Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
One for the armchair generals .... will we see the Ukrainian counterattack start today ?? It would be ironic if in years to come the Russians celebrated Victory Day on the first day of their eventual defeat in Ukraine??
Wonder where all the tanks from previous years have gone?
...
The Russian military just bought a whole pile of T-34/85 from Yugoslavia, just for such parades.
I stand by my prediction, that T-34s are going to be pulled from Russian museums and war memorials by the summer, to be sent to Ukraine - for five minutes each, when up against Abrams, Leopard, and Challenger.
We haven’t seen the promised T-55s yet.
They were seen on a train a few weeks back, heading from ‘storage’ (outside, wet, half a century) to the refurb facility, where presumably a few of them will be made serviceable, or at least a Russian definition of serviceable.
My guess is that they will be converted into recovery vehicles, other engineer vehicles or heavy APCs
The Israelis did the later with a fair number of Russian tanks they captured, IIRC
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My ancestors come mainly from Ireland (Fermanagh, Athlone, Dublin), and Somerset (the surname Fear is quite specific to Glastonbury/Wells/Somerton/the Mendips), so far as a I know. But, a number moved to the South Wales coalfield, when it was developed in the late 19th century.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Plenty of Irish played a big role in building the British Empire. 27% of Wellington's army was Irish.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My ancestors come mainly from Ireland (Fermanagh, Athlone, Dublin), and Somerset (the surname Fear is quite specific to Glastonbury/Wells/Somerton/the Mendips), so far as a I know. But, a number moved to the South Wales coalfield, when it was developed in the late 19th century.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
There is a lot of Spanish ancestry in Ireland Cornwall and Wales IIRC
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Classic stress related ailment. Buy a motorbike.
There is a Ducati dealer half a mile down the road.
I find a modicum of the Singing Ginger helps , but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
Not going to work. Casino doesn't like Angela Rayner. Too "woke".
A glass of port helps to bind it, and unlike bookshops, venison, RN, etc. it is not - so far as I know - woke.
I had venison for lunch on Sunday at a pub in Blairgowrie. Absolutely superb: pink, soft and juicy but lightly charred on the outside for flavour. Its "wokeness" or otherwise never occurred to me until I saw your post.
According to some it is a vegetable.
There is so much venision.. the deer Population has exploded... , I hear its being given to foodbanks in some areas.
I think that the most I have seen in one day in our walks around the village and its woods is 10. I have seen much, much larger herds in the hills of course but the number of deer basically hanging around the village now is remarkable. They are increasingly less shy and will allow you to get very close to them before they move off. An increase in RTAs involving deer is surely inevitable.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Plenty of Irish played a big role in building the British Empire. 27% of Wellington's army was Irish.
They did, but it was the Scottish universities that provided so many of the administrators for Empire post industrial revolution.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My ancestors come mainly from Ireland (Fermanagh, Athlone, Dublin), and Somerset (the surname Fear is quite specific to Glastonbury/Wells/Somerton/the Mendips), so far as a I know. But, a number moved to the South Wales coalfield, when it was developed in the late 19th century.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
There is a lot of Spanish ancestry in Ireland Cornwall and Wales IIRC
The Irish connection with Spain comes through the Jacobites, many of whom took service with the Spanish armed forces, and some of whom returned home, or their descendants did. It might be, that's where the Costello surname (presumably derived from Castille) comes from.
Irish surnames were hispanicised, so Donoghue became Donoju, for example, so there may be Spanish surnames that went in the other direction.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My grandparents were all from Essex, not the same town, but towns and villages near to each other. And at times the same place; my dad and aunt (mother's side) took the same school bus for a time.
But my maternal grandmother was contacted by people in Australia doing their family tree - turns out they had common Huguenot ancestors.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My ancestors come mainly from Ireland (Fermanagh, Athlone, Dublin), and Somerset (the surname Fear is quite specific to Glastonbury/Wells/Somerton/the Mendips), so far as a I know. But, a number moved to the South Wales coalfield, when it was developed in the late 19th century.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
There is a lot of Spanish ancestry in Ireland Cornwall and Wales IIRC
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
What about Cymru? The Scottish parliament voted for the Union. Cymru’s history is one of piecemeal conquest by its larger neighbour.
The Tudors managed a reverse takeover, as did the Stuarts much later. The mainland of the British Isles is historically interwoven and the grievances of Wales and Scotland are largely manufactured and have no more validity than any other region of this island.
