About us
PREFACE
In writing this I feel that I have short sheeted, othermembers of the Farrar Farrow project. For this is not intentional, butunfortunately inevitable.
There aa group of people in the project who have tested BigY and the results have proventhat they are descendants if a man who arrived in Yorkshire circa the time ofthe 1st Crusades, thus a willing immigrant.
We don’t know his name, but I will give him the name of his SNP (Single NucleotidePolymorphism) named YP5578.
A little on this (SNP’s and naming of SNPs. YDNA has two things that are tested for DNA Ysegments (DYS) also known as Short Term Repeat( STR’s). On your personal pageyou have a list of from 37 to 111 STRSs,each STR is different and has its own mutation rate, Some like CDYb can mutateevery generation, others like DYS 390 mutate once ever thousand years, from STR’sone can deduce possible relationships, but almost impossible to accuratelypredict time to most recent common ancestor, but we can draw some tentativeconclusions, For instance a genetic distance of 3 implies that one will have togo back some 400 or 500 years to find a common ancestor. A genetic distance of4 definitely means that we have to go back to at least the 15thcentury to find a common ancestor.
The other thing that YDNA provides are SNP’s. SNPs appearsequentially, (serially), they don’t disappear or drop out, New SNPs appear every other generation, orlonger (some sources say every 150 years.
Hereis my SNP “tree” R-M512/M198->M420->M459->M198->M417->Z645->Z93->YP5585->>YP5582YP5578->Y28816->YP5905->FT3740005->BY27595
The Internataional Societyof Genetic Genealogists llist it as R1a1a1b2h1a1ah2a1
R-M512 is the “great greatgreat… etc grandfather) of all in haplgroup R.
In the above string you willnotice YP5578. I have tentatively identified this as a man who was born, orarrived, in Yorkshire, then called the Barony of Northumbria, about the time ofcrusaders returning from the crusades.
This SNP YP5578 has beenfound nowhere else in the world, other than modern times because of migrationto America, New Zealand, Australia, than in Yorkshire.
The next subclade thatappears (to date) is YP5905, it appeared around 1600, plus or minus, and thatcoincides with the brith of Councilor William Farrar who migrated to Jamestownin 1618, there are about 19 men in the project, each claiming him as anancestor, who have that SNP.
YP5905 then had descendantswho were born with their own SNPs. I amsure that there are many SNP’s but unfortunately not enough male Farrardescendants have tested, because it takes two to tango and it also takes two tot positive for a SNP for it to be recognized, and then forwarded to ISOGG and be name All testeeshave what are called novel SNP’s that is SNP’s that are unmatched thus not identified and named.
I had two novel SNPS, but then the testing algorithm wasimproved and matches were identified.
In fact I had five matcheswith men who claim Stephen Farrar born 1756 as an ancestor, and that SNP isFT347005, and one match with my 2nd cousin BY27595, which I identifyas my great grandfather born 1850.
There are four members whohave a subclade of YP5905 anemd YP6373, and we believe that their commonancestor is a William Farrar born 1718who married Winifred Clark.
A note about SNP names, youcan tell which organization identified the SNP and sent it forward for naming,FT stands for Family Tree (BigY700) and BY stands for BigY500.
Let’s return to the SNPtree.
YP5578 had a “son” (notliterally) that was born 1370 - 1450
All of the Virginia Farrars(descendants of Councilor William), have this SNP.Its name is Y28816, we havemembers surnamed English that also have that SNP.
But there are three “sons”of YP5578 and they are named Y28816, FT126302, and FT372595
And there are five mendescended from YP5578, that to date don’t have any intermediary ancestors
They are Paul, John D.Ronald, Lewis H, aAan, Walter W. some are Farrars and some are not. There is anaverage of three private or novel variants among them. I am surprised that withmore than 15 generations from the birth of YP5578, that none of them share acommon ancestor other than YP5578
With at least 15- 20generations between YP5578 and them, there should be at least 5 more SNP’s.
Two of the five live “downunder: I would assume that they share v eryrecent common ancestor, that migrated down under in the 19thCentury. Yet their common ancestor is YP5578 born about 1200ce.
