Distant Family Links to Ruy

The skein of life

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.

To be born means that something which did not exist comes into existence. But the day we are "born" is not our beginning. It is a day of continuation. But that should not make us less happy when we celebrate our "Happy Continuation Day."

Since we are never born, how can we cease to be? This is what the Buddhist Heart Sutra reveals to us. When we have a tangible experience of non-birth and non-death, we know ourselves beyond duality. The meditation on "no separate self" is one way to pass through the gate of birth and death.

Your hand proves that you have never been born and you will never die. The thread of life has never been interrupted from time without beginning until now. Previous generations, all the way back to single-celled beings, are present in your hand at this moment. You can observe and experience this. Your hand is always available as a subject for meditation. "
('Present Moment, Wonderful Moment' by Thich Nhat Hanh)

Some background on Keith's male-line ydna:

The DNA that is shared by Keith, John Shorrocks and Ken Grist (see FamilyTreeDNA 'Shorrock Surname Study') has been typed using the classification devised by Stephen Oppenheimer for his study ‘The Origins of the British: a Genetic Detective Story – The Surprising Roots of the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh’ (see attachment above).

Basically the DNA is ancestral, aboriginal northern English. However, this does not mean that it is Anglo-Saxon. It goes much deeper than the invasions from the eastern North Sea coast of the period 450 to 600AD. Rather, it stems from the first hunters in Britain who followed retreating glaciers north from the Catalonia (Barcelona area) of Spain around 8,000 years ago hunting for mammoths and other game.

Oppenheimer calls the wider gene cluster that contains our strand R1b-13. About 4 percent of males in the British Isles belong to the R1b-13 group. This is most prevalent in the English Pennines, Cumbria, North West Wales, South East Ireland and South Central Scotland. Our ancestors, over the period 8,000 BC to 2000BC, gradually evolved from hunters into livestock keepers and then to farmer cultivators of limited patches of oats, rye and other coarse grains. They would have spoken a Basque-related language. Their religion probably included the sacrifice of treasured objects and human victims to sacred waters and bogs.

At some point in the first millennium BC, they would have come into contact with more advanced Celtic speaking farmers moving in from the east. Gradually, the Basque-related language of those who lived in what is now England was superseded by a Celtic language akin to Welsh (known as Cumbric). By the time the Romans conquered Britain, our ancestors would have been drawn into Celtic tribes – the most important of which were the Brigantes, who straddled the English Pennines and had an offshoot in South East Ireland.

Overall, it is worth noting that the North West of England was relatively sparsely populated, backward and conservative until the 18th Century, in comparison to the south and east of England. It is likely that there were as few as 2,000 people in Lancashire 1500 years ago. The area then underwent successive conquests and settlements that led to the eventual abandonment of Cumbric in favour of English. The invaders included the Romans, the Northumbrian Angles, the Danes, Norse settlers from Ireland, and the Normans (with periodic invasions from Scotland). No doubt most of these strands can be found in our wider DNA profiles.