Only in the minds of gibbering nutjobs like you gammon boy.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Plenty of Irish played a big role in building the British Empire. 27% of Wellington's army was Irish.
Wellington was, of course born in Ireland, though apparently did not consider himself Irish (even though he was technically much more Irish than most so-called "Irish-Americans") saying that being born in a barn does not make someone a horse. A great general, but clearly a bit of a twat.
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
It's remarkable how political opponents of the Conservatives think the way back to electoral success for them is to junk any semblance of Conservatism.
Enough singing ginger Casino and she woudl be highly desireable
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place...
All four of mine were from what's now West Yorkshire.
But you're not wrong: my wife is from the US, and has Serbian and european Jewish ancestry.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
Yes, I suppose if we keep on going we'll get something exotic like a Londoner. But my sister has done the 'tree' and it was pretty much all Yorkshire. Not 100% in the coal industry, this is true. One or two other low status manual occupations in there. Just incredibly mundane it was. Not even a criminal. If it'd been for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? I doubt it would have been aired.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Plenty of Irish played a big role in building the British Empire. 27% of Wellington's army was Irish.
Wellington was, of course born in Ireland, though apparently did not consider himself Irish (even though he was technically much more Irish than most so-called "Irish-Americans") saying that being born in a barn does not make someone a horse. A great general, but clearly a bit of a twat.
Wellington certainly could be extremely disagreeable, but in that instance, I think he was having a joke.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place...
All four of mine were from what's now West Yorkshire.
But you're not wrong: my wife is from the US, and has Serbian and european Jewish ancestry.
Ah now if I bring my wife(s) into it that transforms things. We go global.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
Yes, I suppose if we keep on going we'll get something exotic like a Londoner. But my sister has done the 'tree' and it was pretty much all Yorkshire. Not 100% in the coal industry, this is true. One or two other low status manual occupations in there. Just incredibly mundane it was. Not even a criminal. If it'd been for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? I doubt it would have been aired.
The main benefit of becoming a celebrity must surely be getting your own who do you think you are. That and being on celebrity masterchef.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Plenty of Irish played a big role in building the British Empire. 27% of Wellington's army was Irish.
Wellington was, of course born in Ireland, though apparently did not consider himself Irish (even though he was technically much more Irish than most so-called "Irish-Americans") saying that being born in a barn does not make someone a horse. A great general, but clearly a bit of a twat.
The quote is misunderstood - it was a biblical reference/joke at the time. He was saying that just being born somewhere doesn’t make you X, you chose your own identity.
He was, interestingly, a Francophile.
EDIT: what he was really disputing was attempts to paint him as part of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Which was considered not The Thing in England or Scotland at the time.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
What about Cymru? The Scottish parliament voted for the Union. Cymru’s history is one of piecemeal conquest by its larger neighbour.
The Tudors managed a reverse takeover, as did the Stuarts much later. The mainland of the British Isles is historically interwoven and the grievances of Wales and Scotland are largely manufactured and have no more validity than any other region of this island.
Only in the minds of gibbering nutjobs like you gammon boy.
Oh dear, the collective intelligence of PB has just taken a nose-dive. Baldrick The Turnip Shagger has just entered. And yes, I was referring to you amoeba brain. Why is it that Nationalists are so ignorant of their own history? Is it just because you are all so thick? Clearly it wasn't a subject for study in your pass degree that you got from the University of Life?
Scottish people were enthusiastic colonisers. Scotland is not a colony. Read some history rather than just watching Braveheart and you might broaden your very narrow mind you silly angry little man. Now go and take a Valium and go for a walk, the walls of your bungalow are obviously getting to you.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Plenty of Irish played a big role in building the British Empire. 27% of Wellington's army was Irish.
Wellington was, of course born in Ireland, though apparently did not consider himself Irish (even though he was technically much more Irish than most so-called "Irish-Americans") saying that being born in a barn does not make someone a horse. A great general, but clearly a bit of a twat.
The quote is misunderstood - it was a biblical reference/joke at the time. He was saying that just being born somewhere doesn’t make you X, you chose your own identity.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Mince Mince Mince Mince, pork of course from Master Gammon
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Plenty of Irish played a big role in building the British Empire. 27% of Wellington's army was Irish.
