This is where McIntosh meets Grant.

Question

Here is where my McIntosh ancestor connects with the descendants of King Ramen of Norway. Since the profile of King Esmen of Norway has been on wikitree for years, why is anyone just now questioning it's accuracy?

Answer 1

There are millions of profiles on Wikitree. It will take a very long time for genealogists to sift through them all and discuss their veracity on G2G.

Answer 2

Most of the Norwegian profiles in that tree are unsourced Howard and they are unlikely to ever be sourced since Norwegian records do not go back that far. How do you know that any of these people even existed? I still have the same question as I had on your other post. What part of Norway was Esmen supposed to be king of? I have not found him on any of the lists of succession that I have viewed.

Comments

As an example of what Lynda Crockett is saying about Viks ng personalities being unsourced, just try to figure out the Y-DNA if William the Conqueror, descendant of Rollo aka Hrolf the Ganger, 1st of Normandy. Everything earlier than Rollo appears to be fabricated. With the Norse ruling the Kingdom of the Isles, the claims of Viking ancestry by Scots clans such as the Macleods appeared quite credible. As it happens, Y-DNA show the Macleod’s, who claimed to be Viking, are in fact Gaels; while the MacDonald chiefs, who claimed to be Gaels, are in fact Vikings. Likewise  MacNeills.

The Grants claimed to belong to the Siol Alpin which included the Macknnkns and Macgregors. There are Mackinnons and Macgregors with the Scots Modal haplotype. The Grants are something else again, probably  foreign but probably not Norse. I see a cluster of Grants who are R-DF21 same as me.  They would be Gaels.

There is work to be done in unravelling fabricated pedigrees. DNA has a role to play in that. It has a bigger role to play in putting together the real story.

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You can't really say who was a Viking and who was a Gael just from looking at y-DNA.  Especially if you can't dig them up.

And it's historically and genealogically meaningless to talk about this or that clan being Vikings or Gaels.  The distinction was obsolete before clans emerged, and no clan descends from a single family.

And what about the people who lived there before the immigrants arrived?  Nobody seems to descend from them, but that's because they got their DNA from the same pot as the immigrants.

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For nearly two decades DNA has had the ability to separate our SNPs that developed in Northern Europe and which in the British Isles context, are a good game ndicator of Norse descent. It took a little longer to separate Anglo-Saxon from Celtic, but again DNA had that capability for some time also. So any living male willing to pull out his wallet can have his Y-DNA tested. As Y-DNA is passed down from father to son, it follows that his direct male ancestors will have essentially matching DNA, minus a few mutations. You don’t need to dig up your direct male ancestors. The answer is in your genes.

The previous writer may be unaware that the Norse ruled the Isles of Scotland until the battle of Largs in 1266, just a generation before those annoying English interfered in Scottish affairs. The Scots still distinguish themselves from the English. The Battle of Largs showed that they also distinguished themselves  from the Norse, 1266 being well after most clans developed.

My previous post acknowledged that the DNA of chiefs and clansmen can differ, as in the MacDonsld clan and the Grants. A number of chi F＆W have been tested so that we have a baseline for several clans.

Answer 3

I think WikiTree just reached 17 million profiles.

Sometimes it seems everyone wants a viking in their tree and since there are (still) not many Scandinavians members of WikiTree compared to Americans I guess profiles like this one have not been questioned.

Norway don't have a project started yet, Denmark and Sweden exists and Finland is just starting up a project right now. Hopefully, with more Scandinavian members, perhaps profiles like these will get some attention from people who might know what saga/legend it was taken from. Or if it really was a real person, and if so, who the profile really refers to.

Because there is no "Esmen of Norway" that I can find in any search I tried for it. And a name like Svenwoman is just not a Nordic name at all, that is (at the best) some kind of invented/translated English name. So most probably this is just an inventive fantasy by someone wanting to connect to some royalty and then it has found it's way around multiple genealogy sites and became "truth".

If you really believe this could be an ancestor you should try to back it up with real published sources, then it would get some credability and we would be able to discuss it.

Edit:

The information on the profile for "King Hacken I Grandt aka King of East Angles" https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Grandt-7 indicates it's a scam from 1710 connecting back to the norse god Odin. I will add the tags for EuroAristo and pre-1500 to this question so people following those tags will find this question.

Comments

Maggie, if you can identify the scam further, it would be great if you could create a category for it and put Haacken I Grandt in that category.  Then we can add other profiles affected by that scam.  Knowing all we can about the scams and what profiles they affect help clean up all the bad genealogy out there!

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Hi Jack, I really know nothing more than is stated on the profile I linked. 

If you are to google the phrase "Monymusk Text" you get (among others) these links; http://www.clangrant.org/index.aspx?pid=15  http://www.clangrant.org/index.aspx?pid=14 

So it seems it was "invented" for a member of the Grant Clan to connect them to the Norse sagas/legends.

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I stand corrected about Norway not having a project by the way, they actually do have a project. I was in to much of a hurry this morning to read the search listing properly it seems.

Added "Scottish Clans" tag to the question, perhaps there is a member on WT who is of the Clan Grant?

Answer 4

It's not really about Norway, it's about the origins of the Grants.  In the 16th/17th century, when the English were inventing their descents from unrecorded Heroes of Hastings and the Welsh were going back to King Arthur, the clans were fitting themselves up with histories that linked into Boece's legendary history of Scotland.  

This was especially important for clans with Anglo-Norman names - they needed a history that didn't start with Anglo-Normans.

Comments

Sorry to upset Horace. But if Y-DNA dismantles on fabricated descent, it can always be the beginnings of a new start on the real story. DNA is not all bad.