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Van Burens in Ancient Greece?

Y-Chromosome Haplogorp T1a-Y21204

In February 2026 a paper was published discussing the results of a study relating to populations in ancient Gree (Psonis et al, “Genetic affinities between the ancient Greek and colonyof Amvrakia and its metropolis” Genetic affinities between the ancient Greek colony of Amvrakia and its metropolis | Genome Biology | Springer Nature Link ). Oddly, the title misrepresents the actual goal of the study, because “metropolis” of Amvrakia was the polis of Corinth, but the people chosen to represent Corinth were actually buried in the polis of Tenea rather than Corinth. Tenea and Corinth are alocated bout 16 miles (25 km) form each other, and Tenea was a dependency of Corinth, but the difference in the origin of the two cities could potentially make a significant difference in the origin and compostion of their populations, even considereing the long time span between the origin of Tenea (~1180 BC) and the Greek Archaic through the Greek Hellenistic pperiods.

According to [the ancient Greek geographer] Pausanias Tenea's founders were Trojan prisoners of war whom Agamemnon [king of Mycenae] allowed to build their own town. The name Tenea is styled upon Tenedos, the founders' hometown, whose mythological eponym was the hero Tenes. Tenea and Rome, according to Virgil's Aeneid, had in the years following the Trojan War produced citizens of Trojan ancestry.” (Wikipedia “Tenea”) Therefore, it seems odd to use citizens from Tenea as a proxy for citizens from Corinth, since the Trojans were not Greeks. Although over the intervening centuries the autosomal makeup of the two related cities may have blended into each other, the Y-chromosome haplogroups would likely have to a greater degree retained any differences.

In a future post I'll discuss this supposed Trojan origin in more detail, as the German tribe of the Franks, which formed the core of medieval Germany, also claimed Trojan descent, as did the van Arkel famly of Holland, according to Dirck Pauw (Dirck Pauw also claimed that after the van Arkel and other Trojan fled Greece they had fled to Hungary, which appears to be a detail unique to the van Arkel origin myth, but which is of great interest because in fact during the van Arkel's supposed tenure in Hungary, which ended in 346 AD, Hungary had strong E-V13 presencee). And, as I'll also discuss in that future post, one and perhaps two ancient E-V13 men were present in Tenea and, although they were not closely related to the Swaim/den Hertog branch of E-V13, their presence in Tenea is an indication that Swaim/den Hertog E-FT388527 branch might have been there as well.

But in this post I'm going to restrict my discussion primarily to the one minor detail of the Psonis study, which the Psonis paper didn't mention at all and would have had no interest in. This detail is that the one of the ancient Teneans was in the Y-chromosome haplogroup T-Y21204. This specifica haplogroup appears both anciently and today to be ow in numbers. Interestingly, it's ancestral haplogroups were present together with the ancestral haplogroups of E-V13 in Varna, Bulgaria around 4500 BC, and shared an even earlier origin in Anatolia and the Levant.

The E-FGC11450 haplogroup, the most recent haplogroup ancestarl to E-FT388527 with more than a few members, is also a small haplogroup, although not quite as small as that of T-Y21240. Futhermore, neither were native to northwestern Europe or specifically to Holland, and yet in the 1400's AD and ater both haplogroups were found in the verys specific locations of Heicop and Lang Nuland (Nieuwland), with T-Y21204 also in Heuklom. And the T-Y21204 family in the Land of Arkel had the surname van Buren (Buuren, Bueren).

I haven't unraveled exactly what this means, but at the very least it implies that the two lines had treveled together from somewhere in the Balkans, probably Greece, because otherwise the odds must be huge for both of these small lineages to have ended up by 1400 AD in the Land of Arkel. However, even if that's true it doesn't necessarily mean that both lines were present in Tenea, or even that the van Buren line was present in Tenea. However, considering the small size of the T-Y21204 lineage and its history, I think there's a good chance that the van Buren line was, inddeed, present in ancient Tenea.

