I tested my mtDNA and Y DNA with FTDNA and also did their Family Finder (autosomal DNA) test.
FTDNA found me 25 mtDNA matches - 11 of them were at a genetic distance of 1 from me, 10 at a distance of 2 and 4 at a distance of 4.
My haplogroup is J1c2.
My earliest known mtDNA ancestor was an Ulster Presbyterian woman with a Scottish surname in Co. Down, Northern Ireland, and interestingly enough several of my mtDNA matches also had an earliest known female ancestor from that area. I also had several matches whose mitochondrial ancestry went back to Norway. Some of these people were Norwegian and some Norwegian-American. You will gather from this that I managed to correspond with some of my matches, who turned out to be quite well informed about their family-tree.
I think I can tie the Northern Irish and Norwegian strands together. The geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer wrote a book called "The Origins of the British" in which he has a map showing movement of what he called J1b people from Norway over to Scotland in the Neolithic. Those Norwegians who stayed at home would obviously have similar DNA to some of their distant cousins in Scotland. In the early 1600s the so-called Plantation of Ulster saw thousands of Scots, mainly from the west of the country, moving over to Ulster, and many of them might have had very distant ancestry from Norway. Also - of course - in historical times Norwegian Vikings raided the west of Scotland, took women home to be their wives, while others stayed here and became Scots.
Harry
