The Livingston/Maclea/Boggs DNA Surname Project
Founded February 2003, Last Updated
22-May-06
This project is open to all families potentially
affiliated with any Livingston(e) or Maclea family.
It is run by participants, for participants.
This is a joint genealogical effort to try to reconstruct family trees, which may contain errors. If you think you see something you want to copy, please also do me the favor of contacting the maker of this webpage (Andrew.Lancaster “at” skynet.be) to give me a chance to update you on the latest possibilities.
Participation
- Concerning testing, see here on
separate page. You need to be a male with one of our
surnames.
- There are also other ways of
providing assistance to this project for relatives (not male, or not
having one of the key surnames) and genealogist friends of these families.
Options include sponsorship, coordination and research. Please contact me for more ideas, or
if you want to make contact with any of our participants families.
- There
is also now a member-only discussion group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/livingston_maclea_DNA/
Introduction to our surnames
(For a more detailed listing of variants, see here.)
The central
name, to which all the others in this project are linked is Livingston
(or Livingstone etc, once widely pronounced and spelt as Leviston
in many places). Concerning the participant families with the Livingston-type
names, the possible distinction between “highland” and “lowland” versions of
the name, should be kept in mind. Highlanders come from the more broken
landscape of North Western Scotland (the term tends to include the “Isles”)
where Gaelic, a language also
spoken in Ireland, was the main language until relatively recently.
1. Highland Livingstones.
Dr David Livingstone,
the missionary, explorer, opponent of slavery, and proponent of free trade for
Africans, was a member of the clan
MacLea, sometimes known as the “highland Livingstones”. In our project we
have members of this clan’s leading family, still based on the island of Lismore. This clan
once used many surnames, most famously Maclea and Maconlea, and for a long time
they only used the surname Livingstone when they were in English speaking
areas. In the 18th and 19th century many Macleas who were
still in Scotland took up what they considered to be the English version of
their name.
2. Lowland Livingstones.
The
“lowland Livingstons”, include Philip
Livingston who signed the US Declaration of Independence. This
English-speaking family of southern and eastern Scotland held political power
of different kinds throughout Scottish history. Famous titles include Callendar, Linlithgow, and Falkirk and Dunipace.
Originally they are thought to descend from the man who founded the town that
is still called Livingston, in West Lothian, Scotland (not so far from
Edinburgh). Modern historians tend to believe he was English or even a
continental European, because the name Living was common in England at that
time, coming (if it was the Anglo-Saxon name) from an earlier form, “Leofwin”.
But the Macleas (and perhaps the Livingstons) seem to have once felt that the
name was Gaelic. Indeed, the earliest Living/Livinus I am aware of on record, St Livinus, seems
to have been a Gaelic speaker rather than an Anglo-Saxon.
Although no
longer the standard theory, this old folklore, accepted once by so many of the families
who linked themselves to the surname Livingston, can be summarized as stating
that the origin of all these names was a Gaelic name. That name was most likely
a version of the Northern Irish royal name Dhunnshléibhe (Dunleavy). So much
knowledge of these times is lost that this project can only state this as a
challenge. As DNA projects gather more and more data they will become more
accurate. What will be the limits?
Amongst our
participating families we have many who claim either a distant relationship
with Philip Livingston and the Callendar group of families, or with Dr David
Livingstone and the clan MacOnlea. We have none who claim both. On the other
hand, as stated above, it seems that in pre-modern times the two families felt
themselves to be related or allied somehow. Consider this 18th
century statement:-
It is very ordinary
for the McLea’s to call themselves ‘Livingston’ when they come or go to the low
country. What is or hath been the occasion of this, I cannot well tell, but it
is very ordinary for the ‘Livingstons’ in the low Country to be very kind to
the ‘McLeas’, and to reckon themselves to have come of the ‘McLeas’ in the
Highlands, and it is alledged upon the Highlanders that for ordinary they have
two names, as the McLea’s have – that of ‘McLea’ in the Highlands, and
‘Livingston’ in the low country.
