Wigington Surname DNA Project- Background

Background

It is currently my understanding that the Wigington (Wiggington, Wigginton, Wiginton) lineages found in the United States today immigrated from the United Kingdom starting around the mid 1600s. Seven of the Wigington's that have been tested thus far are from Haplogroup G and two are from Hg R (either confirmed, predicted, or presumed).

For those that are from Hg G you belong to a very small group of individuals.  It is believed that around 10,000 years ago, as the last ice age ended, our ancestors, along with the other people living in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East discovered how to grow food. The Fertile Crescent extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers form an extremely fertile floodplain. Today the region includes all or part of Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
 
Our ancestors were part of the Neolithic Revolution, the point at which humans changed from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled agriculturists. The National Geographic Society's Genographic Project state that: Today, small numbers of men belonging to haplogroup G can be found in China, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the Polynesian Islands of the Pacific. In the Republic of Georgia (Caucasus Mountains south of Russia, north of Turkey) members of G make up as much as 30 percent of the population. Around 14 percent of the men on the island of Sardinia belong to this group, as well as ten percent of the men in north central Italy, eight percent of the men in northern Spain, almost seven percent of the men in Turkey, and lesser percentages in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Ukraine, Lebanon, Greece, Hungary, Albania, Croatia, and Ethiopia. G is still represented in the Middle East—some of these are Arab, some are Jews, many are neither. Across northwestern Europe, only one to three percent of the men belong to haplogroup G. Small numbers of Gs can also be found in Syria (Arabs), Russia (Adygeans), Uzbekistan (Tartars and Karakalpaks), Mongolia, and western China (Uygurs). Members of haplotype G can also be found in Sicily, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Norway, and Sweden. Haplogroup G marker arose around 30,000 years ago, in a man born along the eastern edge of the Middle East, perhaps as far east as the Himalayan foothills in Pakistan or India. He has had relatively few descendants, and members of this clan are rarely present in population frequencies at greater than a few percent.
 
For a better understanding on the origins of Haplogroup G please see Ray Bank's great web pages.
 


If you have any questions or concerns about joining this group please email me - Paula Mahan.