Autosomal Arkels
Introduction
When I first started doing genealogy a few years ago, using primarily Ancestry.com and Myheritage.com, I didn't know what to make of all the autosomal DNA matches I had from the Southern states. None of my ancestors had ever lived in the South, yet I had hundreds if not thousands of distant cousins who had lived in the South for generations. At some point I realized that this was because many of my father's ancestors had come to America in the early colonies in the 1600's as Pilgrims, Puritans, Swedes in New Sweden, and Dutch, French and Germans/Danes in New Netherland. Few if any had gone to the Virginia Colony, however. My own ancestors over the first few generations moved into New Jersey, but many of their brothers and sisters, both from the New England colonies and from New Netherland had moved to Virginia and North Carolina, and then over the generations into the other Southern States, and many from there to Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa.
So then I understood that these distant cousins from the South were the descendants of the siblings of my ancestors from as long as 10-12 generations ago. I realized that DNA matches don't actually tell you where your own ancestors lived in the past, but where the descendants of their brothers and sisters live today. From where they live today you can use their genealogies to determine how they got there, and that may tell you something about where your own ancestors lived and who they were.
I also had the impression from the beginning that autosomal DNA was useful for genealogy for up to about the last 15 generations at most, not only because genealogical records only generally went back that far, but also because the chromosomal recombination process that occurred at each generation chopped up inherited DNA segments into smaller and smaller segments until they were no longer useful in identifying distant cousins. And yet as I did my genealogy I had many hints that I was picking up some DNA matches from generations much further back than that.
Myheritage.com allows the user to filter his matches by, among other things, the country in which the DNA match lives. When I filter it by matches living in Spain, for example, I get 16 matches. On my mother's side I'm mostly Scandinavian with some Irish, so Scandinavian matches are always popping up everywhere, and apparently many of the Scandinavians as well as some Irish have moved to Spain. Of my 16 “Spain” matches, by name alone 6 of them are obviously Scandinavian (including Finnish), 2 are probably Irish, 1 is either English or Irish, and 1 has a Polish surname. Only 6 of the “Spain” matches have obviously Spanish surnames!
But the real question here is why I have any matches at all from Spain with Spanish surnames. I don't have any recent Spanish ancestors whatsoever, or even a hint of them. I do, however, supposedly have a few more distant Spanish ancestors. I say “supposedly” because they're in my family tree through the Ancestry crowd-sourced tree, meaning that they're there through the genealogical work of other people. Therefore, the quality of their work is unknown and could be full of errors. But it could also be right, and I presume that someone at some point had actually done the genealogical work to prove the connection to the family line. But even if so, they could be wrong. So most of my family tree is not a true tree by genealogical standards, but there are also indications that much of such crowd-sourced trees such as the Ancestry.com tree, the Geni.com tree, and the Familysearch.org tree are surprisingly accurate. Still, the truth of the matter is that such trees must be understood as speculative.
But DNA matches are much less speculative. DNA matches could be false positives, meaning that the match does have a segment of DNA that is the same as mine, but that nonetheless it isn't IBD—Identical by Descent. Identical by descent simply means that the matching DNA segments came from a common ancestor. Shorter segments are more likely to be false positives than longer segments, with some genetic genealogists refusing to use segments 5cM or shorter because they are not reliably IBD.
One way to check on whether or not a shorter DNA segment is truly IBD is to compare the genealogies of the two matches to find a common ancestor. If there is a common ancestor, then it is much more likely that the match is truly IBD. If you can find another match with that DNA segment who also has a common ancestor, then of course the chances are even greater that the DNA segment was truly inherited from that common ancestor by all the matches who have it.
In my speculative family tree I have at least two possible sources of Spanish DNA, and both are through New Netherland ancestors. One is the mother of Anthony Jansz van Salee, the son of Dutch privateer turned Barbary Coast Pirate, Jan van Harlem (1565-1641). Jan van Harlem married a woman in Spain possibly named Margarita, who was probably a Muslim and could possibly have had Spanish ancestry. Some genealogies claim her father was “Sultan Mulay Ziden en Nasir” who was a “descendant of the prophet Muhammed.” Maybe, but maybe she was just a barmaid that struck Jan's fancy and he made up a grand ancestry for her so that he could marry her. In any case, she easily could have shared DNA with cousins who remained in Spain and are today DNA matches at My Heritage.
Another possible source of Spanish DNA is through the father of Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont, who married Otto van Arkel (1330-1396)(this is not Otto the Bastard, son of Jan V, but rather his grandfather). Elisabeth's great-great grandmother (through her father Thibault de Bar) was Margarita of Champagne, whose father was the King of Navarre from a line of kings of Navarre. Also, her 6th great grandfather on her mother's side was Alfonso VII, King of Castile and Leon. Thus, Jan V van Arkel would have had DNA from this line, as would his son Otto, as potentially would the Swaims if the Swaim line descends from Otto.
Thus, there is some genealogical reason to believe that I could share DNA with a match from Spain. It's quite possible that one or all of the six matches from Spain at My Heritage are descendants of Elisabeth de Bar or are cousins of the wife of the Dutch Muslim pirate Jan van Amsterdam.
