The ALLEN (R) DNA Patrilineage Project

The ALLEN (R) DNA Patrilineage Project

This project is dedicated to furthering the genealogical research of a particular set of ALLEN patrilineage cousins, in part by bringing to bear their specific yDNA test results, but mostly by attempting to coalesce their genealogical research. This is called the ALLEN (R) project to differentiate it from the similar Allen (I) Patrilineage project which has been set up for an entirely unrelated set of Allen patrilineage cousins.

A patrilineage in general comprises all the male line descendants of a particular man, and a genealogical patrilineage consists of all the male line descendants of one particular man who lived, perhaps, 650 years ago, and who adopted a particular surname and passed it on to his children. For most western European populations, membership in a patrilineage can be determined with a high degree of probability by a DNA test of the male yChromosome which is passed on from father to son virtually unchanged from generation to generation. Where a number of men who appear to belong to the same patrilineage from testing alone also bear the same surname, it is a virtual certainty that they descend from a remote common ancestor who bore that surname. One also expects to find in most patrilineages one or more NPEs—tested males who match the patrilineage closely yet have different surnames. So far, though, all the tested members of this group are surnamed ALLEN.

The surname ALLEN is thought to derive from a Celtic personal name of great antiquity and obscure origin. Its original English forms were most commonly “Allain” and “Alleyn”. “Allen”, the standard form used here to stand for all variants, is actually the Scottish form of the name.

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An Overview of the ALLEN (R) Patrilineage: Genetic & Genealogical

George ALLEN of Sandwich, Massachusetts (say 1585—1648)

Four of the thirteen yDNA-tested members of this project claim descents from George Allen of Sandwich, Massachusetts (MA), in Plymouth Colony, who emigrated from Weymouth, Dorset, to Weymouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. We don’t know where George ultimately came from, but it would be reasonable to guess that it was somewhere in Dorset, Somerset, or, perhaps Devon.

Although the evidence supporting some links of the ancestral chains of these four tested descendants is not as strong as it might be, and although a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, the fact that these four, who claim separately researched descents through three different sons of George, are all of the same patrilineage, and are differentiated from each other by no more than 2 mutations out of 37 (par for the course of ten generations), greatly strengthens the overall case for each one.

However, given the present state-of-the-art, yDNA testing can only in very exceptional circumstances validate a particular ancestral line—can tell us, for example, that it runs through a particular son of George. Such specific lineages can only be established by solid genealogical evidence for each ancestral link. It would be entirely consistent with the DNA, for example, if any of the known lines of descent from George followed a different ancestral channel than the one claimed, and for that matter any of them might equally well be descended from a collateral male ALLEN relation of George who might have come to New England at about the same time—although none such are at present known.

On the genealogical side, we are fortunate that exhaustive research has been done on George himself, and on his conjugal family. The definitive reconstruction of George’s family is found in ANDERSON, below, although a careful reading of the George Allen sketch in that book should make it clear that the considered judgement of the authors, the very best of New England genealogists, working with an exhaustive compilation of facts from the primary records, is still not necessarily the last word on this family. The authors themselves note that “At one time or another just about every young Allen male in southeastern New England has been placed as a son of George Allen.”

The extensive yDNA test results which have accumulated in the ALLEN Surname Project, and in particular the focus in this project on the descendancy of George of Sandwich, may well, with a bit more thorough and better documented research, modify the conclusions of the authors in certain ways.

For one thing, the paper I have published analyzing the evidence that the line of project members Melava-07 and Nancy_B-13 runs back through their common ancestor Joseph of CanterburyCT to Samuel of BridgewaterMA, son of George of SandwichMA, is, to my knowledge, the first published argument that, considering what is known about all the Samuel Allens in New England in the mid-17th Century, Samuel of Bridgewater (b.say 1633) is by far the most likely one to be the son of George. Although much more work remains to be done on this line (I have only scratched the surface of the documentary record), the case for linking Samuel of Bridgewater to George of Sandwich is significantly strengthened by the DNA evidence that Melava and Nancy_B are probably descendants of George through one of his sons.

Quaker ALLENs and the Southern Branch of the Family

One of the most interesting features of the descendancy of George ALLEN of Sandwich is the fact that he projected offshoots into the American South. In fact six of the thirteen project members claim such southern roots, though only one of the six can at present trace his lineage back to George.