Wellington was, of course born in Ireland, though apparently did not consider himself Irish (even though he was technically much more Irish than most so-called "Irish-Americans") saying that being born in a barn does not make someone a horse. A great general, but clearly a bit of a twat.
The quote is misunderstood - it was a biblical reference/joke at the time. He was saying that just being born somewhere doesn’t make you X, you chose your own identity.
He was, interestingly, a Francophile.
Wellington self-IDed. How woke.
One of the few “luxury foods” he was know to like was {drum roll}
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
Yes, I suppose if we keep on going we'll get something exotic like a Londoner. But my sister has done the 'tree' and it was pretty much all Yorkshire. Not 100% in the coal industry, this is true. One or two other low status manual occupations in there. Just incredibly mundane it was. Not even a criminal. If it'd been for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? I doubt it would have been aired.
The main benefit of becoming a celebrity must surely be getting your own who do you think you are. That and being on celebrity masterchef.
Yes a definite perk. I guess they must do some pre-audit to avoid getting lumbered with a great big yawn of a tree that doesn't make for good tv. Although anything can be found interesting with the right mindset of course. The mundane isn't boring if you drill down enough.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My grandparents were all from Essex, not the same town, but towns and villages near to each other. And at times the same place; my dad and aunt (mother's side) took the same school bus for a time.
But my maternal grandmother was contacted by people in Australia doing their family tree - turns out they had common Huguenot ancestors.
While living in Sunderland many years ago I was told that many Durham colliers were descended from Norfolk people who’d migrated North to seek work during an agricultural depression. And when I did my family’s history I discovered that many men had moved from rural Carmarthenshire to the Rhondda and neighbouring valleys.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
What about Cymru? The Scottish parliament voted for the Union. Cymru’s history is one of piecemeal conquest by its larger neighbour.
The Tudors managed a reverse takeover, as did the Stuarts much later. The mainland of the British Isles is historically interwoven and the grievances of Wales and Scotland are largely manufactured and have no more validity than any other region of this island.
Only in the minds of gibbering nutjobs like you gammon boy.
Oh dear, the collective intelligence of PB has just taken a nose-dive. Baldrick The Turnip Shagger has just entered. And yes, I was referring to you amoeba brain. Why is it that Nationalists are so ignorant of their own history? Is it just because you are all so thick? Clearly it wasn't a subject for study in your pass degree that you got from the University of Life?
Scottish people were enthusiastic colonisers. Scotland is not a colony. Read some history rather than just watching Braveheart and you might broaden your very narrow mind you silly angry little man. Now go and take a Valium and go for a walk, the walls of your bungalow are obviously getting to you.
Boring Gammon boy, get some new material or even better get lost
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
Yes, I suppose if we keep on going we'll get something exotic like a Londoner. But my sister has done the 'tree' and it was pretty much all Yorkshire. Not 100% in the coal industry, this is true. One or two other low status manual occupations in there. Just incredibly mundane it was. Not even a criminal. If it'd been for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? I doubt it would have been aired.
Not mundane at all! It would be an absolutely fascinating piece of social history. Part of me envies you being so rooted in one place. (Even if that place is Doncaster ) Though if we're going to go all blood and soil, while blood is interesting, I see it is relatively unimportant in where you are *from*. My home is the North West of England. That is where I grew up, this is where I know the views, this is where the light is right, this is where I chose to settle and raise my own children. This is where I draw my cultural references from. This would be just as true were my grandparents from Sydney, Lagos, Tokyo and Buenos Aires. Perhaps I would feel differently if my grandparents were all from one place!
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Mince Mince Mince Mince, pork of course from Master Gammon
Yawn. Why do you come to this site? I guess diversity requires some people of really low intelligence that can't debate, but just shout playground nonsense.
You do serve a purpose though. You demonstrate to everyone how stupid the average follower of Alex Salmond is. As for gammons, I think you may be indulging in a little projection there yet again. Here once again are the type of gammons that you will be able to relate to:
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My grandparents were all from Essex, not the same town, but towns and villages near to each other. And at times the same place; my dad and aunt (mother's side) took the same school bus for a time.
But my maternal grandmother was contacted by people in Australia doing their family tree - turns out they had common Huguenot ancestors.
