Recently I got an email from the administrator of another surname DNA project about matches in YSearch between members of his project and members of ours.
Usually matches outsides one's own surname aren't anything to get excited about unless there's a known or suspected non-paternity event in one of the parties' background. Because the DNA mutates at such a slow rate, and because in many cases surnames have been in use only the past few hundred years, matches outside one's surname usually indicate a common ancestor in the time before surnames hundreds of years ago.
But this out-of-surname match is much more interesting and exciting.
As you probably know, Slavin comes from the Gaelic word for "mountain" or "of the mountain." (More information here.) So what's the surname with the DNA match to Slavin? Yep-- MOUNTAIN.
Anglicizing Irish surnames has been going on for nearly as long as there have been Irish surnames. In 1465 an act was passed mandating that Irishmen living within the pale should dress like English men, wear their beards like English men, and take an English surname. Our families in northern Ireland were well beyond the pale and not subject to this act, but may have had reason to anglicize Slavin to Mountain at some point. Maybe there were too many Patrick Slevin families in a parish so one family switched to Mountain. Maybe a family switched from the Church of Ireland to the Catholic Church-- or vice versa-- and changed their surname along with their denomination. We'll probably never know.
The Mountain project participants were tested by Relative Genetics/Ancestry, while everyone in "Group A" in our project was tested by FamilyTreeDNA. RG tests 43 markers, and 32 of those markers are in the FTDNA 37-marker test. Of those 32 markers, the Mountains and Slavins mismatch on just a single marker.
I believe this is a strong indication that this Mountain line and the Slavin line split after the adoption of surnames, probably in the last few hundred years. As a point of comparison, we speculate that Group A and Group B sprang from a common Slavin ancestor early in the era of Irish surnames, perhaps 800-1000 years ago. The Mountain and Group A lines would have split much later.
If the DNA match isn't exciting enough in its own right, how about this-- one of the Mountain participants can trace his background to a specific parish in Ireland! His family comes from Magheraculmoney parish in County Fermanagh. The parish is located in northern Fermanagh and adjoins the parish of Dromore, County Tyrone, which had many Slevin families in the mid-19th century. The parish is "18" in the map here.
A quick look on the 'net shows that there were Slevins in the parish in the mid to late 19th century. Granted, this is 100+ years after the "Group A" Slavin line came to America. But it's a tantalizing hint at the family's origin.
Additional testing is being planned to further solidify the connection between the matching Mountain and Slaven project participants. Check back for updates!
Copyright © 2008 Larry Slavens. All rights reserved.