WHEN JIM WILSON emailed with the results of his analysis of my own DNA, I was of course fascinated. And my faith in the accuracy of the techniques used was redoubled. Jim told me that mine did not match with any other men named Moffat on the database. Perhaps there had been a mix-up at the lab? Perhaps all was not what it seemed? We could have it retested. Jim’s polite hesitations and awkward enquiries were resolved when I told him that my father, Jack Moffat, had been an illegitimate child and that he had taken his mother’s name. What Jim did not know was that I was the first legitimate child in my paternal family for three generations. Bina, my granny, was the only child of Annie Moffat, born in 1890 at Cliftonhill, a farm near Kelso in the Scottish Borders. In 1916, Bina gave birth to my dad and her lover was Robert Charters, a soldier home on leave.
My Y chromosome marker is S142 – Scandinavian and very common in Denmark at about 13 per cent of all men. The Angles who landed and settled on the North Sea coasts of Britain came from southern Denmark and northern Germany and the derivation of the surname Charters is Anglo-Saxon. It comes from Ceatta, a personal name, and it is recorded on the Lincolnshire coast. In the seventh century, the Borders was overrun by Anglian war bands and the likelihood is that the descendants of Ceatta were amongst the warriors or those who followed them. It seems that I am an Angle, a Bernician, or, put another way, an Englishman – which is a source of immense pride.
If my Y chromosome lineage has been in the Borders for more than a millennium, my mtDNA has probably also been in this place for a very long time. Ellen Irvine, my mother, was born in Hawick and, with her parents and seven siblings, she lived in a tiny flat in the centre of the town. I have many Hawick cousins and more second cousins than I can count.
My mum passed on Irvine mtDNA to me and the surname again turns out to have English origins, meaning something like ‘a swineherd’. The distribution is mainly English and it may be that, as an occupational name, it was attached where Anglo-Saxon communities settled and farmed. My mtDNA also remembers the long walk of the pioneers out of Africa. It is a rare lineage and it arose in South Asia before making the journey westwards.
What Jim’s findings mean to me is something simple and unarguable. I am a Borderer in my blood and bone and my family has worked on the land since time out of mind. When I was doing research for a memoir published in 2003, I found the gravestone of my great-great-grandfather, William Moffat. He had been a ploughman and the churchyard in the village of Ednam lay close to where he worked at Cliftonhill Farm. His daughters were all bondagers, female field-workers who did most of the backbreaking, day-in-day-out labour on a farm. Towards the end of the memoir, having found William’s grave and that of his wife and two of his daughters, I tried to work out what I felt about my ancestors, my people:
The gravestone faces east, towards the morning sun, the rigs up at Cliftonhill Farm and stretching beyond it to the distant sea, the rich, red earth of Berwickshire where many generations of my family had walked their lives. And for a fleeting instant I heard them, my old aunts, heard the clatter of their boots come down the hill, on the metalled road by the old smiddy, heard their quiet morning chatter as they shouldered their hoes and pushed open the gate to the turnips in the bottom field by the River Eden.
* * *
I have been interested in genealogy, inheritance and genetics ever since I can remember. As a boy, I knew the gravestones of distant ancestors of my father in Fair Isle in Shetland and of my mother in Harray in Orkney. I traced the family trees back through generations of farmers and fishermen, reaching back to 1424 in the case of my mother’s family, the Fletts. So I know where I come from. The surnames of my ancestors are a roll call of the families of Fair Isle and Orkney where I grew up.
I read genetics in Edinburgh and went on to a DPhil in Oxford on human population history using genetic markers. Of course, this opened up a whole new world and, although I am primarily engaged in understanding what genetic variants tell us about health and disease, my first interest was in understanding what these markers tell us about the past. One part of my DPhil studies involved Y chromosomes in Orkney – I was interested in whether we could detect Viking DNA and I knew that Orkney was the place to look so I collected saliva samples from friends, relatives and neighbours over the Christmas holiday in 1998.
Back in Oxford, the second sample I analysed belonged to a group called M17 which I had not seen before. This was my uncle Hamish Flett’s Y chromosome and so I was very interested in what it could mean. Going through the other samples, the sixth, the sixteenth, nineteenth and many others – in fact, about a fifth all told – belonged to this group. What I did know was that M17 was also seen in Iceland. I soon got access to Norwegian, Welsh and Irish samples and the pattern became clear – M17 was very common in Norway and essentially absent in the Celtic-speaking populations. I had found a marker of the Norsemen in the British Isles. The legacy of the Viking age in Orkney was both cultural and genetic – luckily for me or I might have been lynched as Orcadians are very proud of their Viking past!
Surname specialists consider the name Flett to mean ‘a piece of land’ and there couldn’t be a more apposite derivation as the Fletts of Harray have held land very dear to them over the centuries from their first mention there in a 1492 land record to the present day. The name was first recorded in Orkney in 1136 in the person of a certain Thorkell Flett, remembered in the Orkneyinga Saga as a violent and powerful but also wise man. Flett is a nickname in this instance, probably meaning flayer or plunderer.
Flett is but one of my ancestral lineages and I’ve been lucky to be able to analyse the DNA of several others. These include many further surnames I’ve shown genetically to be of Norse pedigree – Linklater, Isbister, Clouston, Baikie and Dickson, to name a few – and also many lineages originating in Scotland.
My own Y chromosome spent twelve generations in Fair Isle, now Britain’s most isolated inhabited island. But the rarity of the name Wilson in Shetland always made me suspicious that it was not a true Norse patronymic there. Many Shetland names come from Orkney but my Wilson Y chromosome does not match Wilsons from there. Instead, it belongs to the rare S145-str43 group, which is concentrated in a band from Stirlingshire through Perthshire to Fife. These were the lands of the Maeatae, a southern Pictish kingdom. It appears that my father line originates only just to the north of where I am writing this – I can see the hill of Dumyat, the Dun of the Maeatae, out of my window in Linlithgow. There is circumstantial evidence suggesting the Fair Isle Wilsons came from Fife – one of the earliest Wilsons on record in Shetland was, in 1623, a burgess of St Andrews and the unusual given name Jerome, used by my family in every generation, is only recorded for a Wilson in one other place in Scotland – Dunfermline. Perhaps they came to Shetland with the Stewart Earls?
The Y chromosome lineages of my two grandfathers thus reflect the broader Norse-Scottish mix in Orkney and Shetland. I am, of course, proud to descend from the Norse and the Picts, their farmer and fisher descendants and predecessors. My roots are in Orkney and Shetland but it takes things to another dimension to think that my Flett and other Norse ancestral lineages have dwelt in the Northern Isles for over a thousand years. Different sides of my ancestry, Wilsons, Sinclairs, Tullochs and others, reveal DNA connections in Scotland going back 4,000 years and more – an incredible continuity. My mother was happy to learn our mtDNA was brought to Europe by early farmers as she continues to rear animals and plant crops to this day.
But the journey into the past is nowhere near complete. There is a new revolution taking place in genetics whereby the DNA of entire genomes can be read cheaply – all six billion letters of the genetic code. Once we make sense of all this information, it will provide a level of detail far beyond that which we have today, potentially identifying the very fjord a Viking set sail from, and building a family tree of all Scots and all mankind. My six-billion-letter sequence was completed last week and we will begin the analysis tomorrow.
Alistair Moffat
Selkirk
November 2010
and
Jim Flett Wilson
Linlithgow
November 2010