FTDNA estimates that The T[Y21204 mutation was fomred in 5700 BC and that the most recent common ancestor of all men in the haplogroup lived around 1850 BC This TMRCA date means that all living men in the haplogroup trace their ancestry back to one man who lived around 1850 BC.

As of the time I'm writing this is May 2026, FTDNA has tested 197 men in the T-Y21204 haplogroup. FTDNA says these men live in 35 different countries.

In contracts, the E-V13 subclade E-Z5018, which is ancestral to E-FGC11450 and E-FT388527, had a comparable TMRCA date to T-Y21204 of 1750 BC, but FTDNA has tested 4,520 men in E-Z5018 (including men in all subclades) and these men live in 90 different countries.

In other words, FTDNA has tested 23 times the number of men in E-Z5018 compared to T-Y21240. It is true that FTDNA's figures for haplogroups no doubt suffer from strong selecgtion bias, including a likely slection bias in favoring, for example, one among others, Western Europeans versus Eastern Euroepans, but these figures are give us at least an idea of the relatively sizes of the two haplogroups, and we can say with some confidence that T-Y21204 is uncommon in Western Europe, including the Netherlands, and the English-speaking former colonies of Western Europe.

To be clear, there are likely far more than 197 men living in the world or in Western Europe, because only a small fraction of men in any haplogroup are likely to pay to have Y-chromosome DNA tested. To illustrte this, for the E-FT388527 Swaim/den Hartog terminal (thus far) haplogroup, FTDNA shows only 2 individuals—one Swain/den Hertog (me, wih my paternal line from the Land of Arkel) and one Sulc (paternal line from Czechia). Yet the Google AI says that in the USA there re about up to 6,150 men with the name Swaim, in Canada up to 3,100 men with the hame Swim (the Canadian variant of the name after the group was split during the Revolutionary War), and in the Neetherlands there are up to 7,000 individuals with the surnames den Hartog, den Hertog or variants, with the den Hertog name “significantly less common” than den Hartog. This is about 16,000 individuals potentially descended from Willem Ottens with those surnames, and if we assume half are male, that's 8,000 men likely in the E-FT388527 haplogroup. And this figure doesn't count the Sulc/Solc line atl, nor does it count all the men in the Netherlands and Americas with surnames other than variants of Swaim of den Hartog, or who descended from Otto's brother Gerrit, or from other men incestral to Willem Ottens. Of all these thousands of men, only one has taken FTDNA's Y-chromosome test (although several others have taken the STR test, as shown in FTDNA's “Swaim surname project.

The Google AI says that there are up to 5,000 individuals in the Netherlands and USA with the name van Buren. Assuming half are males, this is 2,500 men plausibly in the E-Y21204 haplogroup, but fewer of these may be in the haplogroup E-Y21204 because this name is a “van” name based on a location, and men in other haplogroups may have taken that surname (as opposed to den Hartog or Swaim, which are not geographically based). How likely it is that all E-Y21204 men in the Netherlands and Americas have the van Buren name is unknown, but could be signficant.

Therefore, there may be thousands of men in Western Europe and its former colonies in the E-Y21204 haplogroup. But it's nonetheless true that it, like E-FT388527 and E-FGC11450, is still a minor haplogroup within Western Europe and its former colonies.

Van Buren in the Land of Arkel

The Psonis study was inteed to “investigate the genetic relationships between the Corinthian metropolis and the Amvrakia colony, the contribution of the local population to the ounding genetic pool, as well as the demography of Amvrakia in subsequent periods.” Amvrakia (today's Arta, Gree, in Epirus) was founded in the 600's BC. A member of T-21204 was also found in Amvrakia from 475-450 BC (Amv_Epi_Cl_4). Thus, the implication is that one branch of T-Y21204 migrated from Tenea to Amvrakia sometime after the founding of Amvrakia.

