Richard III of England - DNA Contribution...

It's amazing they have been able to sort out these old lines since so many intermarried, especially in Ireland and Scotland. Aren't Brian Boru, King Niall, Conn of the 100 Battles, The Fitzgeralds and Somerled all kind of related to each other?

All royalties in Europe are more or less related because
they merried other nobilitys, when I follow the lines to see
which and whom I am related to I often find that the lines
meets more than once.

Charlemagne is for example my 29 to 41 Gf, and everything
in between that if I count it all right.

Charlemagne, Emperor of the West is Ulf Ingvar Göte Martinsson's 39th great grandfather!
http://www.geni.com/path/Ulf-Martinsson+is+related+to+Charlemagne-E...

Brian Boru, High King of Ireland is Ulf Ingvar Göte Martinsson's 12th cousin 32 times removed!
http://www.geni.com/path/Ulf-Martinsson+is+related+to+Brian-Boru-Hi...

Charlemagne, Emperor of the West is Brian Boru, High King of Ireland's 20th cousin four times removed!
http://www.geni.com/path/Brian-Boru-High-King-of-Ireland+is+related...

Dear Ulf,

I think you have a very nice line. Thank you for sharing it. :)

We share the same ancestors' many times over. It's funny, I think when you get down to it we all end up at the same person and that is where we truly are one. We all are the same person just divided, mixed and recombined to our own individual current selves. I think this is what Geni in it's noble quest was trying to show people.

This is where you and I share the same ancestors' above.

Brian Boru is my 27th Grandfather http://www.geni.com/path/Wanda+is+related+to+Brian-Boru-High-King-o...

I have another pedigree collapse at Charlemagne and it's too many to list so I will just post one of the them, the closest one geni can find.
Charlemagne is a my 32nd Grandfather.

http://www.geni.com/path/Wanda+is+related+to+Charlemagne-Emperor-of...

Because I have so many pedigree collapses to the same family's through two or more Grandparents I end up with Charlemagne as an Ancestor 21 times! I just counted them. Good gawd, I'm going to grow my hair long...lol

By using History link, Geni finds all the paths. Because Charlegmagne had such a big family it is through many different people and Geni just put's it down as "Charlemagne Emperor of the West Direct family line".

I think part of this is because I have another pedigree collapse at Edward iii and Philippa. They end up being my Grandparent's six times, not all at once but very close together. When you start to trace them back plus others you start to run into those multiple 1st, 2nd 3rd cousin marriages etc. When you do the math on that, it's easy to see how you start stacking up pedigree collapses occurring in virtually all the royal lines backward, so much so that Charlemagne ends up being my Ancestor 21 times.

You also have a lot of Charlemagne's with your 12 lines leading to him so this means we are probably 12 x more related than average. Have fun thinking about that one Ulf :) lol...We can't do much about it so we might as well have a little fun with it and a good laugh. :) If you have any good Charlemagne jokes please do tell ;)

As long as no more jokes about torture are made I could tell a joke about Sweden.

Ulf's very nice lines are running through a very little Island parish called "stonechurch". This parish is so small that almost every herring fisher and seagull hunter is descendant of noble men/women and queens/kings.
Stenkyrka parish on the island of Tjörn outside of the small town of Uddevalla in Sweden will next year start to celebrate the honourable descendance of Jacob and Göran Nilsson and Alf Olsson and the community is discussing to raise a statue of "Karl den Store" in order to increase the number of travellers to the island and the hotel spendings.
The "Carolus Magnus Day" will be held the day after the National Day of Sweden - which is early june, when the sailing and tourist seson starts.
In honour of all Nilssons and Olssons of Tjörn - who once and still fifty years ago hunted seagulls.
If you don't think it is funny just forget it. I like the Olsson brothers and Olsson fakes.

Justin,

Surely curators DO have power to lock profiles? Ofir Frieman does it all the time.