(A brief excursion. Of the five DNA companies that have ventured an estimate of my ethnic composition, only 23&Me claims that I have any Spanish/Portuguese ancestry, which they place at 0.7%. Unlike Ancestry, 23&Me had a chromosome painting tool, and here is where they claim my Iberian ancestry can be found in my DNA:
It's hard to see, but there's a very short segment marked in blue at the end of the bottom chromosome at chromosome pair 16. Here's a zoomed-in shot:
This is segment 832888987-83895753. This segment is surrounded on either side by much longer lengths of DNA that 23&Me is only confident enough to call it “Broadly European”:
Since the shorter “Spanish and Portuguese” segment slots into the surrounding “Broadly European” segments, it seems logical to conclude that this is actually one contiguous segment of DNA, but that 23&Me was only able to identify a small segment of the segment as Spanish/Portuguese, by whatever protocol they utilize to determine ethnicity.
Here is My Heritage's chromosome painter for one of my six true Spanish matches:
This is DNA segment 84958018-86225663, and is just to the right of the short segment that 23&Me determined was “Spanish and Portuguese” but which is located within the presumed larger segment that 23&Me was unable to identify more specifically than as “Broadly European.”
Since it turns out that I do have a Spanish match that shares a segment of DNA in this location, it appears that 23&Me probably did in fact correctly identify the neighboring short DNA segment as “Spanish and Portuguese.” My guess is that in the future 23&Me will probably label the entire longer segment as "Spanish and Portuguese.)
According to the My Heritage ethnicity estimate, Gonzalez is actually only about 18% Iberian and about 62% Scandinavian. I share one other DNA segment with Gonzalez and we have 94 shared matches, all of who appear by their name to be Scandinavians/Finns. Does this mean that the 6.5 cM block of DNA is after all actually Scandinavian or Finnish rather than Spanish?
I don't think so, because none of the other 94 shared matches has triangulated DNA with Gonzalez and me. This means that none of these Scandinavian/Finnish matches have this 6.5 cM block of DNA. They have nothing to do with that bit of DNA, but are only coincidentally matches with both of us because we both have a lot of Scandinavian/Finnish DNA.
Instead, because the 6.5 cM block of DNA is located in the section that it is, as I just explained, it is much more likely that it was inherited from the matches Iberian ancestors rather than from his Scandinavian/Finnish ancestors. Which also means that I inherited it from an Iberian ancestor rather than from a Scandinavian ancestor.
Gonzalez has only 8 people in his family tree on My Heritage, so it's impossible to trace potential sources of his DNA back to its source (our MRCA). However, we can still do something interesting with a tool available on Geni.com (which is owned by My Heritage). This tools creates a relationship path from the user (when he's signed in) to anyone else in Geni's large family tree. It searches for a path and either tells you that there is no path, that there is a in-law path, or that there is a genetic path. It displays that pathway generation-by-generation, and while online when you place your cursor on a name a popup screen provides a summary of that person's record.
Obviously the pathways provided by the Geni tree cannot be assumed to be completely accurate because they are based on user-submitted information that may be incorrect. However, the tree does have curators and is quite a large tree that, on the whole, is probably fairly accurate. This tool is the key to this kind of investigation, because it does in seconds what would take hours to do by hand, meaning that most pathways between two people would remain hidden because few people are willing to spend untold hours obtaining genealogies and finding obscure connections in them over pathways that occur over many centuries.
Since we're dealing with DNA, we're only interested in the genetic pathways. The in-law pathways can reveal interesting social connections, but some are very convoluted and confusing, and go back-and-forth between continents and forward-and-backward in time. The genetic pathways, on the other hand, are simple: they start at either end with a person and go from both ends go backward in time to a common ancestor (or, more usually, to a sibling pair—presumably because with autosomal DNA you can't know whether an MRCA is the mother or the father of a sibling pair).
Despite having dozens of ancestors who immigrated to New Netherland, I'm probably only about 2% Dutch/Belgian because Dutch DNA stopped entering my line about five generations after my Dutch ancestors immigrated to America in the 1600's. However, Arkels show up in the lines of some of those Dutch ancestors in my family tree, although I don't know how accurate the genealogies of those lines are. However, in my Geni.com tree I did not develop those lines at all, but only my paternal Swaim line as well as one Swedish line that has some noble ancestors. The reason I did this is that my interest for now is primarily in the paternal line, as I'm my goal is to determine if the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line through Otto the bastard son of Jan V van Arkel. And since the Geni relationship pathway tool only displays the shortest pathway between two people (or the two shortest), I didn't want other lines potentially interfering with a pathway through Jan V/Otto.
Also, note as we go along that most of my matches through the Arkel line are through Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont or Ermengarde von Kleve, both married into the Arkel line just one or two generations before Jan V's generation. Since my autosomal-only supposed Arkel ancestors are all from before these generations, the path through Jan v/Otto should be the only possible Arkel pathway for such matches.
It's still possible that these matches could come through some other ancestors rather than the Arkel line, but no others that have de Bar-le-Duc/Dampierre -Namur ancestors. Sometimes the Geni tool will show a pathway (for a non-Scandinavian) through both Jan V/Otto and through my Swedish line. Usually the Swedish pathway will be an in-law pathway, but sometimes it's a genetic pathway. This is not as odd as it seems, because the Swedish line it goes through has nobility from an early period, and nobles often married nobles from other countries rather than people from their own country.
