I-Y33765 and nineteenth century emigration from Europe

The nineteenth century was a time of mass migration from Europe and we have evidence that some I-Y33765 men participated in these movements.  For example, we know that today, men with this Y-chromosome mutation are living in New Zealand and Australia and that these men are descended from one migrant, Shadrach Clement, a farmer from West Harptree, Chew Valley, England, who emigrated with his wife and family in 1857.  These pioneers sailed from London as steerage passengers on 11th June in the ship Glentanner and arrived at Lyttleton, Canterbury, New Zealand on the 3rd October, 1857 (see Figure 1).  Since then Shadrach's lineage has prospered in Australasia and today we can identify at least a dozen living I-Y33765 direct-line male descendants.  For example, Clement IN82043 is the 2x great-grandson of Shadrach. 

Figure 1:  Part of the report published on page 4 of the Lyttelton Times, Volume VIII, Issue 514, 7 October 1857, reporting the arrival of the Glentanner in New Zealand and containing the names of Shadrach Clement's family.  This "safe landfall" for Shadrach and his two sons likely marks the first arrival of the I-Y33765 marker to Australasia.

Shadrach Clement was a descendant of the English arm of the I-Y33765 clade but as I have discussed in earlier articles, based on the seven BigY results we have within the clade it seems very likely that the Y33765 mutation originated in Scandinavia circa 20AD possibly in what is now south-east Sweden.  All four Swedish men who are derived for the SNP have documented male-line ancestry from the north-east of the province of Småland. During the years 1850 to 1930 there was considerable migration of principally young Swedish men and women to North America.  This exodus has been estimated (Blanck, 2009) to have involved 1.3 million Swedes moving principally to the United States but also to Canada.  The Swedish province from which the second highest numbers emigrated was Småland with 4.6 emigrants per 1000 inhabitants leaving in each of the 80 years, 1850-1930 (Graves, 1991).  So,did any men derived for I-Y33765  travel to North America among these Småland emigrants?  That would certainly seem possible.

Its now over two decades since FamilyTreeDNA (FTDNA) started offering direct-to-consumer Y-DNA testing in the USA.  Since then hundreds of thousands of men worldwide have taken some sort of Y-DNA test with the majority of these being used by men who are resident in North America.  The first 111STR result for a I-Y33765 (+) man was completed in 2013 and a year later in an early BigY result (Clement 236748) the SNP was first identified although not named until it was recorded by YFull.com in analysis of the BAM file from a second BigY (Clement 282009) in 2017. The first positive Swedish results for I-Y33765 (Jacobsson IN70815 and Eklund IN78306) date from 2019 and early 2020 but at present no Y-DNA evidence has been found for I-Y33765 men in North America.  This is noteworthy because, of the eighteen clades downstream of Y4252 (Source: The I-Y4252 Draft Tree, 13 November 2020, I2a Project, FTDNA) all but I-Y33765 have already been recorded in tests of men who are today living in North America but who have known or unspecified European ancestry.

Just because I-Y33765 has not so far been recorded in North America doesn't mean we have no evidence for men with this mutation migrating there from Europe.  In 1850, at about the time the great period of Swedish migration was beginning, Henry Clement, a stone mason from Bristol England, is recorded in the US Federal Census working as a labourer in China Township, Wyoming County, New York.  Henry is a 3x great-uncle of Clement 236748 & 282009.  Henry had just married when he emigrated but his wife died soon after they left England. In 1855 he remarried in Kane County, Illinois and he and his new wife, herself an immigrant from Ireland, subsequently had two daughters.  Henry fought in the Union Army during the American Civil War and, after his capture at the Battle of Shiloh, died in a Confederate prison camp in September 1862 (see Figure 2). 