My interest in Tenea was not the T-Y21204 haplogroup, but in the ancient individual Ten_Pel_Hel_2, who was buried in Tenea between 323-31 BC and was in haplogroup E-CTS9320, a branch of E-BY3880. The Swaim/den Hartog line descends from a different branch of E-BY3880, and so the two lineages diverged by 2100 BC. Nonetheless, it's quite plausible that the Swaim/den Hartog line had also been present in Tenea as well as E-CTS0320. Therefore, we can tentatively use Ten_Pel_Hel_2 as a proxy for the possible location of the Swaim/den Hartog line (although it could actually have existed elsewhere, or in several places at one). As I'll discuss in a future article, it appears that ehte earliest E-FGC11450 mand (FVD009 from Fonyond, Hungary) and the earliest E-FGC11451 mand (Arg5_1 from Argmum Bulgaria), both of whom died around 450 AD, were Greeks who were likely from from the Greek colonies on the norhtern and western shores of the Black Sea.

The Psonis study tested 9 invidividuals from Tenea, of whom 4 were males. Two of those males were from the Roman perios, and at a quick glance one and probably both appear to have likely come from lineages not present in Tenea from before the Roman period, but rather were migrants from Armenia. Ignoring these two men we have only men from the E-V13/E-CTS9320 haplogroup and the he T-Y21204 haplogroup. Thereore, I looked into the history of the T-Y21204 haplogroup to see how it had interacted over time with the E-V13 haplogroup.

Beside looking into the history of the T-Y21240 lineage, I also wanted to see if I could find evidence that the line was present today in the Netherlands, which if was true would be evidence that the it had possibly traveled there together with the E-FT388527 haplogroup. Although if both lines were present today in the Netherlands, that fact wouldn't be proof that the two lines had trveled there togetherk it would be evidence that they might have, because both lineages were small and T-Y21204 had been together with a differe E-BY3880 line in Hellenistic Greece. Not proof, but evidence.

To find evidence of the existence of the T-Y21204 haplogroup in the Netherlands I checked the FTDNA geographical proojects “Netherlands” and “Benelux” (which can be accessed by going to the website or just by entereing a search term such as “FTDNA Benelux project” and “FTDNA “Netherlands project”) I believed that the odds of finding the line in the Netherlands were low, but in fact three living T-Y21204 men had actually had their Y-chromosome DNA tested and had joined both FTDNA projects. And all three men had the surname “van Bueren/van Buuren”.

This is from the "Netherlands” Project There are three individuals here with the van Buuren/Beuren name.

This is from the “Benelux” project:

These are two of the same individuals from the Netherlands project

But from the “New-Nehterlanders” project we have someone different:

The lineage of Cornelis Maessen van Buren is the New Netherland family that produced the president of the USA Martin van Buren. But the problem is that we two van Buren families with two different paternal haplogroups.

In a situation such as this there are two possibilities. One is that there were two different van Buren families in Holland/Gelderland. The other is that there was only one van Buren family and that the particular line with this van Buren from New Netherland was the result of a “Non Paternal Event” (NPE), which is a nice way of saying that a wife cheated on her husband and had a child by another man that she passed off as the husband's child. Such events are and were quite common.

Becaue it appears that FTDNA restricts access to the R-CTS99623 haplogroup because it's too specific to one family, I can't analyze the ancient members in the haplogroup.

Although it would have been nice to be able to look at the haplogroup ancestry of the man claiming Cornelis Masessen van Buren as a paternal ancestor, for the primary purose of this post the answer to this puzzle doesn't matter. What matters is the location of the van Buuren family in Holland, which can be found in the a family tree of the Koolwaaij family. In the Netherlands and Benelux projects the individual 571055 included the information that his eariest known paternal ancestor was Gerrit Hendricksen van Buuren 1680-1764, from the town of Heukelom.

