*[Hast du gut geschlafen?]
There is an entirely different way to study the Barlow origins and that is through the use of DNA. This has been a very active same-name project which has yielded excellent results. (Well, for one individual it was not so good.) Four Germanna Barlows were in the test and they all fall into the R1a Haplogroup.
The R1a Haplogroup is believed to have originated in the European Steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas. The group would have been members of the Kurgan culture who were the first to domesticate the horse about 3000 B.C. They were the first speakers of the Indo-European language group. Today, many members of the R1a Haplogroup are found in central and western Asia, India, and in the Slavic population of Europe.
The R1b, a related group, has the most Barlows, many of whom have an earliest known origin in Lancaster, England. In this largest group of Barlows, many of the individual members lack a proven relationship by non-DNA means to each other. A subdivision of this Haplogroup, R1b1, is the most common group in Europe. It would appear that many of the English Barlows are related, in the past, to Europeans (probably true for most of the English).
In the DNA tests, one individual was isolated and did not match well to any of the other Barlows. Even though he had the Barlow name, he was probably not of the same lines of descent as the other Barlows. Perhaps he was an adopted child, an event that was very common hundreds of years ago when the life span was much shorter.
These results, which are reported on the Internet, can be found easily by a Google search for “barlow dna”, where the first item returned is this Barlow DNA Study.
In that Study, a set of Barlows trace their origins to the Isle of Wight, but their Haplogroup I is rather remote, indicating an origin or split, from the other Barlows in the study, thousands of years ago. One person has the same markers as the Germanna group but the family traces their origin to Ireland and Australia.
*[Did you sleep well?]
(29 Jan 07)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.