While living in Sunderland many years ago I was told that many Durham colliers were descended from Norfolk people who’d migrated North to seek work during an agricultural depression. And when I did my family’s history I discovered that many men had moved from rural Carmarthenshire to the Rhondda and neighbouring valleys.
Merthyr Tydfil was briefly a boomtown.
I was wrong about the Costello surname, as it happens. It's of Gaelic, not Spanish origin. Also, on checking, the Irish military connection to Spain goes back as far as the late 16th century.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
Yes, I suppose if we keep on going we'll get something exotic like a Londoner. But my sister has done the 'tree' and it was pretty much all Yorkshire. Not 100% in the coal industry, this is true. One or two other low status manual occupations in there. Just incredibly mundane it was. Not even a criminal. If it'd been for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? I doubt it would have been aired.
Allegedly Who (etc) did Michael Parkinson’s ancestry and found very much the same. So it was never aired.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My grandparents were all from Essex, not the same town, but towns and villages near to each other. And at times the same place; my dad and aunt (mother's side) took the same school bus for a time.
But my maternal grandmother was contacted by people in Australia doing their family tree - turns out they had common Huguenot ancestors.
While living in Sunderland many years ago I was told that many Durham colliers were descended from Norfolk people who’d migrated North to seek work during an agricultural depression. And when I did my family’s history I discovered that many men had moved from rural Carmarthenshire to the Rhondda and neighbouring valleys.
Merthyr Tydfil was briefly a boomtown.
I was wrong about the Costello surname, as it happens. It's of Gaelic, not Spanish origin. Also, on checking, the Irish military connection to Spain goes back as far as the late 16th century.
You might be related to George Canning via his mother, who was a Costello.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My grandparents were all from Essex, not the same town, but towns and villages near to each other. And at times the same place; my dad and aunt (mother's side) took the same school bus for a time.
But my maternal grandmother was contacted by people in Australia doing their family tree - turns out they had common Huguenot ancestors.
While living in Sunderland many years ago I was told that many Durham colliers were descended from Norfolk people who’d migrated North to seek work during an agricultural depression. And when I did my family’s history I discovered that many men had moved from rural Carmarthenshire to the Rhondda and neighbouring valleys.
Yes, I think there were also a lot from Norfolk and Suffolk moved to the mines and factories in the East Midlands.
Makes sense really. Highly populated rural counties with excess population lends population to not-particularly-populated counties suddenly awash with job opportunities. I think Hampshire was a similar donor county to northern industrial areas for the same reasons.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My grandparents were all from Essex, not the same town, but towns and villages near to each other. And at times the same place; my dad and aunt (mother's side) took the same school bus for a time.
But my maternal grandmother was contacted by people in Australia doing their family tree - turns out they had common Huguenot ancestors.
While living in Sunderland many years ago I was told that many Durham colliers were descended from Norfolk people who’d migrated North to seek work during an agricultural depression. And when I did my family’s history I discovered that many men had moved from rural Carmarthenshire to the Rhondda and neighbouring valleys.
Yes, I think there were also a lot from Norfolk and Suffolk moved to the mines and factories in the East Midlands.
Makes sense really. Highly populated rural counties with excess population lends population to not-particularly-populated counties suddenly awash with job opportunities. I think Hampshire was a similar donor county to northern industrial areas for the same reasons.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Sri Lanka is a real mix of several Indian groups, Portuguese, Dutch and British.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
What about Cymru? The Scottish parliament voted for the Union. Cymru’s history is one of piecemeal conquest by its larger neighbour.
OKC , 12 greedy barstewards voted for it to get the bribes they were promised, nobody else wanted it.
You sound more bitter by the day
He is a silly angry little man with the intellectual capacity and debating ability of a lobotomised crustacean. I suspect he will throw more playground insults, which is very boring so I really need to get back and do some work. Have a nice day everyone, it was an enjoyable interlude until PBs Anglophobe Nazi turned up.
If someone can find out his shift pattern for when he moves trolleys at Tescos I'd be grateful so I can avoid the idiot.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Plenty of Irish played a big role in building the British Empire. 27% of Wellington's army was Irish.
They did, but it was the Scottish universities that provided so many of the administrators for Empire post industrial revolution.
I might be mistaken but I thought that Colonial administrators weren’t usually university graduates (still very small numbers at UK universities in this days and they weren’t generally studying to get on civil service fast track).
