> >

> The bell beaker style of pottery first appears in north-western
> Europe about 2500 B.C. which was before the age of metal working
> when people were using stone tools. This style of pottery continued
> until about 1700 B.C. by which time copper tools and weapons
> had been developed, closely followed by bronze.

This is laughably wrong. There are copper tools known from the Fertile Crescent and the Balkans thousands of years before Bell Beaker, and copper metallurgy was visible in much of Central Europe before the 3500 BC date used informally as the beginning of the European Chalcolithic. It may be unclear exactly when the famous Los Millares culture of southern Spain
first used copper tools, but it was probably before 3000 BC.

In fact it was the Bell Beaker culture itself which brought widespread metallurgy to Western Europe. https://www.iansa.eu/papers/IANSA-2010-01-02-merkl.pdf might be helpful for someone who wishes to confirm this. (The paper will be of no use to John Watson: he'll see phrasing like "The questions of whether there exists a typical Bell Beaker metal ..." and get confused -- Were the beakers made out of metal? :-) :-) :-) :-) )

Similar comments apply to Todd's sarcastic joke about stable-boys. Although details are hard to come by, an increase in horse domestication in Western Europe was synchronous with Bell Beaker. And one of the earliest indications of horse riding in Western Europe is
> A notable observation from the physical anthropological examination
> is traits at the acetabulum and the femur head suggesting that
> the individual frequently rode horses.
This is reported from the archaeological site Quedlinburg VII.
What culture is that 2300 BC site assigned to? BELL BEAKER.

> > Leave you guys alone for a few years and you become twice as
> > pedantic and irritating as ever! Congratulations, I guess.

You guys are not only more pedantic than before;
you're also much stupider.

J

[taf]

On Thursday, August 10, 2017 at 3:01:33 AM UTC-7, James Dow Allen wrote:

> Similar comments apply to Todd's sarcastic joke about stable-boys. Although
> details are hard to come by, an increase in horse domestication in Western
> Europe was synchronous with Bell Beaker. And one of the earliest
> indications of horse riding in Western Europe is
> > A notable observation from the physical anthropological examination
> > is traits at the acetabulum and the femur head suggesting that
> > the individual frequently rode horses.
> This is reported from the archaeological site Quedlinburg VII.
> What culture is that 2300 BC site assigned to? BELL BEAKER.

They had horses, therefore it must be the kings/chiefs from whom a widespread haplotype derives. Non sequitur much?

> > > Leave you guys alone for a few years and you become twice as
> > > pedantic and irritating as ever! Congratulations, I guess.
>
> You guys are not only more pedantic than before;
> you're also much stupider.

Pedantry = having the temerity to not accept unquestioningly a totally groundless argument based in equal parts on DNA and wishful thinking, it would seem.

taf

[Bernard Morgan]

If the Beaker People are correct associated with the Indo Europeans, they would have had kings.

For the concept is found in numerous IE descend languages, which stem back to common PIE root.

Simply put kings are part of the common heritage of Indo Europeans.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 3, 2017, at 2:20 AM, John Watson <watso...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thursday, 3 August 2017 09:23:03 UTC+1, James Dow Allen wrote:
>

> A Great King of Western Bell Beaker - what rubbish are you reading? Western bell beaker was a kind of neolithic pottery prevalent in the third millennium B.C. Nobody could be a king, great, or otherwise of a kind of pottery. How do you know that these new stone age people even had kings?
>
> Regards,
>
> John
>

> -------------------------------
> To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to GEN-MEDIEV...@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

[Bernard Morgan]

The Lebor Gabála Érenn is early Christain work. By authors attempted to merge the truths of the new religion with older beliefs of their own people.
The invasions occurs on important dates in the Irish early Christain calendar (i.e. Cross quarter days found in the older Latin calendar) and are more likely echoes one origin festival were the forces of summer defeat winter. The multiple invasions of Ireland can be seen as multiple retelling of this pre-Christain conflict.

Hence the invasions cannot be taken as literal truths.

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 3, 2017, at 12:40 PM, taf <taf.me...@gmail.com<mailto:taf.me...@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 11:23:34 AM UTC-7, nore...@san.rr.com<http://san.rr.com> wrote:

-------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to GEN-MEDIEV...@rootsweb.com<mailto:GEN-MEDIEV...@rootsweb.com> with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

[Paulo Canedo]

There are suggestions by T.F. O'Rahilly and other scholars that the Fir Bolg were the historical Belgae.

[wjhonson]

On Friday, August 11, 2017 at 9:18:50 PM UTC-7, Bernard Morgan wrote:
> If the Beaker People are correct associated with the Indo Europeans, they would have had kings.
>
> For the concept is found in numerous IE descend languages, which stem back to common PIE root.
>
> Simply put kings are part of the common heritage of Indo Europeans.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Aug 3, 2017, at 2:20 AM, John Watson <watso...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thursday, 3 August 2017 09:23:03 UTC+1, James Dow Allen wrote:
> >
> > A Great King of Western Bell Beaker - what rubbish are you reading? Western bell beaker was a kind of neolithic pottery prevalent in the third millennium B.C. Nobody could be a king, great, or otherwise of a kind of pottery. How do you know that these new stone age people even had kings?
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > John
> >

And again, using the word "King" to describe "leader of fifty people" is ridiculous.

[sincearls...@gmail.com]

Kelsey you said above ( This is, no doubt, the origin of the widely-repeated claim that he was born circa 1666. It's worth pointing out, though, that there's still nothing which definitively links this man with the indentured servant from Glasgow who went to Virginia in 1698 ) This is so true and I have to say I have been at odds with this Mr.Sinkler or St.Clair for ages regarding this bogus information. This line of Sinkler was created in the USA most likely an Irish immigrant line. NO dna matches to any Sinclair,Sinkler or St.Clair outside of the USA indicating the name is solely of the USA. Ill put money on the MacRay connection. After years of this lines claim to the Sinclair lot, hes been finally run off.

[sstclair]

This comment is by Robert James Sinclair who has no data whatsoever to back up his claim, and suffers from the Rosslyn nobility delusion.