With that Preface out of theway, I move on to what I have discovered to date, bear in mind that none ofthis is writ in stone, it is simply a deduction from what I have uncovered inmy research.
ORIGIN: Haplogroup Rappeared as glaciers started retreating and hunter gatherers followed.
Haplogroup R had sons R1a(M512) R1b(M269) and another R2.
When I talk of sons, I don’tmean literally, but the next appearance of a SNP.
According to calculations ofhttps://phylogeographer.com/mygrations/?hg=R1a&clade=YP5585
YP5585 was born 2,600bce in the steppes between the Black andCaspian Sea
We know, to date, thatYP5585 had a son that migrated to India, Perhaps part of the so called AryanInvasion His ISOGG name is Y91310, a descendant of him is a member of theproject
YP5585 had another son,YP5582, no estimate on when he was bornthough.
What I know is that YP5582has descendants in Iran and the Mideast (Kuwait). I surmise that these descendantswere or ar Shia Muslims. My conclusionis based on my knowledge of the reason and the relision, and Shias occupy thegolf area from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Yemen and western Saudi Abia,(where they areused as poorly paid migrant workers in Saudi oil fields0
The problem that I had tosolve, at least theoretically, is how has a SNP YP5585 jumped from the mideastto Yorkshire and not left a footprint in between, thousands of miles with noevidence of a pit stop.
At this point I rely on myknowledge of history and metalurgy.
In the early 8thCentury, an Arab invaded the Indus Valley, he massacred hundreds of thousandsbecause the holy books of Islam demand that polytheists and non believersconvert or die.
I do not know if there wereany conversions in the Indus Valley at the time, but there certainly were
Conversions when there was asecond invasion.
I do know that it was theirpractice and the practice of slavers to assess their captives for usefulness,health, strength and skills, and force march them back over the mountains thatbear their name, Hindu Kush, Hindu Slaughter.
Among those found to be aneconomic asset, were artisans, in particular those who knew the secret ofmaking high quality steel (Wooz) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel,also known as Damascus steel, but only because the crusaders first encounteredit in the Levant, made in Damascus.
Medieval Europe, especiallyat the time of the crusades. Was a feudal society, steeped in ignorance.
Society was worried by armedthugs, who were employed by their leige lords, I am talking of Knights.
They caused so much troubleharassing the peasantry and warring with each other, that the Pope found a wayto use the testosterone by sending them off on a crusade.
These were not the gloriouschivalrous knights of movies and books, but coarse, and murderous
Thugs. When there eyes fellon Constantinople, they were awestruck, with a thick walled city, and homes,castles and stadiums of stone, then they raped and sacked the city, becausethey were not true Christians butOrthodox heretics.
Then onto the holy land(Syria, Palestine) and castles and battlements of stone, these men lived andwarred out of castles of timber and mud, built on motte (mounds) and bailey’s.
Then they encountered Arabscimitars, made of wootz steel, which they named Damascus steel.
It didn’t take much toconvince stone masons and ferrors to leave the Levant and migrate to Europe.
Islam’s holy books and laws,do not make provisions for polytheists (Hindus) and atheists (infidels) to livein Muslim lands. Saudi Arabia has made provisions for that, by setting asidecompounds which are not Muslim.
There was a solution,though. Conversion. However at the time of Ummayad and Abbasid caliphates,Islam was considered an Arab only religion and thus set up roadblocks toconversion. That and non Muslims were a source of income, a poll tax, quiteonerous, called jizzyah, and the only people eligible were what they calledpeoples of the book, Christians and Jews), who could live amongst them assecond class citizens called dhimmis.
The slaves hauled from Indiawere a valuable commodity, but could not convert to Islam, and it wasn’tfeasible to convert to Judaism, as that requires rabbinical instruction andtakes time. The solution was to convert them to Christianity, which onlyrequired a profession of faith and a dunk in astream.
It doesn’t take much torealize how tempting it would be for masons and ferrors to accept the crusadersoffer to migrate to England , one they would be respected, no longer secondclass citizens, they would live among others of their faith, and be wellrewarded for the skills that they brought.