Now, back to the Gonzalez match. Even though we don't have an effective genealogy for Gonzalez, we can put the search term “geni gonzalez” into Google and then run a Geni relationship path search for each name that appears. Since we can't compare a family tree in My Heritage with a person in the Geni relationship pathway we can't be certain in this case that we're looking at the right pathway, but any pathway to a Gonzalez that is displayed might be of interest, because how many different Gonzalez families can I (or, really, the Arkel line) possibly be related to?
Gonzalez is a common Hispanic surname and because of the lack of a useful family tree I didn't conduct an exhaustive search, but here's a pathway for a Gonzalez who lived in Spain:
This Jose Gonzalez (1689-1712) lived in Agreda, Spain. The MRCA with him and me (through the Arkel line) was one of the parents of Phillipa de Dammartin and her sister Juania de Dammartin. This would be either Simon II de Dammartin (1180-1239) or Marie de Ponthieu (1196-1250).
As it turns out, Marie de Ponthieu's great grandfather was Alfonso VII of Spain. Recall that one of two connections to Spain in my family tree was through Otto van Arkel's wife Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont, and that her 6th great grandfather was also Alfonso VII of Spain (through a different daughter than Phillip's line).
Thus, Jose Gonzalez and I share a common ancestor who lived in Spain and through whom “Spanish” DNA could have passed down to both of us. But this is only if I descend through the Otto the bastard son of Jan V van Arkel and only if this Jose Gonazlez is an ancestor of the My Heritage match Gonzalez.
Without a family tree that connects the DNA match Gonzalez with Jose Gonzalez, I can't claim to have made a link with a DNA match to me through the Arkel line. But if the DNA match Gonzalez is not connected to the Jose Gonzalez, then what's my connection to the DNA match Gonzalez? How do I have a distant cousin in Spain, unless through a very distant connection? Other than through my New Netherland ancestors I have no hint in my family tree of any connection to Spain.
Chromosome 6
50370182-76836782
Von Wachenfeldt
I have two von Wachenfeldt matches on My Heritage, with whom I share one segment each, which is a triangulated segment approximately 14.6 cM long:
I have another three von Wachenfeldt matches on Family Tree DNA, all on this segment, though from 9.62 cM up to 15.19 cM.
The von Wachenfeldts are Swedish and I have about 20-25% Swedish ancestry, but I have no ancestors by that surname in my family tree. If I had a perfect family tree they would of course be there, because since we share DNA that must have come from a common ancestor. If that common ancestor was in my family tree, both my line and the von Wachenfeldt line would descend from that to the five von Wachenfeldt matches and me.
Although the von Wachenfeldts today are Swedish, the surname is German and began as the German name von Wachenhusen in northeastern Germany near Lübeck. The family moved to Sweden sometime in the 1600's and was ennobled in Sweden as “von Wachenfeldt.”
In My Heritage I have more than 350 relatives in common with the von Wachenfeldts, all but one with Swedish or Finnish surnames, but the vast majority of these matches are not triangulated matches (meaning that I and von Wachenfeldt separately share DNA with these matches, but not the same DNA). Still, we do share triangulated DNA with a couple dozen of these matches, but none of these triangulated matches has a family tree extensive enough to find a common ancestor.
Fortunately one of the von Wachenfelds has a family tree on FTDNA that allows us to connect her tree to the Geni tree:
And here's the same Anders Sebastian von Wachenfeldt (1782) in the Geni relationship path:
(The 4th through 7th generations up from me in this line are wrongly placed and should show Karl Karlsson instead of Ingeborg Andersdotter, due to a problem I haven't yet fixed, but this doesn't affect the rest of the pathway upstream or downstream, including the number of generations).
So did this DNA come from one of Kerstin's ancestors?
Not necessarily, and this is an important point to make clear. Any DNA segment could have come from any of the lines in the relationship pathway, and there's really no way to determine which one it was unless you can find a 3rd party to triangulate it.
But here's what happens when we follow the Wachenfeldt line up to Anders Sebastian's grandfather, Paul Frederick von Wachenfeldt (1700-1779):
Now it turns out that I'm related to the von Wachenfeldts through the (hypothetical) Arkel line as well as the Swedish line!
The MRCA of this pathway is one of the parents of Dietrich III of Meissen and his sister Adelaid, who are Otto II von Meissen (1125) and Hedwig von Ballenstadt, Princess of Brandenburg (1131).
But which line did the DNA actually come through?
Since there are several Swedish matches triangulated with this segment of DNA, it's tempting to say that the segment came through the Swedish line. But those matches could all have gotten the DNA segment from a Wachenfeldt, so it's not a certainty that it came through the Swedish ancestors.
But we do have one triangulated match with a non-Swedish surname, Rodarte. Rodarte's tree unfortunately only tells us that her father's surname was Rodarte and her mother's surname was Gallegos. There's also information on “Ancestral places in [Rodarte]'s tree,” which lists “New Mexico, USA.” There is also information that Rodarte has more than 30% Scandinavian DNA and about 7% Iberian. There's a significant amount of undisclosed DNA that could be Meso-American/American Indian.
There's a Rodarte family tree in Familysearch.org that is almost certainly this family. Based on this, my guess is that the family tree in My Heritage is not actually the family tree of the match herself, but of her father or mother (or grandparents) who are likely Hispanic without any Scandinavia admixture. In the tree there is a Jose Leon Rodarte (1909-1987) married to a Maria Basilia Gallegos (1920-2006), and my guess is that these are the Rodarte/Gallegos in the My Heritage family tree. This couple was born in New Mexico and died in the state of Washington, and at least three of their daughters married men with English-sounding surnames.