It would be an understatement to say that this New England—Southern connection was unusual. To find great-grandchildren of New England Puritans in the Anglican plantation society of Virginia would be distinctly anomalous. The anomaly is accounted for, though, when we learn that many of George’s children were caught up in the first wave of New England Quakerism, for the Quakers were persecuted and hounded in the Puritan settlements, and encouraged to flock to the frontier in search of peace. And the areas of Virginia, and also North Carolina, where these Quakers settled were indeed America’s western frontiers, where they joined such other unwanted peoples as the feisty Scotch-Irish, and the pietistic, hard-working Germans.

Certain Quaker enclaves did emerge in southeastern Massachusetts, and of course in Rhode Island, the first polity in the world in which religious toleration was written into the constitution, and it is in these New England enclaves that George's Quaker progeny first took refuge. The largest number settled in DartmouthMA on the southern coast next to Rhode Island, and their descendants continued to constitute one of the largest families in the town on into the 1800s. Others trickled into Rhode Island, and as orthodox Puritanism began to lose its grip, on to Connecticut, Vermont, and New York.

But meanwhile several families of George ALLEN descendants made the big leap to Monmouth County, New Jersey where a small Quaker settlement and monthly meeting sprang up in the township of Shrewsbury. From there, it was only natural that subsequent generations should continue the migration south toward the newly opening western frontier of Virginia, west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Towards the end of the 18th century, the north central counties of North Carolina (Orange, Rowan, and the counties they gave birth to, Guilford and Rockingham) became a Quaker stronghold in their turn, but a generation before that, beginning in the 1730s, George ALLEN descendants were participating in the first settlements of the Valley of Virginia, in Augusta and Frederick Counties. The story of these first Quaker settlements beyond the Blue Ridge is told in WORRALL.

Of the four project members who can trace their lines back to George, two are descended from sons of George who went Quaker. Member Bill_L-10 descends from George’s Quaker son George, through progeny who settled first in Dartmouth, then migrated later to Rhode Island and New York. The line of the fourth member, John_W-02 (representing testee David Allen) descends from George’s Quaker son Ralph, through his son Joseph, who ended up in MonmouthCoNJ. Two of Joseph’s sons, Benjamin and Reuben, migrated in turn first to CecilCoMD, and from there to AugustaCo in the upper Valley of Virginia, appearing there first in 1739. John_W’s line runs through Reuben.

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What the DNA tells Us

First and foremost, the 37 marker Genetic Distance chart show that this is a reasonably tight-knit group. With the exception of one outlier, project member Kathy-12, it’s likely that all descend, either from George of SandwichMA, the 1635 immigrant to Massachusetts Bay, or from a close relation of his, and as we bring genealogical considerations into play, that likelihood becomes a strong probability.

As for Kathy, the likelihood is that she (her test surrogate) descends from a different, later, immigrant ancestor, though she isn’t so far removed from the mainline genetically, that a descent from George can be absolutely ruled out. In any case, she are close enough to the others to make it probable that her ancestors came from more or less the same place as George; thus if the immigrant ancestor of her line can ever be found, it may generate leads for discovering the origins of George of Sandwich.

Beyond this, there are two shared mutations, one of which appears very consequential against the backdrop of the genealogy.

The “Southern Mutation”

John_W’s line is of special importance, not only because it allows us to trace the migration of George Allen descendants into the south, but also because its yDNA haplotype is differentiated from that of the other known George Allen descendants by a characteristic mutation, DYS449+ (the marker DYS449 changed from the patrilineage norm of 31 to 32). And this mutation is shared by four of the other five ALLENs with southern roots! These other four project members (Judy-05, Bob-09, Nancy_R-11, and Tim-06) appear to trace back to FranklinCoVA—a “Southside” county which butts up against the Blue Ridge Mountains from the cis-montane side.

The other project member with southern roots, Bill_B-08, does not have the DYS449+ mutation shared by the other five, but his line traces back to Tennessee, and from there probably to RockinghamCoNC, one of the counties of Quaker settlement. Is it a coincidence that the area of FranklinCo where the “southern mutation” Allens seem to have settled is a mere twenty miles north of the border between Virginia and RockinghamCoNC? Although, Bill_B’s haplotype lacks this mutation, it is otherwise very close to that of the George Allen prototype, so that there’s every reason to suspect that he too descends from George, allbeit through a different son or grandson than the other southern-origined Allens with their distinctive mutation.

