The Brown Family World

The Fertile Crescent Connection

The orgins of our particular Brown family are from the area commonly referred to as The Fertile Crescent, and maybe specifically Anatolia.  This is perhaps Norther Syria or Iraq.  I recently received an email from an expert on the J2 haplogroup.  The email said that while Syrian Archers from the Hama region of Syria were very likely, so were Iraqi Boatman from the Tirgris River who were sent to Scotland to supply the Roman (including Syrian) forces.

The male descendents of Abraham Brown, born 1700  in Scotland are in the J2a2 haplogroup.*

*Note:  I received the following information today from an interned friend who is an expert on J2 haplogroups.:

"A long time ago, J2a4b (which is our present haplogroup) was called J2a2, when the haplogroup tree was a lot simpler. Just in the past week or so, we've had new discoveries that will cause yet another change, so in the future you will be called J2a3b! The reason that the names change is that they reflect the structure of the tree, how your branch is related to all the other branches.  Each branch is defined by one or more SNP mutations. When new mutations are discovered, they can often create new branches or new levels of the tree structure. In this case, it turned out that two branches that were seperate, were found to be nested, that is, of of the was inside the other. This caused the other branches to be bumped up and get a lower number."

It is believed that our particular haplogroup arrived in Scotland around the time that Syrian Archer were commissioned to build Hadrians Wall and to guard the English from the northern "barbarians." Yes, the English considered the Scots to be barbarians. Occasionally an English acquaintence of mine likes to remind me of that fact. In turn, I remind has always been the lower class English that consider the Scots to be barbarians. However, I am regressing from the primary subject of this part of the site.

To read moer about the Roman Soldiers and especially the Syrian Archers in Scotland, visit the following web site:

http://www.romanarmy.hamians.htm 

Before this update, I had listed certain statistics about the prevelance of J2 in Scotland and in other parts of the world. Since so much has changed with the new discoveries, I am not going to list those in this update. I think we can safely write that our DNA arose between 30 and 50 thousand years ago in the Neolithic age.  

Our DNA marker exists at around 7 percent in the Pitlochry area of Scotland. Pitlochry, in Perthshire, lies of the river Trummel in the Central Highlands. It would have been a formidable place of a  young Roman soldier from what is today Syria or Iraq who was used to the hot sun and desert temperatures.

The Covenanter communities in Pitlochry area were greatly persecuted by the Crown. Being on the run from English forces who were determined to destroy every person who would not confess the Soverign of England as Head of the Church must have been extremely trying for subsequent generations.  According to my grandfather, land was confiscated and people were imprisoned on false charges .

Our ancestor would have been between sixteen and twenty-five years of age. He would have been required to serve in the Roman Army for a minimum of twenty years.  After his service he would have been free to live in a place of his choosing within the Roman Empire. It is likely that he met a Scots woman and had a family while in service to Rome. He would have stayed in Scotland with his family after his service ended.