Holmes Genealogy

I have learned much about my ancestry as a result of DNA testing. When I first started my family research over 30 years ago, I pondered the Homes surname. It is fairly unique. I wondered if we were related to the Earls of Home in the Borderlands of Scotland and their descendants, many who took the surname Humes. Though Y-DNA testing I now know that our name is a derivation of Holmes or Holms as it often seen in Scotland.

The image above is a screenshot of the public results page for Holmes Group 1 at FTDNA. In all likelihood I share a common male ancestor (going back father to son) with all the men in this group. A group that includes the descendants of:

• William Holmes b. 1770 Renfrewshire > emigrated to Massachusetts
• Robert Holmes d. 1754 Sussex County, DE
• James Holmes b.1798 Duchess County, NY
• Robert Holmes and Mary Luckie of NC and GA
• Thomas Holmes d.1860 Robertson County, TN
• John Holmes b. abt 1790 County Donegal, Ireland

The testing for the project is different than the autosomal DNA testing used by Ancestry and others. Autosomal testing works well within about 5 generations. It is great for identifying cousins as it checks what percentage of DNA you have in common with someone else. The downside is that the amount of DNA shared falls in half every generation, so there isn’t much common to compare once you get beyond the 5-6 generation mark.

Y-DNA is different. It looks at the Y chromosome that is passed down from father to son. This can be useful identifying common ancestors going back 20 or even 30 generations. Modern testing can now analyze over 700 markers. My Y-DNA cousins and I all share very similar markers values, usually with only a handful of differences between us. These differences help estimate the time to our shared common ancestor. Basically the larger the difference the longer the time estimate. The 700+ marker testing is Very sophisticated. We can produce a time-tree showing when our common ancestors likely lived and when different branches broke off. The time-tree below is from public results for Holmes Group 1. Some information is incomplete or marked private, but it gives a good overview of what we can learn.

As you can see the Holmes surname is very old indeed. The chart above would indicate that the name has been in use since about the 12th century.

A big surprise in the testing has been the Holmes families of County Donegal. My ancestor, the Rev William Homes was likely born there in 1663. The Holmes DNA project has several participants with roots in County Donegal. It surprised me when testing revealed that while many participants fall into my own Group 1 (likely to have originated in SW Scotland), several others fall into Group 8 (many with ancestors in England). Even my own Group 1 is a surprise. Most of them (subgroup 01a) likely share a common ancestor in the 1600s. My ancestor’s connection with them is much earlier, however, with our common ancestor likely having been born around 1400 +/- 200 years.

Selfish blurb: The Holmes project is always looking for additional participants. If you are a Holmes male (or know one), we would love to hear from you.