Why do I think that ourancestor was such a person (YP5582) because he was a ferror, and what is aferror. A ferror was a man who made steel, most likely crucible steel, the highquality steel for which England subsequently became famous.
Ferror is the originalspelling of the name, Ferrar, Farrer, Farrow, Farher, Fairer, Fawhrer is arevariations resulting from varying degrees of literacy and regional dialects onthe part of the person being inventoried or making a legal filing and thescrivener.
There is anotherpossibility, which I have investigaged and subsequently set aside for lack ofevidence.
Another possiblity Ihaven't fully discounted, would be Alani's, a Sarmatian tribe that the RomanGovernor/praetor Aerius allowed to settle in Brittany, then called Armorica..
Alani's, as far asknown, were a tribe of Sarmatians that had R-Z93, as well as G2 (G2 is the YDNAof Richard III)
It is also prettycommon in Europe or so I have read.
Anyway William lebetard razed Northumbria, mostly Yorkshire, to put down a rebellion of theSaxon Barons Aedwin and Morcar.
These sons of Aelfgarhas pledged fealty to William after the conquest, and thus allowed to keeptheir baronies, howver on discovery of the Domesday survey and it's taxationpurpose, they reneged on their pledge and revolted, in response Williamgathered his Army and in 1-67-1060, laid waste in what is called The Harryingof the North. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people died either under the sword orby starvation, as his army slaughtered all creaturs and burned all crops.
The survivors fledthrough passes in the Pennines to Galloway in Scotland and Cumbria, and onlydrifted back slowly.
William realised,after the fact, that he shot himself in the foot. His reason for invadingEngland, was to use it as tax farm, and in his anger he wiped out a goodportion of his tax base.
He then tried torepopulate the north. He asked his Norman lieutenants if they would be interestin the barony of Northumberland, They declined. The reason is strange to us,but solid then.
Except for a fewdales, that lie between the fells that fall of the spine of the Pennines, inwest Yorkshire, wheat will not grow in the north. The only cereal crops wereoats, barley and rye.
The Normans consideredoat as fodder for horses and Scots, And would not eat Barley or Rye bread, onlywheat bread.
It is believed thatthe Norman Robert Guiscard that invaded Italy and took possession of Sicily,did so because of a failure of the wheat crop in Normany, and that might alsohave been a motivating factor for William.
The situation was direbecause 16 years after the Harrying of the North, there were only 10,000 peoplein the North.
It was later that theDanes came back to settle in York,
Frustrated Williamturned to the man who was in charge of the Bretons, his left flank at Hastings,Alan the red (Alain le rouge, Alan Rufus). Alan accepted and made his seat atRichmond North Yorkshire.
The Bretons wereaccustomed to eating oats, barley and rye, because the climate and soil ofBrittany is very much like that of Yorkshire and the North.
I see a possibility,far fetched, that Alan Rufus, brought with him an Alani descendant withR=YP5582, or YP5578.
I once thought that itmight be Alan Rufus, but I discovered that although he never married or leftdescendants, he had a brother that did, and descendants of his brother are amutually exclusive haplogroup.
There is one thingthat favors the Crusader route and that is the original spelling of the nameFerror, and ferror is a maker of crucible steel, from the Latin ferrum.
By 1400 the family hadbranched out into the more lucrative trade of wool, of which that part ofEngland, especially West Riding Yorkshire is famous for, as the fells and moorsof the area provide a sweet grass which produces superior wool, and even todaythe major industry of the Calder valley (Calderdale)) is wool., further east inNorth Yorkhshire, steel reigns supreme, and is the home of Sheffield Steel.
A Frank Farrar, hasdone research, which I might post separately, Short story is that a Young mannamed Henrie Ferror who apparently was a dyer of wool, and an archer in thelevy of Sir John Pilkington was bribed with gifts of land in what is nowCalderdale, and includes Elphaborough Hall, and later Great Ewood, located onthe Calder River bounded by a forest and Cragg Brook, to marry his daughter whowas pregnant with the child of Richard of Gloucester (Richard III), the childKatherine Plantagenet or John of Gloucester were eventually recognized byRichard, however John of Gloucester was executed by Henry VII as a threat tothe throne.
No he is not anancestor, died without issue I think.