I thought that most colonial administrators went from schools, including those such as Haileybury which was I think an East India Company foundation, and then sat their EIC or Civil service exams then shipped off as cadets or the like.
Not to argue against the huge importance of Scots to service of the Empire in any way.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Which DNA test did you do? I have done quite a few and would say that Ancestry is currently the most accurate for ethnicity. Also they now have something called Sideview that split's your ethnicity and matches by parent.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
The Scots participated in the Empire with boundless enthusiasm, and prospered hugely off the back of it.
Disproportionately so. It is rank hypocrisy for them to claim (as a few historical illiterates have claimed on here) that they are a "colony". Looking at the number of Scots, or those of Scottish decent that have held the highest offices in Westminster it is possible to suggest that it is England that is held captive
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
Mince Mince Mince Mince, pork of course from Master Gammon
Yawn. Why do you come to this site? I guess diversity requires some people of really low intelligence that can't debate, but just shout playground nonsense.
You do serve a purpose though. You demonstrate to everyone how stupid the average follower of Alex Salmond is. As for gammons, I think you may be indulging in a little projection there yet again. Here once again are the type of gammons that you will be able to relate to:
Johnny come lately windbag shows how thick he is. You are teh moist boring windbag poster to ever come on the site. An arsehole of all arseholes and having been here years before you I will god willing be here years after you unless you bore me to death with your pathetic juvenile vacuous crap. Jog on loser and pretend you are somebody other than a thick clown elsewhere.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Which DNA test did you do? I have done quite a few and would say that Ancestry is currently the most accurate for ethnicity. Also they now have something called Sideview that split's your ethnicity and matches by parent.
I haven't done it, I'd be interested in people's experiences as well as any privacy concerns.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Yes, anywhere coastal is likely to have a mixture. In my case all my known ancestors were from ports or within a few miles of one, so it's not surprising that something exotic has arrived from somewhere. The other interesting I have found via my daughter is that basically I have very little Anglo-Saxon in me, lots of Celt (via the Channel Islands predominantly) and Viking (Yorkshire) but the West Country must be mostly celt too. Of course she won't have inherited my DNA exactly proportionately so I'm tempted to see what mine looks like.
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Classic stress related ailment. Buy a motorbike.
There is a Ducati dealer half a mile down the road.
I find a modicum of the Singing Ginger helps , but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
Not going to work. Casino doesn't like Angela Rayner. Too "woke".
A glass of port helps to bind it, and unlike bookshops, venison, RN, etc. it is not - so far as I know - woke.
I had venison for lunch on Sunday at a pub in Blairgowrie. Absolutely superb: pink, soft and juicy but lightly charred on the outside for flavour. Its "wokeness" or otherwise never occurred to me until I saw your post.
Oh, good. Had some game terrine myself on Saturday, from a local producer!
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
There was a surprising amount of ethnic blending during history. From African-born Romans serving in into northern England, through Barbary Pirates denuding coastal areas of Europe for slaves to take back to Africa, to the Crusaders making their way to the east and the Holy Land. Then there are all the traders that travelled vast distances even in neolithic times.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Sri Lanka is a real mix of several Indian groups, Portuguese, Dutch and British.
Yes, south and north Indians and Arabs, Africans and Malays as well as the three European colonisers. It's a real genetic melting pot.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My grandparents were all from Essex, not the same town, but towns and villages near to each other. And at times the same place; my dad and aunt (mother's side) took the same school bus for a time.
But my maternal grandmother was contacted by people in Australia doing their family tree - turns out they had common Huguenot ancestors.
While living in Sunderland many years ago I was told that many Durham colliers were descended from Norfolk people who’d migrated North to seek work during an agricultural depression. And when I did my family’s history I discovered that many men had moved from rural Carmarthenshire to the Rhondda and neighbouring valleys.
Merthyr Tydfil was briefly a boomtown.
I was wrong about the Costello surname, as it happens. It's of Gaelic, not Spanish origin. Also, on checking, the Irish military connection to Spain goes back as far as the late 16th century.
Elvis Costello isn't a Costello. He's really "Declan McManus"
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Which DNA test did you do? I have done quite a few and would say that Ancestry is currently the most accurate for ethnicity. Also they now have something called Sideview that split's your ethnicity and matches by parent.
I haven't done it, I'd be interested in people's experiences as well as any privacy concerns.
Presumably you know that the police use such sites to trace criminals either directly or through genetic relatives. But then one effectively signs away rights to privacy when sending samples.