In any case, Rodarte could have inherited the chromosome 6 segment from whoever she got her Scandinavian DNA. Without further inquiry, this would probably be the common assumption. However, could she alternatively have inherited it from her Hispanic ancestors? That seems unlikely, but we saw that it's possible that my Spanish Gonzalez ancestor got his Chromosome 16 segment from a common ancestor with me.
A Geni relationship path search on Rodarte turned up no relationship, but a search on Gallegos did turn up a path to me through the Arkel line:
This is interesting, but I haven't established a definite connection between Jose Basilio Gallegos and Maria Basilia Gallegos. Jose died in 1860 in Las Vegas, NM, 60 miles north of where Maria was born (Pintada, NM) in 1920. Both share surnames and middle names, which is probably also a surname. So it is likely they are related, but not proven.
The MRCA in this relationship is one of the parents of Philippa de Dreux and Yolande de Dreux, who were Robert II de Dreux (1154) and Yolande de Coucy (1164).
These are not the same potential MRCAs of the von Wachenfeldts, but as long as there's a common ancestor from one of the pairs with the other of the pairs, then this link is possible. And there is at least one two MRCAs that both lines have in common, who are the married couple Bernard II, Duke of Saxony (990) and Ellika of Schweinfurt (1000)(through Hegwig von Ballenstadt and Yolande de Coucy).
The reader might be skeptical that a segment of DNA could survive intact through 40 generations (roughtly 1,000 years), but apparently it can. The ISOGG article “Identical by descent” states that one study estimated that triangulated DNA segments from 4 cM to 10 cM in length come from a common ancestor who lived between 500 and 1,500 years ago, and that segments longer than 10 cM likely come from a common ancestor who lived less than 500 years ago.” (Identical by descent - ISOGG Wiki )
The segment of DNA we've been discussing is about 15 cM long, which means that it is a bit long to have come from an MRCA who was born 1,000 years ago. This might mean that after all it comes from the von Wachenfeldt line, perhaps from about 1600 AD, and that it came to the Rodarte line through her Swedish ancestry that didn't pass through Spain. But it's probably also possible, if unlikely, that a segment of DNA this size could have survived intact through 40 meiosis events—in the end, it's all a matter of chance.
It's also possible that this DNA segment survived longer than normal because the SNPs in in it possessed some survival value and were therefore conserved. This is probably especially true since they are on chromosome 6, which codes for much of the Human Leucocyte Antigen (HLA) complex, which is an important part of the immune system. If this segment of DNA had some value in protecting against, say, Bubonic Plague, then it might be more likely that those who retained the whole segment were more likely to survive the Black Death that wiped out a large portion of the European population during the last 40 generations. This might make it more likely that such a segment would survive intact longer than normal.
Chromosome 4
cm 6.5 cM - 48394450 – 57945439
Verstraeten
Verstraeten is a match from Belgium. There is reliable historical documentation that indicates that Arkels lived not only in Holland, but also in Belgium from at least the 1100's, in both Hainaut (Leuze-en-Hainaut) and in Hesbaye in today's Belgian Limburg west of the Meuse/Maas. (DUTCH NOBILITY (fmg.ac) ) This is why it's important to look for matches from Belgium, and also from Lorraine in France as well as Luxembourg, where various Arkels may also have lived.
Verstraeten and I share two segments of DNA, one of them 6.7 cM long on chromosome 1 and the other 6.5 cM long on chromosome 4. Verstraeten and I have 22 matches in common, but 21 of these are untriangulated matches, meaning that Verstraeten and I are only coincidentally linked together to each other through these matches, rather than sharing DNA with them from a common ancestor. For our purposes these matches are irrelevant.
However, Verstraeten and I did triangulate with another match on the 6.5 cM segment on chromosome 4, meaning that the three of us share a common ancestor. With a segment this short, that ancestor is likely to have been born a thousand or more years in the past, so locating him or her through genealogy could very well be impossible (our best hope being that we are connected through nobility).
This is especially true since Verstraeten's tree has only 463 people in it, which is not particularly large. However, to me it was an interesting tree because most of Verstraten's ancestors lived within a relatively compact area in Limburg (both Belgian and Dutch Limburg) near Roermond on Meuse/Maas River. I've marked several of these locations on the map below:
This location is interesting for two reasons. First, at least one of the Arkels was very active in this area, this being Robrecht van Arkel, Lord of Grevenbrouck and Renswoude (1345-1412). The map below, drawn by Joan Blaeu in 1645, shows the land of Grevenbroeck (located in the Land of Loon/Loen/Looz) including the towns of Achel, Hamont and Neerpelt. These are located near the top of the map, which is actually the direction east as the map is oriented with north to the right-hand side. Roermond (Ruremonde) is located at the bottom of the map.