If Bill_B does descend from George through a different branch of his Quaker progeny, that would mean that the four unlinked members with the “southern mutation” are even more closely related to John_W’s known line of descent from George than otherwise, and most likely they too are descended either from Reuben (say 1694 - abt 1741), or from one his brothers—if any others went further south. I shall have more to say about this possibility below.

Other Possibly Significant Mutations

The other mutation which may be indicative is shared by Nancy_B-13, a descendant of George’s son Samuel of Bridgewater, and Angeline-04, whose line traces back (for sure) only as far as a Phineas Allen, born about 1826, probably in BrownCoOH. There is some circumstantial evidence that the father of this Phineas was also named Phineas, and that he was born in VT, but unfortunately, no birth record for Phineas Sr. turns up in the VT Vital Records Index. However, Nancy_B’s line also runs through VT, and she and Angeline do share the mutation CDYa+ (their marker value being 37 instead of the project norm 36).

Unfortunately, one can’t be too sure that this shared mutation is meaningful. The CDYs are the most mutable of tested markers, and there is some chance that these two ALLEN lines picked up the same mutation independently instead of inheriting it from a common ancestor. However, the odds favor inheritance by about 4-1, and if the mutation was inherited, the fact that Nancy-13 and Melava-07 are descended from different sons of Barnabas Allen of CanterburyVT, yet Melava’s line lacks the mutation, would mean that Angeline is probably descended from Barnabas’s son Silas, and this knowledge in turn provides a very specific research focus to guide her search for the ancestors of her Phineas.

Hopefully, as new tested patrilineage members accrue, other such overlapping mutations will appear, and similar guidance may become available to other members. Given what we know, both genealogically and genetically, one might even think of pursuing targeted testing: tracking down descendant male Allen cousins of certain known lines and recruiting them for testing purposes—perhaps subsidizing their tests—in order to determine whether they have, or do not have, a key mutation that matches one of an existing project member. Such knowledge can in some certain cases allow us to make inferences about which ALLEN family branch a particular unlinked member falls into. For example, if we had just Nancy_B and Angeline’s results, with their shared CDYa+ mutation, by testing a male Allen closely related to Melava, we would be able to make the inference I have outlined above. And if the markers in question were any other than one of the highly mutable CDYs, the inference would be that much more likely to be true.

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Further Research Possibilities: the George of Sandwich lines

On the genealogical side, the descendancy of George of Sandwich is so extensive, particularly in New England, that we may hope to attract many other testees in time, and any one of these may match mutations with existing members, and/or be able to contribute some missing piece of the genealogical puzzle. Thus, even though some project member’s lines appear to be “brick-walled” at present, there is always hope. And as matter of fact, it seems to me that few of the existing members have dug deeply into the primary records of the places indicated by the research which has been done.

It is all too easy with these New England and Quaker lines and their plenteous vital records to assume that since sets of vital records have been plausibly shuffled into coherent families, that all the necessary research has been done. However, I have found that by digging into the primary probate, land, tax, and miscellaneous court records of a place, one almost always finds additional bits of circumstantial evidence, and quite often something of genealogical significance will turn up. One is also likely to encounter anomalies—new potential pieces of the puzzle which cannot be accounted for by the prima facie theories with which most people are satisfied, and while this may be initially frustrating, some of these anomalies may turn out to be leads opening up new avenues of research for apparently blocked lines.

It should be within the compass of any of you to access the original records without an undue amount of travel or expense. Pretty much all of the county courthouse records in the US have been filmed by the LDS (the Mormons), and just about everyone can find one of the LDS Family History Centers within an hour’s driving distance (usually much closer), and can borrow therefrom the relevant films from the LDS archives in Salt Lake City for a small fee. The online FHL Catalog is the best guide to the extant records of most American jurisdictions, and it is the first place I turn to when I am familiarizing myself with the research possibilities of a new area.

