Isaac HULIN family St Briavels (General)

by Richard Hulan , Sunday, November 27, 2011, 13:26 (4748 days ago) @ unknown

We don't know for sure who our British ancestors were, nor is our line connected by solid documentation to the first Hulin who appears in Virginia records. That's why we have started a Y-DNA project for the Hulin family. I posted about it on the thread here that's headed "Does our DNA come from our ancestors?" For reference, here is the project (but please look at my other recent post):

http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Hul_n_/default.aspx

The Y-DNA signature that we have determined is virtually unique to our family in America has only four close parallels worldwide (among people who have tested to date, in public databases) -- and of those, the only two of British background come from elsewhere in the Severn River valley and estuary (several members of a Hall family, and one man named Brown). This is one reason we think the Forest of Dean Hulins are more likely to be our relatives than some other Hulins -- found elsewhere in England, but rather later.

The other families whose DNA is somewhat similar (they are probably in the same subclade of a much larger haplogroup) are from Poland and France, respectively. It appears that we are something of a remnant population that has been around NW Europe since the Bronze Age, roughly 4,500 years ago -- before which time, they came from somewhere farther east. This is still a bit speculative, but the science is progressing very rapidly now.

Genetic genealogy sometimes works at a level so deep, it is of more interest to anthropologists than to family historians. Be that as it may, it proves kinship in a way that traditional paper documentation cannot. And it breaks through the proverbial brick walls for people whose paper trail is interrupted by uncontrollable events (adoption, wartime destruction of records, and emigration, among many others). We would like to determine whether we have Forest of Dean ancestry, and we could prove that by matching our unusual baseline Y-DNA with someone from your Hulin family. (We didn't match Donald from Clevedon -- but so far nobody else in your family has tested to match him, either.)