And this map shows how close this is to the area where the ancestors of Verstraeten lived, using the city of Molenbeersel as a reference:
Thus, Robrecht van Arkel lived about 15-20 miles from the region occupied by the Verstraeten ancestors. Here is some information about Robrecht van Arkel from the de Groen family tree (translated by Google Translate):
“Knight Robrecht van ARKEL (RENSWOUDE) (van Grevenbroek), born 1346 in Gorinchem, died about 1410. Robrecht van Arkel was enfeoffed with Renswoude in 1363 through his uncle Johan van Arkel, when he was still bishop of Utrecht. In 1366 Robrecht bought the castle of Montenaken from knight Jan van Montenaken, was himself called a knight and owned a mill in Waremme (Borgworm). As "grand seigneur" he received a life pension on 21 April 1372 for services rendered by Charles V, King of France. During his life he had a monastery and large hospital built in Roermond. Robrecht was also recipient of the County of Loon. After Jan van Hamal renounced the castle of Grevenbroek in 1367 in favor of his son Willem as a vassal, Robrecht van Arkel received the seigniory of Grevenbroek on 1 February 1380 through his uncle Jan van Arkel, who was meanwhile prince bishop in Liège. Around the year 1400 a border dispute arose between Robrecht, meanwhile called van Grevenbroek, and the municipality of Neerpelt over the ownership of the heath. Prince Bishop John of Bavaria had the matter investigated and boundary stones placed. Robrecht did not agree with this course of action, had the stones ripped out and thrown onto the dung heap of the mayor of Neerpelt. The prince bishop then raised an army, besieged Grevenbroek, had the castle of Hamont and the castle of Grevenbroek destroyed and set fire to the town of Hamont and the villages of Achel and Sint Huibrechts Lille. By decree of May 21, 1401, Robrecht van Grevenbroek lost his rights and the until then flourishing lordship of Grevenbroek, where he himself founded a hospital in the commercial town of Hamont, was annexed to the land of Loon as a fief. With limited power, son Jan still became the new lord of Grevenbroek.” Robert (21) van Arkel (van Grevenbroeck van Renswoude) (1345-1412) » Genealogie De Groen (Grolsch) » Genealogy Online (genealogieonline.nl)
Something else to note about the lordship of Grevenbroeck is that it looks as if it included the town of Overpelt (Over Peelt), or was at adjacent to it. This has some significance to some Swains since it was the hometown of the van Pelt (or Laenen) family that immigrated to New Netherland in the 1600's. The Family Tree Y-DNA project was started in large part to determine the relationship between the van Pelt and Swaim paternal lines, resulting in the determination that there is none. Some family trees show and Elisabeth van Pelt as the wife of my 7th great grandfather Cornelius Tysen Swaim, but I haven't seen any documentary evidence to prove that, although the autosomal DNA evidence seems consistent with that being true.
Another interesting point to make about the locale of the Verstraeten ancestors is how close it lies to the town of Swalmen. As far as I know the Swaim line has no real connection to Swalmen, but I hypothesized in a previous post that the Swaim name may have come from the town of Schwaam (now in Germany) on the Swalmen river. The Swalmen river also gives its name to the Netherlands town of Swalmen, and it appears that in the past “Swalmen” was actually locally pronounced much like “Swaim.” The evidence for this comes from old maps, where the town was spelled variously as “Suamme,” “Swamme,” “Zuamme,” “Zwamme:”
The weakest part of my hypothesis about the origin of the Swaim line having come from Swalmen was always that there is no known connection between the Swaim line and the region in which Swalmen is located. That the Verstraeten line has deep roots in this region doesn't imply that anyone from the Swaim line had ever visited this region, especially since the MRCA of the two lines probably lived a very long time ago. However, it does make such a connection more likely.
So did I find anyone in the Verstaeten family tree who connects to the Arkels? The short answer is no, but that I did find a surname connection that is likely to be a connection. After running the surnames in the family tree through the Geni relationship path tool, the one surname with an Arkel connection was Nijssen. This is Nijssen in the Verstraeten family tree:
Petronella Nijssen was born in 1620 in Helden, a few miles north of Roermond. When I searched on Google using the phrase “geni nijssen,” I received about 14 relevant results. Of these, one showed a genetic path to me through the Arkel line. This person is Anna Maria Nijssen:
Anna Maria Nijssen was born in 1876 in Mopertingen. Mopertingen is located about 46 miles from Helden, the birthplace of Petronella Nijssen (1620) from the Verstraeten tree. The genealogical information is too sparse to connect the two people, so the Verstraeten connection to the Arkels remains speculative. Nonetheless, let's briefly examine the connection.
The MRCA of the two lines is one of the parents of the brothers Gerard III van Loon Rieneck (1175) and Arnold III van Loon (1182). These parents are Gerhard II van Loon (1136) and Adelheid van Gelre (1140).
There's also an in-law connection to the Arkel line that is definitely connected to the Verstraeten tree. In the screenshot of the tree there's a “B Van Nienhuis/van den Beucken (1655). In the following Geni pathway, “Thomas Driessen van Nienhuijs” is the grandfather of “B. Van Nienhuis/van den Beucken,” whose first name is Bartholomeus. Thus, the in-law connection is definitely esablished. Since this isn't a genetic connection, however, I won't discuss it further.
Standifird
Standifird is the other match who shares the 6.5 cM segment of DNA on chromosome 4 with Verstraeten and me. With 430 peple in it, Standifird's tree isn't particularly large, but nonetheless I was able to find two different lines that connected genetically to me through the van Arkel line. Most of Standifird's ancestors appear to have come from England but some come from Germany, and of the two lines that connect to me, one comes through each of those countries.