It’s true that primary records research in the colonial and early American records can be quite challenging. These old manuscript records are typically hard to read, and their correct interpretation requires familiarity with the law and customs of the time. But as long as such records exist unexamined, no one can reasonably claim to be brick-walled. And even though clear relationship evidence may not, after all, be lurking in these primary records, one nearly always picks up a few slivers of local color on the folks one is researching to fill out what is supposed, after all, to be a family history.

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Further Research Possibilities: the “Southern Mutation”

The most salient problem regarding the patrilineage right now is how to link the five unlinked southerners to the general descendancy from George of Sandwich. Prior to analyzing the DNA, I was thinking that they might be descended from an entirely different immigrant ancestor—one who emigrated directly to Virginia from the SW of England (according to FISCHER, SW England was the principal source for the minority of Virginia immigrants who were not brought over as indentured servants).

Now, however, thanks to the “southern mutation”, it is almost certain that they descend from one or more of the Quaker lines exemplified by that of John_W. The only question is how to bridge the one- to two-generation gap from the time the earliest known ancestors of project members begin to be identifiable as such in the records of FranklinCoVA and nearby areas in the late 1700s, back to the early-to-mid 1700s when Quakers first began to filter down deep into VA and NC.

The starting point would be to follow up on the brothers Benjamin and Reuben in Augusta, Frederick, and other related Valley of Virginia counties, and to look for the appearance of other ALLENs in that area who might be descendants of George of Sandwich’s Quaker sons.

The descendancy of Reuben has been fairly thoroughly researched and accounted for, though some of his grandchildren may have migrated farther south. MacDONALD seems to have foreclosed on the possibility that Reuben’s brother, Benjamin, had children, but I am not so sure about that. He does note that further research needs to be done on the ALLENs of this area, but I imagine that the reason he himself didn’t pursue things further, is that there simply aren’t likely to be any, or many, records for this area which do not already appear in CHALKLEY—and I have made my own abstracts of all that do. There are also a few ALLEN records in the order book index for OrangeCo, Augusta’s parent, and there may well be deeds records there too.

Both Benjamin and Reuben took out early patents in the Valley, evidently intending to settle (MacDONALD notes these too, albeit with a couple of minor errors), but there may be others in SW Virginia by other related ALLENs. Wonderfully, the VA Patents have all been abstracted, indexed, and put online by the Library of Virginia, the search link for which is to be found here. By entering Reuben Allen and following the links you can access and download Reuben Allen’s patent.

There is a tantalizing reference in MacDONALD to an Augusta order book record dated 18Mar1746/7 which associates a Daniel Allen with the probate of Benjamin. MacDONALD notes at the same time that additional research is required on this Daniel, whom he thinks was probably married in CecilCoMD, as was (brother) Reuben. As usual, MacDONALD provides no citation for this record, but since the order books are chronological, I’ve scanned all the Chalkley abstracts for that court date (Chalkley 1:26) and there is no such record to be found—nor are there any corresponding Daniel Allen references in the indexes to any of the three Chalkley volumes. Is this one of the items which Chalkley missed, and did MacDONALD himself plow through every page of the early order books trolling for ALLENs, or perhaps it was the probate records which were meant, or maybe the date was wrong. Only the original books themselves are likely to yield up that secret, and for such a potentially important record, only the original document will do.

If Benjamin and Reuben’s brother, Daniel, did come out to the Valley, and especially if he was a Quaker, he may well have continued south in his search for vacant land in a less violent area than Augusta, which was populated largely by pugnacious Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and occasionally raided by Indians (one of my own Quaker ancestors did just that, leaving my Scotch-Irish ancestors to wrestle with the raw frontier). Daniel would only have had to journey another 80 miles due south down the Valley, crossing back over the Blue Ridge mountains to reach FranklinCoVA (perhaps passing over the old wagon road which passes within 100 yards yards of where I live), and it would have been only another 50 miles due south from there to present day RockinghamCoNC, where Bill_B’s Allen ancestors may have come from. Moreover, I have noted the presence of at least one Daniel Allen in RockinghamCoNC, though much later in the 18th century.

The goal here would be to try to match up the early Allen settlers of Augusta and Frederick Counties in the Valley, with the Allens who turn up early in FranklinCo (and its predecessors, Bedford and Lunenburg) just to the south, over the mountains—meanwhile taking care not to conflate the Allens of this patrilineage with the many unrelated Allens of Patrilineage (I) who were also pioneers in these Southside VA counties.