An Account of the Name of
McLea, 1743, See http://www.macleay.cncfamily.com/account_of_mclea.htm
For
genealogy of Dr Livingstone, see here: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~swilson/livingstone/livingstone.htm
For
genealogy of the early lowland house of Livingston, see here: http://www.stirnet.com/HTML/genie/british/ll/livingston01.htm
For
genealogy of the Barons Bachuil of Lismore, see here: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~swilson/livingstone/other2.htm
…and…
http://www.clanlivingstone.com/family_tree.htm
A quick introduction to
the DNA results and what they mean
Background reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_genealogy
- Along the tops of
tables you can see the names of places ("loci" or
"markers") on the Y chromosome. Every
man has a Y chromosome, made up of DNA, which he gets in a fairly
accurate from his father.
- The particular
places on the Y chromosome which are studied by genealogists are
"stutters" in the "code" of the DNA, which are
relatively unstable, called "STR markers"
(with names like "DYS393" or "YCAII"). This makes them
suited for identifying large patrilineal families
or dynasties, and therefore for surname studies. For distinguishing
specific individuals compared to relatives with the same surname, or
distinguishing whole ethnic or geographic groups, other DNA
"markers" can be used.
- The numbers
within the table can be considered as the number of repeats within each of
the "stutters" under consideration.
- Several of the
markers have multiple copies at different places within the Y chromosome.
These add an extra complexity, because in a single generational step one
of these copies can overwrite another. For example the two different YCAII
markers might go from YCAII=19-24 to YCAII=19-19.
- These multi-part markers must be interpreted carefully because the lab results are not always certain. One single result could mean that one of the copies has been deleted or that there are two with the same number of repeats. In the case of DYS464 there can even often be extra copies (more than the normal 4).
Here are some example of multi-part markers from our first results table below. Compare these to these more full lists of the possible interpretations to the standardized formats presented below…
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DYS459 |
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DYS464 |
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YCAII |
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CDY
(DYS724) |
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|
normal number
of alleles |
2 parts |
|
most
common is 4 parts, but often more or less |
|
2 parts |
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|
2 parts |
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|
Livingstone |
21629 |
9-9 or
just 9? |
15-15-15-15
or 15-15-15 or 15-15 or 15 or something else? |
19-24 |
|
|
|
|
38-38 or
just 38? |
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McLean |
28652 |
9-10 |
|
|
15-15-17-17
or 15-17 or something else? |
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|
19-24 |
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36-38 |
|
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|
MacLea |
16114 |
9-9 or
just 9? |
15-15-16-16
or 15-16 or something else? |
|
|
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|
|
19-19 or
just 19? |
|
39-39 or
just 39? |
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|
McCauley |
17767 |
9-9 or
just 9? |
15 |
16 |
16 |
16 |
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|
|
19-19 or
just 19? |
|
39-42 |
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- MARKER STANDARDS. Wherever marker standards differ between labs I have used the Family Tree DNA standards for the first 37 markers (the ones up to and including DYS438). For the next 11 markers (DYS461 up to DYS463) we use the most common standard for those markers, which is that of the companies DNA Heritage and Relative Genetics (also used on www.ysearch.org). We use the standards of DNA Fingerprint on all other markers. See their conversion table.
- HAPLOGROUPS. When we speak about “haplogroups” we are talking about the broad groupings of humankind who share ancient common ancestry, in this case only in their paternal ancestry, and from a common paternal ancestor. A great resource for this is at http://www.isogg.org/tree/index.html.
KEY. To make it
easier to take this large
R1b group in I have divided it into two tables and used a colour coding based which tries to make what is most
unusual most obvious. Only the very fastest markers are given red titles. And all coloured cells within the table
are on the following basis:
1.
Pale Yellow for 1
repeat less than the typical group value (group modal) chosen for comparison (bright green row at top).
2.
Bright Yellow for 2 repeats less than group modal.
3.
Pink for 1
repeat more than group modal.
4.
Magenta for 2 repeats more than group modal.
5.
Purple for 3 repeats more than group modal.
6.
Red for 4
repeats more than group modal.
7.
Bright green for more distant, and therefore outstanding, results.
Individuals marked as SMGF come from the Sorenson
database at http://smgf.org and are not participants of the project as such.
The Results:-