Here's the part of the Standifird family tree that shows both lines, which are the Standifird line and the House line:
Here's the Geni relationship path for the Standifird line:
In this path, the MRCA of the Swaim-Standifird matches is one of the parents of Thiebaut II de Bar and Margaret of Bar. This would be either Henry II de Bar (1180-1239) or Phillipa de Dreux (1192-1242). This is a different pair than the MRCA pair from the possible Nijssen line, but that's not unexpected. We then need to look for the potential MRCAs of these pairs. I've located two common ancestors of Gerard II van Loon Rieneck and Thiebaut II de bar, which is Gottfried von Dagsburg (919-976) and his wife, whose name is unknown but is a daughter of Lietaud I, Count of Macon (895-965) and Ermengarde de Chalon (896-931).
There are undoubtedly other common ancestors that could be found, but finding them is time-consuming and pointless, since I've already proved a common ancestor (assuming the accuracy of the genealogies). The 6.5 cM segement of DNA on chromosome 4 could very well have come through Gottfried von Dagsburg or through his wife.
(As an aside, this Standifird pathway also explains how an English person came to have shared DNA with an Arkel. The granddaughter of Thiebaut II de Bar and Margaret of Bar, Phillipa of Hainault, married Edward III, King of England. The line remained in England and nine generations later a descendant, Mary Whitaker, immigrated to Virginia. For two or three generations the line seems to have maintained contacts with England, but then with John Charles Whitaker it settled into Maryland for three or four generations and also had some contact with Kentucky, and then migrated west to Indiana and Iowa. The line didn't remain there, however, but continued on to Oregon, California and Arizona.)
We also have the Geni relationship pathway through the House line:
John Valentine House, Sr. great grandfather of the Sarah (1783-1857) in the Standifird family tree. This pathway shows the MRCA as being Walram IV of Limburg (1165), but could instead be his wife, Cunegonde of Lotharingia (1175).
Eberhard I von Sponheim (990) is a common ancestor to the House line and the Standifird line. Again, there are many other possible common ancestors and I'm not going to search for all of them. The 6.5 cM segment of DNA from chromosome 4 could have come from the House line rather than the Standifird line, but it really doesn't matter because there's no practical way of tracking it without much more data.
Verstraeten/Standifird Conclusion
Verstraeten, Standifird, and I share a triangulated section of DNA that, at 6.5 cM in length, is likely to have come from a common ancestor who lived between 500 and 1,500 years in the past. I was able to show a genetic pathway through Geni from a member of the Standifird match's family tree to myself through the Arkel line that goes through Jan V van Arkel and his son Otto the Bastard. I was not able to show a confirmed pathway for the Verstraeten line due to the incompleteness of the family tree, but was able to show a pathway for a potential member of the Verstraeten line who had the same surname as a member in the Geni pathway and who lived in the same region of Limburg. Assuming this potential pathway can ever be confirmed, we've shown that there is a common ancestor for the three of us who dates back to the late 900's, which is right in the middle of the predicted age for the MRCA of the segment of DNA.
The goal of this exercise was to determine if autosomal DNA could potentially support the hypothesis that the Swaim paternal Y-DNA line derives from the Arkel line through Otto the Bastard. In my opinion I haven't proven that, but I believe that I have in fact found support for it. It is definitely possible that the DNA could have followed other pathways to get to the three living people that we know carry it (Verstraeten, Standifird, Swaim), but such paths might be difficult to find unless they go through the nobility because older records generally only exist for nobility. I supposedly have several other connections to the Arkel line, but they all occur earlier than the time that the Arkels married Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont and Ermengarde van Kleve and most pathways go through one of these two people.
As my Geni tree now exists, any path that went through an earlier Arkel or some other ancestor would likely not be displayed because I've only developed my paternal line of that tree (and one Swedish line). But if the only pathway to a DNA match is through Elisabeth de Bar, then I believe this would come very close to proving that the Swaim line must have descended through Otto, the bastard son of Jan V van Arkel.
There is one other thing to consider. Dirck Pauw claimed that the Arkel line moved to Pierrepont in Lorraine at the very early date of 388 AD. If this is true, then Arkel DNA would have been in that region for a very long time, and many of the early Lotharingian nobles might have had Arkel DNA in them from this earlier time. Elisabeth de Bar-Pierrepont may very well have been a distant cousin to her husbant Otto van Arkel (the uncle of the bastard Otto). And yet because we don't know by what name the Arkels may have gone by before one line moved to Holland, this will probably never be known. The Geni pathway couldn't pick this up, either. Therefore, it's possible that there might be DNA matches that are actually from the Arkel line that don't show a genetic pathway through the Arkels because the true identity of the Arkel it came from is unknown.
Chromosome 4
7.5 cM - 118034145 – 127749954
Swanepoel
I have a My Heritage match with Swanepoel, who comes from a genealogically well-documented South African Dutch line that originated in Nieuwmunster, West Flanders (Belgium). (Swanepoel History | Stefan Swanepoel).
Although the first element of the name “Swanepoel” is probably pronounced much like my surname “Swain,” which is a variant of the more common surname “Swaim,” the Swanepoel line appears to have nothing to do with the Swaim line from the Land of Arkel, other than that the origin of both probably derives from the Dutch word for “swan.”