I would recommend, therefore, to any of this southern crew who are determined to try to solve these knotty genealogical problems, to begin to dig into the primary records of all these counties (Franklin, Bedford, Lunenburg) and compile everything found there on Allens. At the same, the data at the other end of the missing link (Augusta, Frederick, and Shenandoah Cos) needs to be systematically compiled to identify possible descendants of Benjamin, Reuben, and perhaps Daniel or others who went south instead of north as most of the Quaker Allens did.

Because the records are so scant in colonial Virginia (and North Carolina), and vital records are almost entirely lacking, there is a need to thoroughly mine all such records as exist for whatever they may yield, and to try to reconstruct, not just the focal Allen ancestral family, but all of the Allen families, in order to be able to assign all the little shards found in the record books (here a signature on a deed, there a record of jury service, or as a party to a lawsuit) to the proper identities. It is possible, by diligently pursuing this comprehensive method, to build a strong circumstantial case even where direct evidence is lacking.

RECOMMENDED SOURCES for this ALLEN (R) Patrilineage

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ANDERSON
“George Allen” sketch, pp. 27-35 in
Robert Charles Anderson, George F. Sanborn Jr., Melinda Lutz Sanborn
The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, Volume I, A-B, (Boston: NEHGS, 1999)

Although the Sanborns were important collaborators for this volume and the next of Anderson's Great Migration series, I have elected to style this source as just ANDERSON. Given the problematic nature of the reconstruction of the conjugal family of the immigrant, George of Sandwich, it is likely that all three authorial heads were brought to bear. Be that as it may, this George Allen sketch is one of the longest in any of the published GM volumes to date.

The authors first note {p30} that “At one time or another just about every young Allen male in southeastern New England has been placed as a son of George Allen.” They then proceed to consider the strongest claimants, and end up with a list which is considerably different from that found in GARDNER, though with respect to inclusiveness it matches MacDONALD except for the latter’s inclusion of son Francis. However, because MacDONALD evidently failed to take into account the many pieces of circumstantial evidence available to the authors at the NEHGS library in Boston, his estimates of the birth dates of George’s children are significantly different from those found in ANDERSON, leading to a considerably shuffled birth order.

At the end of the sketch, two secondary sources on this family are recommended. These are GARDNER and J.K.ALLEN, below.

This Great Migration George Allen sketch must be considered the definitive source. Like all the other sketches in the GM series, it is not only based on every shred of primary records evidence which has come to light in 150 years of research on these early New Englanders, it also takes into account the best secondary sources. Furthermore, all three authors are F.A.S.G.s—members of the most elite society of American genealogists. limited to no more than 50 living members, all elected by their peers. Robert Charles Anderson himself is undoubtedly the greatest New England genealogist of our day, or probably of any day.

However, precisely because the authors of this work are so well regarded, I am quite sure that they would be the last to claim that what they have published is anything but the best current take on the accumulated evidence regarding this extensive and genealogically important family. Nothing is every proved in history, and all historical propositions remain open and subject to revision in the light of new evidence, or new ways of looking at the existing evidence.

For example, one new way which has emerged just in the last 10 years since the George Allen sketch was published, is yDNA testing, and I believe that we of this patrilineage project may already begin to argue on the basis both of solid genealogical evidence, and of the yDNA testing already undertaken, that George’s son Samuel, was Samuel Allen of BridgewaterMA, and the ancestor of at least two of our project members, Nancy_B-13, and Melava-07.

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GARDNER
Charles Carroll Gardner
“George Allen of Sandwich”, in A Genealogical Dictionary of New Jersey, 16:1-4, 49-52
(reprinted in Genealogies of New Jersey Families (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2005), 2:150-169)

Robert Charles Anderson calls this the best (previous) treatment in print. Although GARDNER cites some evidence not explicitly referenced in the Great Migration sketch regarding the immigrant George and his family, his reconstruction of George’s conjugal family must give way to the more comprehensive and astute analysis in the definitive ANDERSON sketch. What makes GARDNER indispensible nonetheless, is the work he has done on many of George’s descendants, all of which is backed by copious evidential extracts and full source citations.

