RootsChat.Com

I find it very annoying that some of the old counties have disappeared in local government reforms, especially that Kincardineshire and Banffshire have been swallowed up by Aberdeenshire, so that you get ridiculous anomalies like "Banff, Aberdeenshire" and "Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire". And the Highland counties are subsumed under "Highland".

Harry

I tested my mtDNA and Y DNA with FTDNA and also did their Family Finder (autosomal DNA) test.

FTDNA found me 25 mtDNA matches - 11 of them were at a genetic distance of 1 from me, 10 at a distance of 2 and 4 at a distance of 4.

My haplogroup is J1c2.

My earliest known mtDNA ancestor was an Ulster Presbyterian woman with a Scottish surname in Co. Down, Northern Ireland, and interestingly enough several of my mtDNA matches also had an earliest known female ancestor from that area. I also had several matches whose mitochondrial ancestry went back to Norway. Some of these people were Norwegian and some Norwegian-American. You will gather from this that I managed to correspond with some of my matches, who turned out to be quite well informed about their family-tree.

I think I can tie the Northern Irish and Norwegian strands together. The geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer wrote a book called "The Origins of the British" in which he has a map showing movement of what he called J1b people from Norway over to Scotland in the Neolithic. Those Norwegians who stayed at home would obviously have similar DNA to some of their distant cousins in Scotland. In the early 1600s the  so-called Plantation of Ulster saw thousands of Scots, mainly from the west of the country, moving over to Ulster, and many of them might have had very distant ancestry from Norway. Also - of course - in historical times Norwegian Vikings raided the west of Scotland, took women home to be their wives, while others stayed here and became Scots.

Harry

Leith and Edinburgh were separate towns until 1920, and several street names are found in both places. Previous posts here suggest the Bank Street in question was the Edinburgh one, and there were other registry offices nearby, e.g. at George IV Bridge and Chambers Street, where non-church marriages were performed.

Harry

If you are down that way it's worth visiting the birthplace on the Arbigland estate of John Paul Jones, the pirate who is regarded as the "father of the American navy". My wife and I were there once and enjoyed watching the video and getting a tour from the friendly curator who was delighted to get some visitors on a quiet day.

https://johnpauljonesmuseum.com/

Harry