Re ethnicity, I don't have any expertise, but one obvious issue is what DNA they use - mitochondrial or nuclear, and in the latter case what chomosomes. Y chromosome DNA is through the male, mitDNA through the female line.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
Yes, I suppose if we keep on going we'll get something exotic like a Londoner. But my sister has done the 'tree' and it was pretty much all Yorkshire. Not 100% in the coal industry, this is true. One or two other low status manual occupations in there. Just incredibly mundane it was. Not even a criminal. If it'd been for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? I doubt it would have been aired.
Not mundane at all! It would be an absolutely fascinating piece of social history. Part of me envies you being so rooted in one place. (Even if that place is Doncaster ) Though if we're going to go all blood and soil, while blood is interesting, I see it is relatively unimportant in where you are *from*. My home is the North West of England. That is where I grew up, this is where I know the views, this is where the light is right, this is where I chose to settle and raise my own children. This is where I draw my cultural references from. This would be just as true were my grandparents from Sydney, Lagos, Tokyo and Buenos Aires. Perhaps I would feel differently if my grandparents were all from one place!
Ah now hang on, it's quite a bit wider than Doncaster. There's lots of Barnsley in there too. Totally different area. Esp back then when you had to walk everywhere.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Which DNA test did you do? I have done quite a few and would say that Ancestry is currently the most accurate for ethnicity. Also they now have something called Sideview that split's your ethnicity and matches by parent.
I haven't done it, I'd be interested in people's experiences as well as any privacy concerns.
If you are interested in genealogy then it is an invaluable aid as it has helped me break brick walls, which I wouldn't have done just with paper records.
However, a word of warning - be prepared for the unexpected. DNA has the ability to uncover deep family secrets e.g. long lost relatives and NPEs (non parental events i.e. when a parent, usually the father is not who would you expect due to a variety of reasons).
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Sri Lanka is a real mix of several Indian groups, Portuguese, Dutch and British.
Yes, south and north Indians and Arabs, Africans and Malays as well as the three European colonisers. It's a real genetic melting pot.
It's a bit counter-intuitive that Sinhala, the majority language is actually a "North" Indian language, related to Hindi and Gujarati. Same for Divehi, the language of the Maldives.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My ancestors come mainly from Ireland (Fermanagh, Athlone, Dublin), and Somerset (the surname Fear is quite specific to Glastonbury/Wells/Somerton/the Mendips), so far as a I know. But, a number moved to the South Wales coalfield, when it was developed in the late 19th century.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
There is a lot of Spanish ancestry in Ireland Cornwall and Wales IIRC
Shipwrecked off Ireland after the failed Armada?
I think this is a bit of a myth, though there are (going much further back) genetic affinities between the 'Celtic' areas of the Isles and the people of Atlantic Spain, e.g. Galicians.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Sri Lanka is a real mix of several Indian groups, Portuguese, Dutch and British.
Yes, south and north Indians and Arabs, Africans and Malays as well as the three European colonisers. It's a real genetic melting pot.
The Romans even had a trading foothold in nearby Arikamedu (near Pondicherry).
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Which DNA test did you do? I have done quite a few and would say that Ancestry is currently the most accurate for ethnicity. Also they now have something called Sideview that split's your ethnicity and matches by parent.
I haven't done it, I'd be interested in people's experiences as well as any privacy concerns.
If you are interested in genealogy then it is an invaluable aid as it has helped me break brick walls, which I wouldn't have done just with paper records.
However, a word of warning - be prepared for the unexpected. DNA has the ability to uncover deep family secrets e.g. long lost relatives and NPEs (non parental events i.e. when a parent, usually the father is not who would you expect due to a variety of reasons).
I think in my case the chance of a NPE is quite low but who knows!
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
I'm tempted to get these tests for my wife and me. As far as I know I have extremely boring British Isles ancestry with West Country/Irish on my mum's side and South Wales and the East Coast (East Anglia up to the East Coast of Scotland) on my dad's side. It would be interesting to know if there was more in there. My wife's family come from Sri Lanka, which being an island on historical trade routes will probably give her lots of interesting stuff. We have speculated if there are some European genes in there as some of her family - and most notably our children - are quite fair.
Which DNA test did you do? I have done quite a few and would say that Ancestry is currently the most accurate for ethnicity. Also they now have something called Sideview that split's your ethnicity and matches by parent.