As for why people fake genealogies, the basic answer (usually) is that rich people hire genealogists who want money for coming up with something impressive. At any rate this seems to be true of most of the fakes for early Massachussets immigrants that I've come across, which generally stand out like a sore thumb when the people around the alleged parents of the immigrant is filled in. For early English fakes perhaps much the same is true, usually, but also you get deliberate fakes by the College of Heralds in the seventeenth century especially (for example, when someone got made an Earl who could only identify his peasant grandfather, and they thought an Earl needed a grander ancestry than that). And, of course, you get in many Heralds' Visitations rather vague reconstructions according to memory - not surprising if you try to do this yourself: I have second cousins whom I knew perfectly well whom I have not put on Geni because I have forgotten one link. I do believe that some suppositional relationships are permissible on Geni; for example, if you find one reference each to two people of obviously the same family owning the same place in say the twelfth century, it seems legitimate to speculate that one was the father of the other - though they may have been brothers or uncle and nephew. That is a legitimate response to a paucity of sources. Even much later, it seems to me permissible to speculate on a relationship where you have two families for whom you can demonstrate a history of intermarriages, where there is a record in one family of a marriage, and a record in the other family of the person (and her father) which fits chronologically and geographically, even if in the second family there is no record of the marriage. Most real genealogy started out as pretty speculative. It is only now that lots of documents in the middle ages are widely available on the internet in transcription.

Mark

Well Gerhard, we are slipping away from the DNA issue of Richard III, but I believe that the brain need breaks from all the seriousness then and then, maybe we could start a tread about everything, without having the feeling of interupting?

I know that I have hard to keep toed in the line, I wander off easily. I think it's due to my IQ, its pending between 130-140, when it's low I really feel like an idiot. I can say things that come out just the way I thought about it, without any kind of censur, that is bad and often lead me in to situation where I have to explain or defend myself.

That fact in combination with a strange humor, macabre, as a school teacher put it once, make it twice as hard to be taken seriously.

Anyway, it was over a year ago since a was out fishing herring, and you tell me, which olssons are false?

Alf Olsson is Ulf Ingvar Göte Martinsson's 9th great grandfather!
http://www.geni.com/path/Ulf-Martinsson+is+related+to+Alf-Olsson?fr...

Alf Olsson
Alf Olsson
Ättlingar 5,000
Följs av 7

Olof Alfsson d ä
Ättlingar 3,716
Följs av 8

Alf Olsson
Ättlingar 678
Följs av 2

Why would people want a fake tree i cannot believe they would want to fantasize a fake tree to write a book ????

Mark, curators can lock a profile or lock individual fields in a profile but they can't lock relationships. That can have some very odd consequences. A locked profile with no parents can reacquire the fake parents if it's merged with a profile that has the wrong parents.

Without relationship locking it's an uphill battle to clean up the medieval tree. Users do a ton of work getting something cleaned up, and a few months later it could be wrecked again, even it was locked.

All it takes is access to one of the surrounding, unlocked profiles. That's why Ofir locks as lavishly as he does. It's annoying if you want to fix something but he doesn't have a choice.

Judy, I feel the same you do but I'm betting you've had the same experience I've had with those old 19th and 20th century American genealogies. Immigrant X with unknown ancestry suddenly acquires a Rather Grand pedigree, and because it's in a book, genealogists repeat it until the end of eternity without ever noticing that it's wrong.

And, even though everyone knows all the other stories like that are wrong, people often think their favorite line is the exception ;)

lmao Gerhard and may they make a statue of Jonathon Livingston Seagull while they are at it. ;)

I have a lot of respect for the curators on geni, Ofir being one among many hardworking curators. The endless hours building trees, fixing messes, sourcing, researching and filtering is mind boggling. I admit when I first joined I did not understand how it worked and was repeating work already done causing curators to merge dupes and making unnecessary work for them. After kindly explaining how it worked, the curators always answered my questions, gave me helpful advice and more. This was on top of the immeasurable hours they had already contributed to geni.

Woodman Mark Lowes...that is a very interesting response. I would never have thought that the Wealthy would hire someone to "find" an impressive ancestor in their tree or fudge their tree. I had always assumed that they simply married someone with an impressive pedigree and their descendants inherited the benefits of that partnership. Thank you for explaining that because I never would have guessed or known.

