Editor’s note: Guest author Nick Rowland has graciously contributed this article to Rowland Genealogy. Nick, currently a resident of Sussex, is the leading genealogical researcher of the Rowland family of Essex, England, from which he descends. He has documented this line back to the 1500s and has used Y-DNA to confirm common ancestry back to 1670. As he digs deeper, he finds himself in the era before there were surnames. Paper trails are scant to non-existent, so Nick is following the science–the DNA. Today, he shares his journey with us.

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Rowland DNA Group M Update

— by Nick Rowland, Sussex, England

Rowland project DNA Group M now has four FTDNA Y-700 (Big Y) testers. This testing has enabled us to validate the documented tree back to 1670 AD in Coggeshall, Essex, England.

Validating a family tree is one of the benefits of deep Y testing, it is possible from the number of SNPs to calculate how far back two males from the same paternal line share a common ancestor. Regardless of how exacting and detailed your documentary research has been carried out, there is often some uncertainty if you have linked a child with the correct parent.

In my case, we had a number of Peter Rowland names around the same time and in the same place. I was 90% certain I had linked a child to the correct father but the common ancestor calculation confirmed this. For example, I found a 7^th cousin 1x removed to test. In theory, according to the documentary research, we shared a common ancestor Peter Rowland born 1670. The DNA calculation showed a most recent common ancestor of mid-1600s, which aligned with the documents. The calculation isn’t exact to a year but is good enough for most purposes.

Big Y Block Tree

Recently there has been an unexpected development that has shown up in the Big Y Block Tree (see below).

As you can see another four males have appeared in the group M section of the Block tree, the puzzle was they all have the surname Sedgwick!

There followed some serious investigating as this was an unexpected but exciting development. The most recent common ancestor calculation indicated the Rowland and Sedgwick lines shared a common ancestor born around the mid-900s AD and the common Sedgwick ancestor was born around the mid-1400s AD. Our joint ancestor of 900 AD was well before surnames became fixed, which explains the differing surnames.

Discussions with the Sedgwick project have revealed this family lives in Utah but the family originated in the north of England most likely in a narrow band running across England from Cumbria to Durham. This is quite different from the Rowland family who can trace their roots back to the early 16th century in the Coggeshall area of Essex, England.

At this point, our archaeological relative VK184 (see The Essex Rowland Family Story from 10,000 BCE to 2020 CE) discovered on Greenland comes into the equation. This chap was a Viking burial in the East Settlement on Greenland and had been born in Iceland around 900AD. Vikings in Iceland originated on the east coast of Norway, so the Rowlands were originally from Norway and so must have the Sedgwicks also originated in Norway.

At this point, we only have the above data as firm facts but linking those facts to English history leads to a potential explanation for our joint story after leaving Norway. I will emphasise this is pure conjecture and could easily be wrong and change as further facts become known.

Now to some historic jigsaw work……

After the early Viking raiding parties attacked the English coast, which were mostly “hit and run” rather than colonisation. The Vikings from what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark formed an alliance in the mid-9th Century, creating a large invasion army. This army became known in the Anglo Saxon Chronicles as the “Great Heathen Army” or “Viking Army. It was created to capture territory from the Anglo-Saxons who had colonised England a few hundred years earlier, just after the Roman era.

Anyway, the Viking army invaded England, landing on the East Anglian Coast around 865AD, and fought their way up England to Northumbria finishing in 878AD. Why is this so significant? Because my long-term family village, Coggeshall, Essex, is very close to the East Anglian coast. Northern Essex was part of East Anglia, which was under Viking rule for 100-200 years.

I wonder if two brothers (could also be one individual who then had two sons in England) from western Norway were part of that army landing on the East Anglian coast, and another brother had sailed to Iceland (the father of our Greenland relative). One brother might have remained in East Anglia as part of the colonisation of that area, while the other brother continued up the east side of England with the army and ended up in Northumbria. See the above map of the invasion, follow the red line on the right-hand side. The black and blue dotted lines mark the boundary of the territory occupied by the Vikings in 877, the north western line passes extremely close to or even over the village of Sedgwick in Cumbria (it’s an indicative map rather than precise).

It seems the chap who ended up in Northumbria may have settled in what is now the village of Sedgwick in Cumbria, this was originally a Viking settlement. It is possibly how the Sedgwick family gained their surname as it was quite common to adopt the name of where you lived.

It is really just a guessed story at the moment, but I thought I would share it with you. The problem now remains of how to show people in a family tree that originate before surnames. We know they must have existed but we will never know their names. Maybe the answer is to only include named individuals in a family tree.

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Image credits:

• “Common Y-DNA Group M Ancestor” created by Rowland Genealogy
• “Big Y Block Tree” from FamilyTreeDNA (as of June 2022)
• “The Great Heathen Army of 865” by Wikimedia Commons contributors, ‘File: England Great Army map.svg’, Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, 19 September 2021, 02:02 UTC, <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:England_Great_Army_map.svg&oldid=592098567> [accessed June 2022]