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J.K.ALLEN
John Kermott Allen,
       “George Allen of Weymouth, Massachusetts...”
  &  “Ralph Allen of Sandwich, Massachusetts”

According to ANDERSON, These two typescript papers were published informally in 1924 by the author, and distributed to “major genealogical libraries”, including, no doubt, the NEHGS library in Boston. I have not been able to obtain copies of these papers myself.

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MacDONALD
Jack MacDonald,
"Descendants of George Allen OF England and Sandwich, Massachusetts"

MacDonald is a professional genealogist who has researched this Allen family for many years, working extensively with primary sources. He has focused in particular on the descendants of his own Quaker line down from Joseph3 (Ralph2, George1), many of whose descendants went south, first to New Jersey, then (some of them) to western and southwestern Virginia. Insofar as I have been able to verify it, his work appears to be of high quality. Unfortunately, the virtual absence of specific source citations (he provides nothing but a bibliographic list of hundreds of generic sources at the end of his lengthy article), or even of analytical discussion of the evidence, renders it of limited value to the serious genealogist. These defects may be overcome, perhaps, by communicating with Mr. MacDonald and asking him specific questions about his sources or his reasoning. I have done this in one instance myself. Or his work may be used by the experienced researcher already familiar with the sources for particular places, as a general outline and guide to what may be found therein.

Of the secondary sources listed above, MacDONALD makes no reference to the definitive Great Migration sketch (published in 1999), nor to the John Kermott Allen papers recommended there.

RECOMMENDED SOURCES: GENERAL

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BERRY
Ellen Thomas Berry & David Allen Berry
Our Quaker Ancestors: Finding them in Quaker Records
(Genealogical Publishing Co, 1987)

This little book is a must-own guide to locating and understanding the Quaker records.

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CHALKLEY
Lyman Chalkley
Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in VA, Extracted from the Original Court Records of AugustaCo, 1754-1800, 3 vols.
(1912; rpt. BaltimoreMD: GPC, 1999). Chalkley is now in the public domain and may be accessed here.

Judge Chalkley indexed virtually all of the records found at the AugustaCoVA courthouse as of the late 19th century, though he deliberately omitted records which concerned only people of obvious German surnames. There are also some gaps in his abstracts, and inevitably, some mistakes. The abstracts themselves, though intelligent, and focused on genealogically relevant information, are often quite inadequate as representations of the records themselves, and they can even be misleading for those not well versed in both the colonial common law and institutions, and in the local geography. Nonetheless, since AugustaCo was the western Virginia frontier from the 1730s until the Revolutionary War, during which period the initial trickle of Scotch-Irish into this wilderness swelled to a flood, CHALKLEY is an indispensible resource for anyone researching 18th century Virgina beyond the mountains. It is important to understand, though, that CHALKLEY should be treated as an imperfect index to the actual primary records, and not as a source in itself.

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FISCHER
David Hackett Fischer
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
(Oxford University Press, 1989)

Although there is nothing about ALLENs here, this is perhaps the single most important work in print on the four most important subcultures of early America: the New England Puritans; the settlers of the Virginia and Chesapeake tidewater region; the Quakers; and the Scotch-Irish settlers of the western frontiers. Since ALLENs of this patrilineage mingled with all four of these cultures, this book provides some context for their varying family histories and some perspective on their evident adaptability

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QUAKER_ENC
William Wade Hinshaw
Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy. Vol. I - VI
(1936-1950; published on CD by GPC, 2003)

Transcriptions of the vast majority of extant Quaker Monthly Meeting records. An indispensable source for Quaker genealogy. It includes the records for the important ALLEN (R) Virginia monthly meetings, but not those for Shrewsbury MM in New Jersey.

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QUAKER_SHREWSBURY
Shrewsbury Monthly Meeting Records
on microfilm at Swarthmore College Library, and available through the LDS.

Transcriptions of the Shrewsbury MM, in Shrewsbury Township, MonmouthCoMJ—an important location for early ALLENs of this patrilineage.