Personally, I think every person is responsible for being impressive in their own lifetime and is capable of being extraordinary by virtue of their own actions and not the coattails of an impressive ancestor. Before the first person in a family line ever became famous there was no one famous before them. I believe that every human being on earth from the lowest of the low has something to teach other human being's that is meaningful and important.

Case in point, one day I saw an unattractive Man with no hands or legs in a wheelchair living on the streets. This Man who many probably thought had a hideous life and nothing to offer had the most magnanimous of things to offer to all the fully formed beings walking by him. I saw him get his wheel chair over to a garbage can where he plucked a used paper cup out of the trash and placed it between his knees. People began to walk by and put change in the cup and he quickly earned enough to buy some food at the fast food place from where he got the cup out of the trash. So what did a Man with no hands of legs have to teach me? Everything. This was a Man who was was industrious, capable, humble, intelligent and so much more. He didn't feel sorry for himself, he didn't cry and he wasn't even sad. He was confident, self assured and as dignified as a person picking through a trash can could be. Those who walked by and put change in his cup were struck with humility, and compassion. This Man who had nothing, who was poor, disabled and disfigured could make the privileged feel compassion, empathy and generosity. Now that my friend. is power. He had it all. That was his pedigree and it was what made him who he was. An important person. I think in today's world perhaps people want or need an impressive pedigree of their own. But in all seriousness, it is simply by being kind to each other that people feel worth. To receive kindness is to feel worth and value. To give kindness is to give worth and value and perhaps that is what is really needed, not an impressive pedigree.

Back to Richard III, by his newly transformed image via computer imaging etc., which of HIS Ancestors do you think he most resembles? Because his DNA is in doubt and Hanky Panky is suspected, who do you think he looks like the most?

Some kinds of DNA information seems to be conserved, especially when there is a bottlneck of DNA as there was about 40,000 years ago, when the breeding pairs of male/females was reduced to about 14,000 pairs. Certain ancestors from the near east which migrated toward Portugal/Spain and the rest went due north into Germany /western Russia and Scandinavia seem to have a very strong set of repeated values on the Y chromosome I-1 to R1b haplogroups. Like a wave repeating itself over and over in the leadership class.

It's clearly visible in the Stewart/Romanoff/Tudor/ lines as well as Mountbatten/ Sutton/ Hall/ Jenkins/ and Drake lines. The beginning set of values or first six the middle six and the last six of the first 37 markers are virtually identical in my observation. The rest of those values change over time, but the Royal Lines seem to carry a DNA signature which is easily discerned if one takes the time to look. The Romanov and Stewart lines share such a common ancestor in the I-1 Haplogroup which is about 10,000 years older according to my reading. The mutation from I-1 to R1b is something I hope to get conversant with. The Blue eyes of G haplogroup Richard III means that mutation occured before I-1 was split out some 40,000 years ago. I wonder who that person was? DCR

Dale, there are some problems with your theory.

There was not just one simple mutation from I1 to R1b. The two groups share a common ancestor more than 40 thousand years ago. There are many, many mutations separating them. I can see from your message that you understand this in theory, but perhaps not the significance. If you look at the tree on this page, you'll get a better idea: http://www.eupedia.com/europe/origins_haplogroups_europe.shtml

Eye color does not follow the yDNA haplogroup, so it's irrelevant that someone who is Haplogroup G had blue eyes. According to recent research, the mutation for blue eyes was 6 to 10 thousand years ago. That mutation spread to all of the major European haplogroups thousands of years ago. It doesn't tell us anything about the age of the haplogroups.

I think the bottleneck you're talking about might be the Toba event, but that is 70 thousand years ago, not 40 thousand. The theory is that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10 thousand people. But, remember it is just one of several theories about why humans are so genetically homogeneous. A newer theory is that human population was just very low overall until the Late Stone Age.

As to your basic theory that DNA information is conserved in royal families, the research shows something similar but not in the way you mean. The idea is that the different haplogroups have different mutation rates. So, R1b, I1, and G2a would all be different, at least in the genealogical time frame. Say within the past 1000 years. We can trace most of the royal families back that far. It would be very odd if a royal family in I1 and a royal family in R1b had the same mutation rate but different from everyone else in their group. And, of course, also odd if that mutation rate was preserved intact for 40 thousand years despite changes in every other branch of the human family tree and also the changes that created the different haplogroups! For a recent (2014) paper on this subject, see http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2014/05/03/004705.full.pdf.

