I'm posting this because if any of my friends might appreciate this, it would be Dark Shadows friends. I've met with only the mildest (to zero) interest from family members with the exception of my mother, who isn't actually affected by it. The subject of gypsies has come up many times on this forum, but I never dreamed I would have a personal connection to the Roma people. It's in the much distant past and I wouldn't want to overstate the case, either.
My genealogy pursuits in recent years have been supplemented by genetic genealogy, i.e. DNA testing. I'm no expert but I have given presentations and co-presented to genealogy groups on some basic aspects. Some results from testing have remained puzzling and it's easy to brush them off. One of these were filtered tests of my data that showed Spanish ancestry. Confident that I have no Spanish ancestry, I didn't pursue these curious findings for several years and only took another look at these results recently. They showed Basque, Andalucia, La Mancha, and a handful of other regions of Spain near the Bay of Biscay and along the French border. In my searches for what Haplogroups and subclades (more precise subcategories) these might include, I came upon an article from 2007 from a journal of genetic research that outlined 12 subclades that define the genetic profile of the Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese) Roma.
Almost in a spirit of following a lark, I began searching my data for each of these clades/SNPs (there is only one testing company that provides this analysis). Each one I checked for, it turned out I had – but the clincher was a specific subclade originating in northern India. For someone with Nordic and French heritage, that is hard to fathom. The administrator of this Haplogroup writes that in European ancestry, this subclade is found only in those with Roma heritage. So, yes, I have a gypsy ancestor somwhere, and more specifically one from Spain.
I've learned a lot about the Roma in the past several weeks, but have also found how much of their history remains a mystery – including in France. The DNA results indicate an ancestor within the last 450 years. Sounds like a long time, but my most likely ancestor was one from Auvergne in south central France who later migrated to the northeastern France of my great-grandfather. My seventh-great grandfather, he lived in the late 1600s and early 1700s. In the late 1580s, Spain decided to rid the country of the gypsies, and many likely fled into France. Within a couple of miles from my ancestor's home in the Clermont-Theirs region was a an area that seems to have been a refuge for the Roma. It is still found on some maps, and called "Bohemia," but in the Occitan form of the local language. A canon of the church living at the time of my ancestor and in the same city was also a poet who wrote sympathetically of the "Baumians," and I believe that this was an area where gypsies were safe for a few generations.
What has this to do with me today? Well, I still have a trace of his DNA. We don't have DNA from every ancestor – by 400-500 years we have too many ancestors to still carry DNA from each one. So I have inherited something from a Roma forebear - DNA, yes, but also a sliver of a heritage I never would have expected I had.