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WORRALL
Jay Worrall, Jr
The Friendly Virginians: America’s First Quakers
(AthensGA: Iberian Publishing Co, 1994)

This is an anecdotal and narrative-style history of the American Quakers, with a useful chapter on the history of the first Quaker settlements west of the Blue Ridge, in the Valley of Virginia. This raw western frontier was first settled in the 1730s by the Quakers, by various German Mennonite groups, and by the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish, all seeking religious, cultural, and economic freedom. WORRALL tells the story of the organization of the first Quaker Monthly Meetings in the (now) counties of Frederick, Shenandoah, and Rockingham. ALLENs of this patrilineage first appeared in the RockinghamCo area in 1739, the southernmost of these counties, when it was still part of AugustaCo, but they are later found north of there in ShenandoahCo, and they belonged, variously, to the Crooked Run Monthly Meeting, north of Front Royal, and the Hopewell MM north of Winchester. Their land probably lay in the main part of the Valley and it would have been a long haul to either Monthly Meeting.

The ALLEN (R) Haplogroup, R-L21* (or R1b1a2a1a1b4)
and the Deep Ancestral History of the ALLEN (R) Patrilineage

This Allen (R-L21*) Patrilineage (to use its full name) is of quintessential British stock.

There is evidence that humans and protohumans had lived in Britain as long as 700,000 years ago, but all were driven out by the glaciers which overran Europe during the last Ice Age (20,000-8000 BC). As the glaciers melted, the human population, which had been pushed back to refugia in the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of the Mediterranean, followed them north and eventually regained access to Britain, which was at the time a peninsula of Europe, linked to it by a land bridge called Doggerland. As the ocean waters continued to rise, first Ireland (about 7500 BC), then England (about 6500 BC), were cut off from their adjoining land masses.

The R1b haplogroup, of which R-L21+ is an offshoot, goes back about 22,000 years to the Middle East, and as it happens, it became the prevalent haplogroup of the repopulated Europe. However, the mutation which marks the L21 branch occurred about 3000 years ago, long after Britain had become separated from the Continent. Consequently, although the type is also found in northern France and Germany, most R-L21+ males today are of British descent.

The Celtic culture and language was brought to Britain between 1200-800 BC, and by the time Julius Caesar led the Roman armies to Britain (about the time of Christ), Britain was Celtic. Ireland, of course, had long been separated by water from Great Britain, and Scotland by its remote geography, so it shouldn't be surprising that in time the basic Celtic culture trifurcated into three subcultures: Brythonic (covering the area of modern England, except for Wales and Cornwall), Gaelic (Ireland, the SW of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall), and Pictic (the remainder of Scotland). By about the 10th Century AD, the Gaelic subculture had largely prevailed over the Pictish subculture of Scotland, except for the lower border areas which were influenced by the Brythonic.

Since all of these cultural developments took place long after the L21 mutation had arisen in Britain, the type is to be found in all these subcultural areas. However, later offshoot branches of L21, marked by the characteristic M222 mutation, have been identified specifically with the major burgeoning of the Irish population associated with the semi-mythical tribal chief Ui Néill, about 500 AD, and descendants of these lines also made an impact on the population of the SW parts of Scotland which have always had two-way intercourse with Ireland.

The Allen Patrilineage is negative for this M222 mutation, as well as for all other mutations subsequent to L21, so it most likely descends from the English (Brythonic) strain of Celts.

It used to be thought that in the centuries 300-400 AD, when the Anglo-Saxons “invaded” England, filling the vacuum left by the Romans, that they displaced much of the native British population, or at least the population of procreating males, but recent DNA research has given this the lie. It turns out that there is very little genetic difference between the population of southern England, where the Anglo-Saxons eventually set up the Kingdom of Wessex, and the other areas of Britain. Britain is now, as it has been for many thousands of years, predominantly R1b, and especially R-L21. Based on recent DNA studies, about 65% of male Britons are of the broad European haplogroup R1b, and fully 25-50% of the current male British population is R-L21. The so-called Norman invasion, while it wreaked profound changes to the language and cultural forms of England, had even less genetic impact—on the order of 1-2%.

For those interested in reading more into these subjects, I recommend this Wiki article on Prehistoric Britain, and this Eupedia page illustrating and summarizing the diffusion of human haplotypes.

The Technical Stuff

Although a male's deep ancestry can be predicted to some degree from the test he takes to determine his surname patrilineage, it requires another kind of yChromosome testing called deep clade testing to determine the haplogroup into which his yChromosome falls. We are indebted to project members Dick Allen and Bob Allen for undertaking this additional testing. Dick, whom many of you will recognize as the administrator of the FTDNA ALLEN Surname project, has recently extended his test to cover most of the mutations downstream of L21.