Why would people want to fake a tree? and why would they with or without DNA evidence like to become the grand....grandnephew of Richard?

Well, one example:
In 1959 a woman nameded Magda Månesköld published a book "Our viking ancestors" with a chapter "The house Drottning (queen) on Tjörn". Tjörn is the island in Sweden with the tiny parish of "stonechurch". She had made new research and findings in the central library of New York. Now everything she and some other "researchers" before her had written about the famous Drottning family and the vikings is now part of "geni" and almost everybody from the tiny parish of "stonechurch" is descendant of vikings and very old kings.
There are - however - some very good genealogists and in this case "Tjörns släktforskare". For those who can read Swedish here is the link:

http://tjsf.org/slakter/drott2b.htm

For those who cannot read Swedish I'll try to translate the first sentence:

"Drottning family" - medieval fantasies and little reality [1] 
Most geneologists in southern Bohuslän (area north of Gothenborg) encounter sooner or later the so-called "Drottning family". Many, including myself, have great enthusiasm for the family which is said to be descended from Harald Hårfagre. (välknown Danish viking Fairhair from the 900th century) However, I have regretted my enthusiasm when I read the source criticism. The family does not hold together. This article tries to explain why."
The lady Magda had obviously no fun at all in New York in the 1950-th; so she had to go to the library and make up a story about her hometown.
Maybe she wanted to impress a gentleman with her viking blood?

How many Magdas have been around there and still are?

Well Gerhard, I haven't made up this line, nor contributed in any way to build it, so all your writings about fantasies to "The Drottning family" in order to be related with Harald Hårfager, seems to have lost its point, the line from him to my family takes another way.

Harald I Halvdansson «Fairhair» Hårfagre is Ulf Ingvar Göte Martinsson's 35th great grandfather!

http://www.geni.com/path/Ulf-Martinsson+is+related+to+Harald-I-Halv...

Well, let's make another joke, Wanda.

Justin wrote: "I'm not a fan of these old lines, as many of you know. If you have one of them, you have them all because they all channel through the same small group of people."

Some people obviosly have passed this channel - both in their minds and in "geni" - and they have connections to the most mysterious worlds.

I now have contacted the tiny parish of "stonechurch" on the island of herring fishers and seagull hunters. I have asked them to built a home for their most famous pagan God. Odin/Wotan/Woden himself is the godfather of all "stonechurchers" and Odin himself is in the line of Ulf. What a mighty pagan power. And - when and where will this end?

Well, Odin is the 9th great grandfather of the viking Harald Halvdansson «Fairhair»; and "Fairhair" is the 25th great grandfather of Ulf.
Now I think that we should install the monument of Charlemagne, "Carolus Magnus", in the palace of Odin on the island of Tjörn in the tiny parish of "stonechurch" - remove the church and build Odin's new home instead.

It is kind of getting turn on all the lights, people with an extremely high IQ - according to their own assessment - are finally connecting us deadly creatures to the old sagas from Island...the old vikings who dreamt of Valhalla with hundreds of virgins and barrels of Miller Light - reminds me of what ? Charlie ?
The sagas from Island like Heimskringla och Knytlingesagaen belong to the first thrilling screenplays before even movies like "Lord of the Rings" became big success. The vikings were not able to write - therefore there are just funny stones somewhere in the countryside with what they call nowadays "runes" - I call it "illiterate". The stories were written several hundred years later...I guess by monks or monkeys who had other problems.

However - next year I hope that we can gather alltogether in the tiny parish of "stonechurch" to admire the new palace of Odin with "Magnus Carolus" on his old wooden throne which we hopefully can borrow from the cathedral of Aachen.
And - by the way - Ulf, I hope that you will defend your Odin-ancestry, proven by Mr. "geni" himself.