The name Swanepoel literally means “swan pool” or “swan pond,” and the Swanepoel coat of arms features a swan swimming in water. As I've mentioned before, it's possible that the name “Swaim” derives from the word “swan,” which would be logical if the Swaims descended from the Arkel line since a swan is also featured in the Arkel coat of arms, deriving from the mythical story of the founding of the Arkel line in Holland. There is probably no connection between the Swanepoel and Arkel coat of arms, and in any case the Swanepoel swan looks docile and passive, where in some of the Arkel depictions that swan looks active and aggressive, no doubt reflecting the general temperament of the Arkel line.
As we will see, many of the matches who share this segment of chromosome 4 come from South Africa and have Dutch names. The most likely explanation for this is that this DNA segment proliferated from one immigrant ancestor (or family) and spread through intermarriage. A very careful examination of the genealogies might prove that to be true, but the Geni relationship path tool seems to indicate that the DNA segment came through an older source and that the various Dutch immigrants already possessed it at the time of immigration.
Swanepoel and I share two segments of DNA, one of which is 7.5 cM long and the other 7.1. The 7.1 cM segment is on chromosome 16 and is apparently not shared with any other match, while the 7.5 cM segment is on chromosome 4 and is shared with several matches.
This 7.5 cM segment of chromosome 4 is at a different location than the segment of the Verstraeten/Standifird matches that we just looked at. It might or might not be on the same copy of chromosome 4, but if it is on the same copy it is probably possible that at one time it was part of a much larger segment that included both this segment and the previous segment. If so, over time the larger segment got chopped up through recombination and the two chunks were randomly distributed to different descendants.
Now, on to the Swanepoel match.
Here's the relevant part of the Swanepoel family tree:
Here's the Geni relationship pathway from the Swanepoel line to me through the hypothetical paternal Arkel line:
This genetic relationship path enters the Swanepoel line through Jan Hendrik Swanepoel's mother, Maria Elizabeth Roux (1754, South Africa).
Unlike the usual Geni relationship path, there is one clear MRCA here, who is Guy de Dampierre (1225-1305). The reason that the path doesn't show the usual sibling relationship is that the two sons of Guy de Dampierre (Jean de Flandre and Guillaume IV de Dampierre) have different mothers. Therefore, the two brothers only have their father in common genetically and their common DNA had to have come from him.
Eberhard I von Sponheim (990) is an ancestor of Guy de Dampierre, and we've seen that he's also an ancestor of the Verstraeten/Standifird lines. The Swanepoel line DNA is not the same segment of DNA as in the Verstraeten/Sandifird lines and therefore there is not necessarily any connection between the two, but as I just mentioned, both are on the same chromosome and therefore both may have been part of a much larger segment in the distant past.
Stoltz
Stoltz didn't provide a family tree in My Heritage, but he's another South African and so his ancestry can be deduced from the existing Stoltz South African trees, as it's likely only one Stoltz line immigrated to South Africa.
Here is the Geni relationship path:
The MRCA is one of the parents of Dietrich I von Kleve, Count of Heinsberg and Valkenburg and Beatrix von Kleve. These parents are Arnold IV von Kleve (1160-1201) and Adelheid von Heinsberg-Valkenburg (1163-1217). I could probably find a common ancestor a bit more recent, but both of these potential MRCAs share an ancestor with Swanepoel's MRCA, and this is Louis I, the Pious (778-840), son of Charlemagne. Louis the Pious is also an ancestor of Standifird as well, through Walram IV, Duke of Limburg, and no doubt also Verstraeten, although we're not absolutely certain of his ancestry.
Du Preez
Du Preez is another South African. Here's part of the du Preez family tree:
Here's the Geni pathway from me to Johannes Petrus du Preez:
The two potential MRCAs here are Arnold VI von Kleve (1160-1201) and Adelheid von Heinsberg-Valkenburg (1163-1217). These are the same as for Stoltz, which is not surprising since the Stoltz-du Preez MRCA is Jacomina van Deventer who seems to have been born in South Africa. Thus, for our purposes, the du Preez and Stoltz lines are actually the same.
However, it turns out that Johannes Petrus du Preez' wife, Helena Catharina Kruger, also has a pathway to me through Arkel:
And this line is the same line as Swanepoel, up to Pierre de Villiers (1681), born in France. It appears that in the next generation the entire de Villiers family immigrated to South Africa. Thus, both the Swanepoel and Stoltz lines merged together in the du Preez line.
Bestbier
Bestbier is another South African, and while I can't connect his small 16-person family tree with the Geni tree, it's pretty likely that the Bestbier member from the Geni relationship pathway is an ancestor at some level.
The sibling pair here is Robert II, Count of Dreux and Braine and Isabelle de Dreux. Their parents, one of whom must be the MRCA, are Robert I, Count of Dreux (1124-1188) and Agnes de Baudement (1130-1204).
Chatterton
Chatterton is another South African, obviously English but he got his chromosome 4 DNA segment through his Dutch side. Through two sides, actually: Vermoter and Griesel. Here's the relevant part of the family tree:
I'm not going to go to the trouble of finding the exact connection to the tree and the Vermoter and Griesel at the ends of the following Geni relationship pathways. I have no doubt the exist, and they both go through through Guy de Dampierre, as do the Swanepoel and du Preez lines.
McNamee
The My Heritage family tree is too fragmentary to connect it to the Geni tree. McNamee lives in Australia but had an ancestor named du Toit, which is a surname that is found in the South African Dutch names. Most likely a du Toit family member immigrated to Australia rather than to South Africa or a South Africa du Toit later immigrated to Australia.