Ancestry’s is the most widely used, therefore has built up the biggest database.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
To recall the end of the Second World War in Europe means remembering that more Ukrainian civilians were killed than were Russians, and that more Ukrainian soldiers died fighting the Wehrmacht than Americans, British, and Frenchmen — taken together. https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1655875109616332800
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1655875110794870784 The owner of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is once again complaining about the lack of ammunition for the war against Ukraine. However, now he no longer wants to leave Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast in the coming days, according to the statement published on his Telegram channel.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
Yes, I suppose if we keep on going we'll get something exotic like a Londoner. But my sister has done the 'tree' and it was pretty much all Yorkshire. Not 100% in the coal industry, this is true. One or two other low status manual occupations in there. Just incredibly mundane it was. Not even a criminal. If it'd been for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? I doubt it would have been aired.
Allegedly Who (etc) did Michael Parkinson’s ancestry and found very much the same. So it was never aired.
Ha is that right? I was actually joking but I think I'm offended now! A solid Yorkshire salt of the earth heritage not deemed good enough for the skittish tv viewers of Middle England. No wonder they keep electing tory governments.
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1655875110794870784 The owner of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is once again complaining about the lack of ammunition for the war against Ukraine. However, now he no longer wants to leave Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast in the coming days, according to the statement published on his Telegram channel.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My ancestors come mainly from Ireland (Fermanagh, Athlone, Dublin), and Somerset (the surname Fear is quite specific to Glastonbury/Wells/Somerton/the Mendips), so far as a I know. But, a number moved to the South Wales coalfield, when it was developed in the late 19th century.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
There is a lot of Spanish ancestry in Ireland Cornwall and Wales IIRC
Shipwrecked off Ireland after the failed Armada?
I think this is a bit of a myth, though there are (going much further back) genetic affinities between the 'Celtic' areas of the Isles and the people of Atlantic Spain, e.g. Galicians.
Somebody…… can’t remember who …… wrote a book that argued that the British Isles were populated after the last Ice Age by two main waves, one up the coast of France and into the West, and the other from the East across the North Sea.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My ancestors come mainly from Ireland (Fermanagh, Athlone, Dublin), and Somerset (the surname Fear is quite specific to Glastonbury/Wells/Somerton/the Mendips), so far as a I know. But, a number moved to the South Wales coalfield, when it was developed in the late 19th century.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
Both sides of my family have strong Irish connections. My Dad's paternal line was Irish Protestant from Carlow and my Mum's paternal line was Irish Catholic from Cork. In both cases they moved to London in the mid - late 19th century.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My daughter and her mother have both had one of those online DNA tests, as my ex-wife is of Coloured South African origin and her grandmother would never admit to any non-European ancestry even though she obviously had loads (mostly various sorts of Asian, it turns out).
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
The DNA links between Iberia and the West Country are well established, I believe, and support the view that much of the Celtic west of Europe was settled by peoples moving up the coast by sea from Galicia.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Do you have any ancestors that you know of not from Yorkshire? If not, I find that surprising. I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place. Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
My ancestors come mainly from Ireland (Fermanagh, Athlone, Dublin), and Somerset (the surname Fear is quite specific to Glastonbury/Wells/Somerton/the Mendips), so far as a I know. But, a number moved to the South Wales coalfield, when it was developed in the late 19th century.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
There is a lot of Spanish ancestry in Ireland Cornwall and Wales IIRC
Shipwrecked off Ireland after the failed Armada?
I think this is a bit of a myth, though there are (going much further back) genetic affinities between the 'Celtic' areas of the Isles and the people of Atlantic Spain, e.g. Galicians.
Somebody…… can’t remember who …… wrote a book that argued that the British Isles were populated after the last Ice Age by two main waves, one up the coast of France and into the West, and the other from the East across the North Sea.
The Beaker movements into Britain follow those two routes. The late Neolithic/early Bronze Age migration saw well over 90% of the indigenous population wiped out within about 2-3 generations. Probably due primarily to diseases much like the Native Americans.
Comments
I've heard that it tends to be the case that genes stay in one place.
Yet I know very few people who have four grandparents from the same place. And those I do know in that category, that place is London: it was likely that their antecedents came there from outside. Now, 'people I know' isn't necessarily a representative sample, but still: I'm not atypical of those who I know: my grandparents were from Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London; and each of those four had grandparents from other parts of the country.