Back to what Justin said:
"I'm not a fan of these old lines, as many of you know. If you have one of them, you have them all because they all channel through the same small group of people."
If you think that you are related to Richard then you also are related to Odin, the Roman and Chinese Emperors. the Faraos and everybody in the Bible - and finally to "God Almighty".

If you like this comment please tweet (only "like" is activated) - if you don't like this comment just don't reply because it was just a joke. Like "geni" seems to be with all their mysterious people in a mysterious world.

Well, for a split second I thought about just press the report button,
but then again, to accomplish what?

People will have their believs no matter what and I believe that's ok.
Thor Heyerdahl believed that Oden might had been a real King, he was sawed alongs his ankles by the established society with the right to declare whats right or not. I'm not so sure, it would have just followed the tradition, a kings son becomes king etc, and why not already then?

Before the tradition of writing people had an oral tradition, that followed some rhyming rules that made it easier to remember, it's fascinating how much some could recite without changing the content, and considering there was not much else to amuse themselves with like nowadays radio or tv, people would still have to be entertained. I guess that many underestimated the human capacity, that pity.

Thank you Justin for those references. The Blue eye thing being part of G haplogroup identified with Richard III may not go back as far I was was thinking....6,000 years seems too recent an event. I wonder why with it occuring in the Scandanavian Countries and evidenced in G haplogroup it could have spread so rapidly around the world. Surely, it occured much earlier observing Occhims Razor? It's just a thought, and I don't wish to appear argumentative, so I will dive into the references you put up. FYI I have triangulation of John Rice DNA profile with father to son descendent Robert Huges from Necotowanasee as well as the Robert Perrott to Lawrence Perrott son's of John the Quaker Perrott. Dr. Robert D. may hold the key to all of this....awaiting a response. DCR 1948

The second reference above, 2014 paper is not very helpful to beginners, it's far more technical and comes to barely anything resembling a conclusion, falling back on variable rates of change per haplogroup. The 40,000 year marker I refer to is the development of I haplogroup overall, and likely due to the Change in Ice Age conditions from warmer to colder natural selection being what it is, those who stored fat more efficiently in warmer times outlived and reproduced passed on their genes for fat storeage to the next generation in I to I-1 sub clades. That's understandable and useful to my rudemintary understanding.

As you may recall, my basic presumption has been all along that the leadership class of the First I-1 peoples of England were in conflict with later arrivers from R1b or (mongol derived) leaders from the East. The last dying gasp was John Sutton orchestration of Guileford Dudley and Jane Grey Protestant grasp at the Crown and is last I-1 BLOOD to make such a reach. and which ended badly for all three. The successor to the Tudor's was R1b Stewart's and they are still in charge. The struggle of preservation of the BLOOD of the ancient line seems clear if not logical to me. DCR

Dale, you have some ideas on this that you should set firmly aside.

First, haplogroup mutations don't happen in response to anything. They're just random mutations, going on all the time. They don't happen in response to climatic pressures. A genetic predisposition toward storing fat more efficiently, or a gene for blue eyes, or anything that might be adaptive to anything comes from other chromosomes, not the y-chromosome. The haplogroup mutations on the y-chromosome have no known affect on anything.

Second, the origin of haplogroup I is debated, but the most reliable estimates are that it formed 20 to 22 thousand years ago in the Balkans.

Third, I think you are not really understanding the vast time scales here. A few hundred years after a particular mutation it would already have spread to many adjacent groups. War, captives, migration. A few thousand years later and there probably wasn't a group anywhere in Europe that didn't have men from all of the major haplogroups. The people of Britain were not uniformly R1b until the coming of the G2a Romans and the I1 vikings. Instead, all of those groups were mixed from the beginning.

Fourth, haplogroup mutations are hidden, in the sense that there is no way for anyone to know they have them. It's hard to see how the first I1 people of England could be in conflict with late R1b arrivals. These groups were mixed. Individuals had no way to know their haplogroup. How could there have been a conflict between specific haplogroups? There could only be a conflict of cultures, but by Tudor times the British and Romans and Vikings and French were so thoroughly mixed that none of them would have been in conflict just on the basis of origin.