Van der Merwe
This is another South African match. I couldn't link this match's My Heritage family tree to the Geni crowd-sourced tree, but one name in the tree, Marais, is found in South Africa and almost certainly all South Africans surnamed Marais come from the same immigrant ancestor. There are at least two Geni pathways for two different Maraises, one of which the MRCA is either Arnold IV von Kleve (as with Stolta and du Preez), and the other of which the MRCA is Jan Herbaren II van Arkel (1253-1297) or his wife
Bertrade Gerardsdr van Sterkenburg (1255-1297). Two of the ancestors of Jan Herbaren II van Arkel are Gilbert, Duke of Burgundy (890-956) and his wife Ermengarde (893-956) one of whom, as we will see in the next section immediately below, may be the MRCA for this segment of chromosome 4.
MRCA of Chromosome 4
7.5 cM - 118034145 – 127749954
The following matches were complete enough that for each of them we can be fairly certain of the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) of that line and the Swain line that leads hypothetically through the line of Jan V van Arkel/Otto the Bastard. Here are the MRCAs:
Swanepoel: Guy de Dampierre (1225)
Stoltz: Arnold IV von Kleve (1160)
Du Preez: Guy de Dampierre (1225) and Arnold IV von Kleve (1160)
Bestbier: Robert II de Dreux (1124)
Merwe: Arnold IV van Kleve/Mabelia van Arkel van Heukelom (1284)
The four MRCAs:
Guy de Dampierre
Arnold IV von Kleve
Robert II de Dreux
Mabelia van Arkel van Heukelom
Now we need to find the MRCA for these four people.
For Guy de Dampierre and Robert II de Dreux I found that both shared a common ancestor in William I, Count of Burgundy (1028-1087) or his wife Etienette de Longwy (1030-1088).
I couldn't find that Arnold IV von Kleve had either William I of Burgundy or Etienette de Longwy as an ancestor, but I was able to find that Arnold IV von Kleve and William I of Burgundy had a common ancestor in either Gilbert, Duke of Burgundy (890-956) or in Ermengarde of Burgundy (893-956). Mabelia van Arkel also has Gilbert, Duke of Burgundy and Ermengarde as ancestors.
I'm not going to spend any more time looking for a more recent common ancestor than this, because even if one exists it doesn't really matter. What matters is that there is a common ancestor for everyone that I was able to investigate for this particular segment of DNA on chromosome 4.
Unless there's a closer common ancestor, then, we can assume that this segment of DNA came to everyone possessing it through either:
Gilbert, Duke of Burgendy (890-956) or
Ermengarde of Burgundy (893-956)
Ermengarde's ancestry is apparently not known, but Gilbert was a 4x great grandson of Charlemagne.
Conclusion for Chromosome 4, 7.5 cM
There were a few other matches who triangulated with the DNA segment but didn't have enough of a family tree to investigate further (Barnard, de Jager, Berner, Mons). Most of the surnames, however, can be found in Dutch South Africans, so this DNA segment at first glance appears to be oddly South African Dutch, even though it appears to have entered the South African Dutch gene pool through several different individuals.
Partly this skew to the South African matches is no doubt due to selection bias. There's a South African project on Geni and Geni is owned by My Heritage, so there appears to be an organized effort to recruit South African Dutch to use these two platforms. The gene may be as widely spread throughout the non-South African Dutch population, but since there is no effort to recruit Dutch as a whole on My Heritage, their appearance there is random rather than organized, so there are fewer altogether.
However, there is another possible explanation as well. It is possible that this segment of DNA has survived intact through a thousand years because it provides some survival value to those who possess it. This DNA segment seems clearly to have been handed down primarily to those with ancestry in the area formerly known as Lotharingia, and yet of all the matches who have this DNA segment, only one (Engel) appears to actually live in Holland, Belgium, Lorraine, or Germany. Rather, all of them live in former Dutch colonies—United States (Swain, Winters/Householder, Mons, Kleier), South Africa—or in former British Colonies—New Zealand (Binedell) and Australia (Hetherington, McNamee/duToit). Is it possible that this DNA segment predisposes its possessors to risk-taking and the desire to travel? Such a predisposition could be dangerous but could also be rewarding when successful, because colonial populations often have very high rates of reproduction, which is true of all the colonies mentioned above.
In all, it seems fairly convincing that this DNA segment came to me through the Arkel line. Assuming the accuracy of the Geni crowd-sourced genealogy, the DNA segment definitely could have been passed to me through Jan V van Arkel and his son Otto. However, by truncating my other Dutch ancestry in my personal Geni tree, I'm forcing the DNA segment to come to me through Otto rather than through some other Arkel who may be the true pathway. Other than Otto/Jan V, I supposedly have more than a dozen other pathways that lead to Arkels further back in time than Otto/Jan V. These pathways are not genealogically proven, but if even one of them is real, the DNA segment could have come to me through one of those rather than through Otto/Jan V. For this reason, I can't say that the pathway through Otto/Jan V is correct, which means that this investigation doesn't prove that the Swaim paternal line descends from the Arkel line. However, as I've already mentioned, most ot the Geni pathways are through either Elisabeth de Bar or Ermengard von Kleve, who were both within the three later generations of the primary Arkel line, whereas my other supposed Arkel ancestors connect to my line earlier than this.
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