Heukelom today is located in Gelderland, but historically it was part of Holland and was in the heart of the Land of Arkel, and the lords of Heukelu(m were van Arkels even after the main branch of the van Arkel line was defeated and extinguished. Heukelum is located 6 miles (10 km) from Middelkoop, the center of the early Swaim/den Hartog lineage. Futhermore,

Other member of the family lived in Heicop, where den Hartogs are known to have lived at the time, and at least one owned some land in Lang Nuland (Nieuwland),

From Koolwaaij:

Furthmore, Cornelis Aertsz van Buuren (1610-1669) married Anneke Gerritsdr van Broeckhuysen, daugher of Gerardus van Broeckhuysen (-1653), a minister, rector of the Latin school in Vianen and lived in Kedichem. This is an interestng link because, as I've posted in the past, the van Broeckhuysen family were nobility in Gelderland who had derived from the lords of Swalmen, who were closely related to van Oist/Oyst/Oest/Osst family located in Oost near Eijsden, who in the late 1300's bought the larodship of Swalmen from Robijn van Swalmen. This provides and interesting link to my hypothesis that Otto Gerrits van Oist was the father of Willem Ottens, and adds to the evidence that these famillies by the 1600's were relatively well-to-do descendants of the ridderschap nobility of earlier centuries.

The van Buuren line as presented by Koolwaaij is:

Aernout van Bueren ~1450- m Stijn

Aerdt Aerdtsz van Bueren 1485-1554 m

Farmer in Heicop

Leenman of the hofstad Culemborg

Barten Aertsz 1511

Hendrick Barten 1540- m

Aert Hendricksen van Buuren 1570-

Cornelis Aerts van Buuren 1610-1669 m Anneke Cornelisdr van Broeckhuysen

(From Kookwaaij Aernout van Bueren (± 1450-????) » Stamboom Koolwaaij - Van Buuren » Genealogie Online )

The Other van Buren Lineage

The FTDNA Y-chromosome “New-Netherlanders” project lists the following individual:

screenshot 3659

This van Buren claims descent from Cornealis Maessen van Buren (-1648), who was from the van Renssellaerswyck colony near Albany New York (by the way, this colony also had a member called “Thijs Barentsz” who arrived on the ship Renssellaerswyck that sialed from Texel 1636, who was a shoemaker who owed money in 1652, but about whom nothing else is known. I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I've speculated that he might be the same Thys Barentsen (Swaim) who migrated to Newtherland in 1661. He married a Scythie Cornlis whose parents are unknown, but it's possible that she was a van Buren who had remiained in Holland. The problem is that there appears to be no other information about this Renssellaerswyck Thijs Barentsz, so all of this is sheer speculation).

i

The problem with the claimed descendant of Cornelis Maessen van Buren is that he belongs to an entirely different haplogroup than that of the T-Y21204 van Bueren family just discussed. This man belonged to haplogorup R-FTC96623. FTDNA appears to be hiding the details of this haplogroup from the public view, possibly because it is too specific to one person, which invokes privacy issues. For this reason I can't even find which higher-level haplogroups his lineage belongs to, renderingn it impossible to analyze his haplogroup.

Although the most likely explanation for these two van Buren lines is simply that they were different lines who both used the name van Buren and that line that migrated to America was unrelated to the line that reained in Heukelom, Heicop and Leuven (in Gelderland). However, it's also possible that the presumed van Buren indiv who tested with FTDNA was in fact not a descendant from the van Cornelis Masessen van Buren line but rather that a non-paternity event had occurred in one of his ancestors, in which a woman married to a van Buren had a child through an adulterous liason who was passed off as a van Buren. This is and was quite common, but I'm not implying that it happened here, but rather merely saying that this is an alternative possibility.

For now this mystery remains.