(Surely you mean the opposite of first I1 people being in conflict with later R1b arrivers? I1 probably originated in Denmark 4 to 5 thousand years ago. It's not the original population of England by any stretch of the imagination.)

Dale, I knew when I linked to it that the 2014 paper might not be the best evidence to give a beginner. I'll see if I can find something written for a wider audience.

The basic idea is that the authors are trying to figure out why the mutation rates for STRs are so much higher when calculated from genealogy than when calculated from human evolution.

In other words, if the higher mutation rates we see in genealogical DNA were really the norm uniformly throughout history there should be a much greater divergence Out of Africa, and all of the haplogroups should be much younger than they appear to be.

There are funny little problems because of the difference. One that you might already know from your reading is that Haplogroup I is maybe 20 to 22 thousand years old, but subgroups I1 and I2 seem to have diverged 28 thousand years ago. Not possible. Something is wrong with the mutation rate calculations.

You already mentioned one possible solution -- the Toba extinction event might have reduced human diversity at one point in history. That helps, but it's still not enough to solve the problem.

If you're not used to reading scientific studies, you might miss the bang in that last paragraph of the Discussion section. The authors suggest that different groups might have different mutation rates. Read it again, carefully, and you'll see the significance.

Gerhard, thanks for the story about Stenkyrka and Magda Månesköld. I don't speak enough Swedish to read the link, but Google Translate did well enough that I can understand the arguments. I looked to see if there is a copy of Our Viking Ancestors in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, but no. I found another book that might have some of the same material -- Måneschiöldska släkten av Olsnäs. Maybe I will have time to look at it next time I'm in Salt Lake.

One of my favorite fakes is an old article in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register that claimed Thomas Joy, a colonial American immigrant who was a ship's carpenter, was the son of Frances Paulet, daughter of William Paulet, 3rd Marquess of Winchester. I must have been only about 14 when I stumbled across that one, but even at that age I wasn't gullible enough to fall for it ;)

Ulf, you might be right about the sagas. They captured the last bit of knowledge from an oral culture. Over and over, studies show that simple stories get distorted over time but long poems with a complex meter are much more stable. Norse poetry was like the Illiad and the Odyssey -- the meter was so complex and required so much skill to create properly that it would not have been easy to just change a few lines. And, the Illiad and Odyssey were memorized and transmitted orally, so why not the sagas?

In the end, though, I'm always surprised when people have any opinion about Odin and the saga genealogies. How can anyone prove them or disprove them? Whether someone is a believer or a skeptic, it is only a matter of faith, not evidence.

Thor Heyerdahl was a great favorite of mine when I was a kid. I must have read Kon-Tiki and Aku-Aku a zillion times. Everyone thought he was crazy, but modern DNA studies have shown there might have been something to his theories, except maybe he got the direction wrong -- it should have been Polynesia to South America, not South America to Polynesia.

I don't know what to think about Heyerdahl's Odin theory. Something like that could have happened, but if it did, I think he got the details wrong. That's just my personal opinion, though. Certainly, there is a lot of evidence that pre-literate cultures preserved the memory of very distant events even if they got the details wrong. If someone tells me they know the answer, I just smile the way I would at anyone preaching a new religion to me ;)

Okay: The multiple Haplogroups I understood emerged over time in lineare progression one building out from the preceding. That's the impression I've had from day one. In the case of Blue eyes, that does not make any sense at all that the gene for blue exploded onto the scene in multiple groups. More like the smarter survivor group of Crow Magnon had first one then two then four exponential growth of blue eyes....6,000 years is too short a time for a world wide spread from a single mutation. I really don't know that but intuitively from 1 to 60 million in 6,000 years would be hard to achieve unless all women are forced to mate with the Blue Eyed King.....I've not heard of a tradition like that. With I haplogroup having a 20,000 year head-start on R1b it seems again more reasonable to belive that those groups in the lowlands of the Channel who migrated with rising seas had claims upon the land that were later contested. How does R1b overtake the largest European sub group that arrived so much earlier? I'll re read your assessment but I don't get that mingled a group from the earliest arrivers. That cuts against O.Razor and crossing at the Straits of Gibraltar makes more sense than a 3,000 mile treck around the Mediteranian to Spain.....so I-1 out of Africa takes (my rule of thumb a short cut) LOL.

