Bruce wrote:
Now we know that our Carpenter ancestors were in England from the
early
1600s back to circa 1300 AD.
It would be more accurate to say that we have no reason to suppose
they were anywhere but in England. The Carpenters who emigrated to
New England, both the Rehoboth and Providence lines, were evidently
English. However, we do not know the ancestors of either line, and so
the presumption of Enlish residency cannot be pushed more than, say, a
couple centuries earlier. There is so little known about these folks
before emigration that we really cannot assume traces of moderately
remote non-English origins would have been detected.
DNA adds a new dimension to the picture, but it cannot refine the time
line by itself. Take, for example, the relationship between the two
New England immigrant Carpenter lines. Although, at first, we had
trouble telling the two lines apart from DNA, we soon found a marker
that distinshished between them, and we have recently gotten proof of
a second distinguishing DNA marker. The current state of the art
places bounds on the time of the most recent common ancestor of the
two lines as between c1000 AD and c1550 AD. There is a hint that a
third distinguishing marker may exist in the 38-67 panel, but that
won't change the bounds much, one way or the other.
Of course, there *is* a way for DNA testing to make big breakthroughs
-- that is to find English Carpenters of today who match the American
ones. Therefore, the challenge for us all is to trace living
male-line descendants of the known English Carpenter lines and recruit
them into the DNA project. In fact, an English Carpenter who matched
a known DNA group could be an exciting find (at least for the members
of that group) even if his own ancestry were known only back to 1800.
There is speculation that one Carpenter
line from France descended from the De Melun Family that is documented to
circa 1000 AD in France.
That's a case in point. In fact, we have one member of that family
in the DNA project. There was (briefly) a flurry of excitement
when the first half of his test results came back and indicated a
possible connection to Group 15. However, the second half of his
results disproved the connection and left him with (at present) no
apparent link to any other participants. Of course, he is just one
person, and rigorous DNA testing requires two or more matching
participants before we can designate an identifiable group, but, if
he had matched someone else convincingly, that could have been the
basis of a whole new chapter in Carpenter genealogy. As it is, this
test has merely added a single data point for future reference.
We need more data points.
John Chandler