While the focus in this project is on the genealogy of the descendants of the particular male ancestor who first adopted the surname ALLEN say 600-800 years ago, and thus became the founder of this ALLEN genealogical patrilineage, the founder himself, as well as all males alive today, are descendants of a much broader patrilineage which comprises all the descendants of an original yAdam who lived (it is estimated) between 50-100,000 years ago. And just we test ySTR mutations to sort living male descendants into particular genealogical patrilineages, so we may test ySNP mutations to map the whole history of the human patrilineage, and indeed all of humanity as it emerged from Africa and spread out across the continents.

ySNPs mutate so rarely that they are useless for differentiating male lineages over the genealogical time frame of a few hundreds of years, but they work very well in sorting out patrilineages over many thousands of years. As the yChromosome of the original yAdam has been passed down the exfoliating tree of his male descendants, a few of these rare ySNP mutations have occurred, each constituting a branching of the human tree. And where the bearers of these mutations can be tracked by archaeology, and their remains successfully DNA tested, it becomes possible to correlate accumulated patterns of ySNP mutations with particular populations and their migrations over time.

Technically, each new ySNP mutation creates a new human population branching, which may be referred to, more or less interchangeably as a “subclade”, or just as a new “haplogroup”. What is important is not the terminology, but the conception of a single patrilineal tree (call it a “ySNP haplotree”) which has been divided, and subdivided, and subdivided again by successive mutations to the original yAdam’s yChromosome, each mutation marking a new branch. Already, there are many hundreds of these known ySNPs, and many new ones are being discovered every year.

The highest level (earliest) branches of the human haplotree are identified by the capitalized letters of the alphabet (A, B, C, etc.), each representing a single early mutation of the original out-of-Africa yChromosome; then, as subsequent mutations have occurred wuthin each of these major haplogroups, corresponding small letters and numbers have been appended to the initial letter—analogous to the Henry System of genealogical numbering. Like the Henry System, unfortunately, as the qualifying ySNP mutation designators have accumulated, the identifying labels have become increasingly long and cumbersome, so that an entirely new nomenclature was introduced a few years ago, which is still only slowly catching on. In fact the field of ySNP testing has been burgeoning so rapidly that the nomenclature system itself has already changed several times, most recently just a couple of months ago, rendering all earlier publications obsolete in their terminology. Thankfully, the new system should render such wholesale systemic revisions unnecessary.

The old (Henry System style) designator for the Allen (R) Patrilineage is “R1b1a2a1a1b4”, which replaces at least two different versions of the old designators. In this project the new nomenclature will be used exclusively: R-L21*—where the “*” means that all the current SNP mutations subordinate to (more recent than) L21 have been tested for and found to be negative. As Dick Allen, the ALLEN FTDNA Project Administrator, has just (21Apr2011) informed us, these subordinate mutations which do not apply to the ALLEN (R) Patrilineage include: M37, M222, P66, L96, L144, L159.2, L193, L226, and P314.2.

New SNP mutations subordinate to L21 are being discovered at the rate of more than one a year, and when the next one appears on the ISOGG yDNA Haplogroup Tree, the R-L21* designation should be changed to R-L21+ to indicate that more SNP testing needs to be done. Newly discovered ySNPs are added to this tree as soon as the experts advising ISOGG are relatively sure that they represent mutations well upstream of the present, and thus encompass many surname patrilineages, and are not just recent, so-called “private SNPs”. There is no need to reorder a deep clade test to keep the Allen (R) Haplogroup classification up to date. FTDNA offers new individual SNP tests at just $29 each. It usually takes FTDNA some time to recognize new SNPs, and add tests for them, so some patience may be required.

Over the next several years, I expect that enough downstream ySNPs will be discovered that the history of this Allen patrilineage will be brought down to within 1000-1500 years of the present, and perhaps even to a particular geographical area, and that not many years after that it will become possible to identify men surnamed Allen as members of this patrilineage just by ySNP testing. Even then, though, we will want to continue to test ySTR markers, because they mutate so much more rapidly than ySNPs, that they will still be the best means of sorting members of the patrilineage into sub-branches. In fact by that time, I expect that ySTR testing will also have improved its discriminatory capabilities, so that it will much more useful for genealogical purposes.