Dear Wanda,

I entirely agree with you. Why would anyone want a long and supposedly distinguished ancestry (but fake) when they may have an ancestry which can only be traced a shortish way but is genuine? Someone who arrived on the Mayflower had a challenge to survive. He (or she) contributed to one of the founding ideals of the USA - "the shining city on the hill" - which motivates the USA even now, even if cynics can reasonably argue that it (like all ideals) has been often abused. Why should anyone sensible bellieve that the people who arrived were jolly good gentry who had no practical experience, who had to go from idleness to hard work and from manicures to blisters on their hands? But they do, they do, as we can see even on this discussion.

Mark

PS: Im speaking of the Land Bridge from Spain to Southern England over to France as the earliest settlements after crossing out of Africa for I-1 150000 years ago, Their I-1Haplogroup colonizes northward into Scandanavia because they have dry land to walk upon and herds to follow. Which continued North into Scandanavia and after the channel flooded, the I-1 came back to take England, Scotland, Wales.

I rely more on Ancestry.com and that's where I had my initial DNA done. I go back and forth between the two and follow the hints to see whether they track, etc. But also on Ancestry, there are numerous records to search. Not infallible, and I have family members whose response is, we're all related anyway. Now I'm getting ready to do further DNA testing and see what confirmations I get. I can say this: just because 'our family' here can trace back millennia, doesn't mean everyone can. Most of the people I know in daily life have no idea who their family members are past a couple of generations.

Dale, over and over I get the impression you're not really taking into account how long these times scales are. Six thousand years is all of recorded history. In that time the Sumerians came and went, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, on and on.

Imagine someone living in Europe 6 thousand years ago. What we think of as "tribes" hadn't even emerged yet. There are just wandering bands of hunter-gatherers. The youth of both sexes routinely leave their family groups to join or establish other groups. The population is relatively small but expanding and pushing into new lands. It's easy to see how a particular gene would spread throughout the whole area. It wasn't an explosion, just normal drift.

Remember too, that the gene for blue eyes didn't spread through the whole world. Just Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and even then the gene never displaced brown eyes and in most areas didn't even become predominant.

And remember that this is a time when it would have been easy to have 5, 6, or even 7 and 8 generations in a century. Even at a conservative 5 generations per century, that would be 50 generations in 1000 years. No one knows how many people there were in Europe at this time, but one recent estimate was that the population went from 1 million in 6000 BCE to 8 million in 2000 BCE:

https://www.academia.edu/5478715/Demographic_traces_of_technologica...

This was not steady growth, but had many booms and busts in between.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440314002982

This would have created population bottlenecks, followed by something similar to a new Founder Effect, where the random genes of the survivors would be disproportionately represented in the population (something that also happened after the Black Death in the 14th century).

There is easily room for a gradual expansion of blue eyes, if you think about the numbers and the time scale.

Here are two articles about blue eyes, if you're interested:

Science Daily article from 2008 about the common ancestor of all blue-eyed people: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130170343.htm.

Independent article from 2014 about the earliest known person with blue eyes, a skeleton from about 7 thousand years ago found in Spain:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/revealed-first-ol-blue-ey...

"I can say this: just because 'our family' here can trace back millennia, doesn't mean everyone can."
Dear Lois, thanks, I noticed that you have some connections to South Africa - wasn't there something called apartheid?
I really give up - when reasonable studies of old bones of Richard do not convince, when "geni"-users start to interprete their DNA, Thor Heyerdal becomes alive again and wakes up Odin, I'll go back to the old oral culture. Which oral culture do you mean? Please skip the last sentence because ilmao.
Sorry ; I guess I am guilty of blasphemy.
Anyhow, my name used to be Ortloff - which is/was one of the finest wine industries in South Africa.

Sooooooooooooooootrue Lois most people do not know who their grt grandparents are as for Royal descendants they would not give you the time of the day. I am a middle class Canadian living the Canadian dream i am more proud of my native descendants at least i know where i come from