And even if you are all Yorkshire coalfield; well, coalfield jobs attracted incomers, and the era when the pits were opened was, what, six generations back - that's 64 great-great-great grandparents you had then. Surely at least one - very probably more - of them was an incomer. Coal mines attracted all manner of individuals for whom the countryside offered nothing but cold and starvation. Admittedly the amount of non-British introduced to all this was tiny, but such is the logic of exponential growth of the number of ancestors as you go further and further back in time that it seems very likely that the odd foreigner crept in amongst your gene pool.
The Israelis did the later with a fair number of Russian tanks they captured, IIRC
Ireland, on the other hand, has a very different story. It is an insult to the Irish for Scots to claim any similarity, particularly as Scottish settlers and their regiments did so much to further Irish misery.
My grandmother's maiden name was Costello, which allegedly comes from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Irish coast, but almost certainly, that's just a legend.
Irish surnames were hispanicised, so Donoghue became Donoju, for example, so there may be Spanish surnames that went in the other direction.
But my maternal grandmother was contacted by people in Australia doing their family tree - turns out they had common Huguenot ancestors.
But you're not wrong: my wife is from the US, and has Serbian and european Jewish ancestry.
He was, interestingly, a Francophile.
EDIT: what he was really disputing was attempts to paint him as part of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Which was considered not The Thing in England or Scotland at the time.
Scottish people were enthusiastic colonisers. Scotland is not a colony. Read some history rather than just watching Braveheart and you might broaden your very narrow mind you silly angry little man. Now go and take a Valium and go for a walk, the walls of your bungalow are obviously getting to you.
But the surprise was that my daughter has quite a large chunk of Iberian that her mother doesn't have, which must come from me even though all the ancestors I know about for several generations back come from the Channel Islands, Yorkshire, the West Country, and London. So you never know, you may be surprised by what you find.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-65531648
Venison…
Says it all, really
Though if we're going to go all blood and soil, while blood is interesting, I see it is relatively unimportant in where you are *from*. My home is the North West of England. That is where I grew up, this is where I know the views, this is where the light is right, this is where I chose to settle and raise my own children. This is where I draw my cultural references from. This would be just as true were my grandparents from Sydney, Lagos, Tokyo and Buenos Aires.
Perhaps I would feel differently if my grandparents were all from one place!
You do serve a purpose though. You demonstrate to everyone how stupid the average follower of Alex Salmond is. As for gammons, I think you may be indulging in a little projection there yet again. Here once again are the type of gammons that you will be able to relate to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ewu5A-fJA
I was wrong about the Costello surname, as it happens. It's of Gaelic, not Spanish origin. Also, on checking, the Irish military connection to Spain goes back as far as the late 16th century.
Makes sense really. Highly populated rural counties with excess population lends population to not-particularly-populated counties suddenly awash with job opportunities. I think Hampshire was a similar donor county to northern industrial areas for the same reasons.
If someone can find out his shift pattern for when he moves trolleys at Tescos I'd be grateful so I can avoid the idiot.
I thought that most colonial administrators went from schools, including those such as Haileybury which was I think an East India Company foundation, and then sat their EIC or Civil service exams then shipped off as cadets or the like.
Not to argue against the huge importance of Scots to service of the Empire in any way.
Re ethnicity, I don't have any expertise, but one obvious issue is what DNA they use - mitochondrial or nuclear, and in the latter case what chomosomes. Y chromosome DNA is through the male, mitDNA through the female line.
However, a word of warning - be prepared for the unexpected. DNA has the ability to uncover deep family secrets e.g. long lost relatives and NPEs (non parental events i.e. when a parent, usually the father is not who would you expect due to a variety of reasons).
This would have the secondary effect of vastly improving our fiscal position, finally making independence viable.
https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1655875109616332800
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1655875110794870784
The owner of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is once again complaining about the lack of ammunition for the war against Ukraine. However, now he no longer wants to leave Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast in the coming days, according to the statement published on his Telegram channel.
Thttps://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/09/liz-truss-to-visit-taiwan-and-give-speech-that-could-upset-uks-china-strategy
Sorry Belgium is still the worst 🇧🇪
https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1655888310298984449
ETA: Yes, he did, although apparently when he was PM, rather than before!