Figure 2: Henry Clement (1825-1862), grave marker at Andersonville National Cemetery, Georgia, USA.  Henry was a private in the 58th Illinois Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War and died in the Confederate prison camp at Macon, Georgia, CSA.  His story is the earliest evidence we have for an I-Y33765 derived man in North America but his line "daughtered out" with his death.  Although he has no direct male descendants, the hand in the photograph resting on his grave marker belongs to one of his many great-grandsons in the USA, Clement Kinnicutt (1939-2017).  The photograph was taken in 2014.

In 1870, a few years after Henry Clement's death, one of his distant cousins from Chew Valley, North Somerset, Hugh Clement a coal miner of Bishop Sutton and a 1st cousin of Shadrach who was mentioned earlier, emigrated with his wife and young family to Knightsville, Clay County, Indiana, USA.  Hugh and his wife lived in Indiana for the rest of their lives and had two sons and a daughter.  Both sons married and each family had two daughters. So again, while Hugh, like Henry, has many descendants living today in the USA, his I-Y33765 Y-chromosome "daughtered out" and these two examples illustrate how male lines frequently end, especially when family size is reduced.

While it is relatively easy to follow the migration of I-Y33765 to North America with men in the English descendant arm, by using the association of the mutation in North Somerset with the Clement patrilineal surname, things become more complicated within the Swedish arm of the clade. This is because of the patronymic surnames which were most usually used in Sweden and other Nordic countries up to at least the end of the nineteenth century.   

In the patronymic system a last name is created by using the father’s first name and attaching a prefix or suffix that denotes the relationship of the child to the father.  Hence, when a chap named Lars had a son named Peter, the boy's full name was Peter Larsson and, the same man's daughter Hannah was known as Hannah Larsdotter.   Of course, when Peter Larsson in his turn had a son he named Lars, that young man was called Lars Petersson, and hence the greater complication for the genealogist becomes explicit.  

Fortunately, some non-patronymic surnames were also used in Sweden and among these the Eklund surname is associated with I-Y33765 and with the parish of Lofta in Tjust.  The Big Y-700 test for Eklund IN78306 shows that he is derived for Y33765 and downstream mutations and he appears to be the 3x great grandson of Lars Nilsson Eklund (1778-1825) who was a resident of Lofta parish. 

By using genealogical databases at Ancestry.com, Familysearch.com, Anarchiv.se and other internet resources I have recently traced two Ecklund lineages descended from the Lofta family of Lars Nilsson Eklund which have living direct-line male descendants in the United States.  Lars's eldest grandson, Lars Petter Eklund emigrated to North America with his wife and family in 1884.  During the 1880's emigration from Småland peaked at about 11 emigrants per 1000 of the population (Graves, 1991).  Two of Lars Petter's sons, Karl Gustaf Ferdinand (1869-1954) born in Lofta, and Daniel Oskar (1882-?) born in Dalhem, eventually had jobs in Chicago, Illinois. In 1910 Chicago had the largest Swedish population of any North American city with Swedish immigrants accounting for 11% of it's population (Sawyer, 1999).  Karl Eklund worked as a rail-car repairer and brother Daniel was a passenger elevator operator.  By the 1920's both were married with families and by then the spelling of their surname had changed slightly to Ecklund.  Today, both brothers have living direct male descendants in the United States among whom, Daniel's grandson and great-grandson are living in Los Angeles, California.  They are respectively 3rd cousin and 3rd cousin once removed to Eklund IN78306.  While, in the absence of a positive SNP test, we cannot assume these Californian Ecklund men are derived for Y33765, their documented ancestry certainly makes that look plausible.   I am sure that if, at some point in the future, we can confirm their supposed I-Y33765 (+) status, then that will help to provide a fuller understanding of the development and distribution of I-Y33765 in Sweden and beyond.

References

Blanck, D., (2009), Swedish Immigration to North America, Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Centre, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, USA

Graves, P., (1991), Emigration and Literature: Vilhelm Moberg, Scottish Society for Northern Studies Vol 28, p35-40. 

Sawyer, K., (1999), The Emigrants from Småland, Sweden.  The American Dream, http://www.swedesintexas.com.