Summary of the T-Y21204 van Burens

Three men with the name van Buuren/Bueren tested with FTDNA who were placed by FTDNA in haplogroup T-Y21204. One of these men claimed as his earliest-known paternal ancestors “Gerrit Hendicksen van Buuren, 1680-1764, Heukelum”. The Koolwaaij genealogy, supported by records, indicates that this family was from Heukelom, Heicop, Lang Nuland and other places within or immediately near the old Land of Arkel, the exact micro-region from in which the earliest-known Swaim/den Hartog members lived.

Another man who claimed as his earliest-known ancestor “Cornelis Maessen van Buren”, a known Renssellaerswyck van Buren, is in a different haplogroup, R-FTC96623. This tested individual may or may not be a true paternal desceant of Cornelis Maessen van Buren, but I suspect that he is and that these are two different van Buren lineages. However, if so it is likely that the T-Y21204 lineage is the one that had descended from the noble van Buren family because of one members marriage in the 1600's to a van Broeckhuysen descendant.

In either case, it appears nearly certain that members from T-Y21204 lineage lived in the same micro-location as did members of the Swaim/den Hartog lineage, in the 1400's-1600's. A member from this same small T-Y21204 lineage had also lived in Tenea, Greece during the Archaic perios 800-480 BC. Another member lived in ancient Amvrakia, a colony of Corinch to which some Teneans also migrated.

However, although members of the T-Y21204 lineage lived in Tenea and Amvrakia in ancient Greece, this doen't prove that the van buren lineage had descended froom them.

Also present in Tenea during the Hellenistic era (323-31 BC) was an E-V13 member, from the E-BY3880 subclade E-CTS9820. This is a separate branch from the Swaim/den Hartog subclade of E-BY3880, but the fact that a member of one branch had lived in Tenea implies that other members from that and other branches may also have live din Tenea. One of those members was plausibly within the same lineage as the Swaim/den Hartog E-FT388527 lineage, but this is no evience of this.

As it stands we cannot connect the Swaim/den Hartog lineage to Tenea. Nontheless, it is quite interesting that a the T-Y21204 haplogroup was present in ancient Greece, as the E-FGC11450 branch has living members in that country and Greece and the Balkans is the region of the highest concentrion of E-V13.

Next we'll look at what we know of the history of the T-Y21204 haplogroup to find any paralles to that with E-V13.

Temporal/Geographical Parallels between the haplogroup lineages T1a leading to o

Ten_Pel_Arch_4 (T-Y21204)

nd E-V13 leading to Ten_Pel_Hel_2 (E-BY9320)

The two hapl0groups, including their ancestral lines, are found together around 4500 BC in Varna, Bulgaria, and probably earlier. The Varna

Under Construction

I1707       7600 BC      Ain Ghazal Jordan Amman           LT-L298

cch205      6600 BC      Catalhoyuk Anatolia                    LT-L298

bad030    6350 BC      Antalya Anatolia                             T-Z19859

I0700      5900 BC      Malak Preslavets Bulgaria Dobruja   T-Z19859

I2208 5880 BC Malak Preslavets Bulgaria Dobruja T-Z19859

I24887 5150 BC Asparn Schletz Austria T-Z198589

VAR010 4600 BC Varna Bulgaria T-L446

VAR022    4540 BC Varna Bulgaria T-L446

VAR032 4480 BC Varna Bulgaria T-L446

I1180 4000 BC Pequin Israel R-Z1985

I4615 3000 BC Sirnak Anatolia T-Z19935

I17962 660 BC Delphi Greece Phocis T-Y21204

I24200 550 BC Nabeul Tunisia Phoenician E-L446

Ten_Pel_Arch 490 BC Tenea Greece T-Y21204

I7318 480 BC Hhimera Sicitly Battle of Himera T-Y21204

Amv_Epi_Cl_4 475 BC Amvrakia Greece Arta Epirus T-Y21204

I7224 409 BC Himera Sicily Battle of Himera T-Y21204

I4530 300 AD Samsun Anatolia Amisos T-CTS933

VK398 1100 AD Varnhem Skara Sweden Viking Age T-Y21204

I3403 1800 AD Roopkund Lake Inda T-Y21204

n/a 1400-1600 Land of Arkel T-Y21204

Te

The following are the locations that are common to both this T1a/ancestral haplogoroup lineage and the E-V13/ancestral haplogroup:

Ain Ghazal Jordan 7700 BC

Asparn Schletz Austria1 5100 BC

Varna Bulgaria 4500 BC

Phocis Greece Time difference

Tenea Greece Time difference

Himera Sicily 480 BC

Sweden/Denmark Viking Age 1100 AD

Land of Arkel 1400's AD

We see that elements of these two lineages have moved together through time and geography for nearly 10,000 years, migrating from the Levant to Austria and to Varna Bulgaria, then to Greece, then Sicily and then to the Land of Arkel by 1400 AD, and to Viking Age Scandinavia at some time before 1100 AD.

In my next post I'll discuss more about Tenea and the early origin of E-V13 as a Indo-European-speaking, Yamaya-related population.

In other future posts I'll also write about the origin of E-V13 as a Yamnaya-related population and its spread into the Balkans. Two men from haplogrops ancestral to E-V13 are from Mycenaean Greece, but the earliest E-V13 men are from Orlivak in Ukraine (Danube delta region), the Maritsa valley of southeastern Bulgaria and the Phrygian Highlands of Anatolia. While E-V13 is often considered to be associated with Thracians, I think that it was possibly more closely associated with the Bryges/Phrygians and their close cousins the Greeks. Phrygians were closely associated with Troy, so it was perhaps they who had colonized the island of Tenedos, the island from which the Teneans originated, which is also the island the Greeks occupied duirng the Trojan War for its strategic location.

I'll also discuss what I believe is the Greek origin of the E-V13 that was found in Hungary, who I believe came from the northern/western Black Sea Greek colonies (Bosporan Kingdom). This probably includes the Swaim/den Hartog E-FT338527 haplogroup, but this remains to be proven. Most of the E-V13 in Hungary and the Middle Danube region were Iazyges Sarmatians who migrated there around 20 AD after migrating from the Sea of Azov (Maeotia), wich is actually a mashy appendage of the Black Sea (Euxine). Many of these Sarmatians joined the Roman army and spread E-V13 into the British Isles, Germany, France and elsewhere, while others remained in the region around Hungary and later became associated with the Avars and then the Magyars (Hungarians). I'll outline a few pathways that the Swaim/den Hartog line might have taken from Hungary to Holland, including the possility that it had migrated to Bavaria and only much later ended up in Holland when the Dukes of Bavaria-Straubing became the counts of Holland (John the Pitiless was actually present and active in the Lando of Arekl including Gorinchem, and apparently had unidentified illegitimate children, and would also would likely have had other men from Bavaria with him. Straubing itself is the location of an archaeogenetic study regarding the Ostrogoth or Sarmatian populations with Arifical Cranial Deformation (ACD), which was also prevalent in Fonyod, esent in Fonyod along with the earliest E-FGC11450 man FVD009.

I'll also revisit the Frankish origin myth, in which the Franks claimed descent from Trojans, a presence in the Sea of Azov, and a presence in Hungary. While historians in general dismiss this mythology as little more than an attempt to connect the Franks to the Romans, who also claimed descent from Trojans, I think the evidence is now pretty clear that this myth was likely grounded in the real experiences of some of the non-Franks from Hungary and the Middle Danube who really had lived on the shores of the Sea of Azov (Sarmatians, Heruli), and who possibly who claimed descent from Teneans (such as Black Sea Greeks caught up in the Hun/Ostrogoth migration into Hungary). Some of these men likely joined the Franks, and if so after several generations after these popole joined the Franks, even those Franks whose paternal lineages had never left the lower Rhine region, really did have such ancestors.