Shared ancestry between two men can be determined based on measurements of their y-chromosome, and comparing the extent of their differences.Īn individual's y-chromosome profile is known as his haplotype, from the Greek haplo, meaning simple or single. However, over the generations mutations do occur, increasing in number with the centuries. This chromosome is passed from father to son relatively intact. The y-chromosome, then, identifies just the male line of descent, and does so back to the development of Y-DNA itself. That means that a son can receive the y-chromosone that defines him as a man only from his father. However, as we all remember from High School science, while our mother had two x-chromosomes, our father had an x- and a y-chromosome, the latter determining his sex. Looking at our DNA will help clarify the possibilities.ĭNA Analysis & the "Deep Ancestry" of our FamilyĭNA testing allows us to determine the degree of relationship between any two people, but more importantly it lets us trace the origins and development of man back tens of thousands of years and, combined with the archaelogy of ancient settlements, to follow his travels across the globe as well as his technological advancement.Įach one of us is a unique creation, a scramble of the genes provided by our mother and father. Perhaps they had lived there for generations perhaps they had just arrived. It is, however, difficult to say when the family first arrived in Heysham. See the Evolution of Names to learn more about this process. This was done in order to differentiate him from John of, say, Halton, or John, William's son, or John, the tailor. So, an ancestor, we'll call him John, became known, for administrative or legal purposes, as John of Heysham. That is, they were there when surnames were first being developed. If the above is valid, we can make an educated guess that our family lived in or near the village of Heysham in the 13th century. In the latter 17th century common variants included Heesom, Hesom and Heesham, all spellings used by our family during the same era. The earliest recorded spelling of the village's name, in the Domesday Book of 1094, was Hessam. On the previous page we claimed that our family name, Hissem, was a derivative of Heysham, which is a village in Lancashire, in northwestern England.
When Did the Hissem Family First Live in Northern England?
It is also from there, looking backwards, that we can use biological and archaeological evidence to construct a coherent story of where the male line of our family came from and how they managed to get to the north of England. It is from there that we can look forward, using written documents, to trace our family descent to the current day. This is, metaphorically, a stake in the ground for the earliest point of something like certainty in our story. However, before we start this long and fairly torturous journey, I want first to identify the locus of the following discussion, which is northern England. The origin of the male line of our family, the Hissem Family, is a complex subject which covers not just hundreds or thousands of years, but hundreds of thousands of years.
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