Having been researching ‘ours’ for over thirty years, it is no great surprise to say that I’ve come across a lot of assumptions and alternatives in history that are open to interpretation if there isn’t hard written proof.
The ‘original’ version of my descendent line can be found on this page, and it certainly stands up from my father back as far as Joseph Collier (1719-1800). Back beyond that there are some potential issues which, dear reader, I feel it only fair to include.
Joseph married Mary Ho(a)re. There is no evidence of the wedding but Joseph is referred to in wills associated with the (wealthy) Hoare family. The Hoare line allegedly goes back to the Norman conquest but I personally haven’t followed up all of the material to verify that. Certainly they were well off and the money came from somewhere, but it does raise the question, why would a wealthy woman marry Joseph, whose background appears to be that of farm labourers.
In a similar vein there is a version of the story that say that our oldest Collier line, Robert Collier (abt.1555-1612) was married to Alys who was supposedly Alice Hawkins, related to John Hawkins who was an Elizabethan privateer / pirate. Robert certainly married an Alys, but whether this is Alice Hawkins is open to debate.
There were a lot of Colliers in Devon during the 17- and 1800s. There is increasing evidence that suggests many of them were related, including some over the boarders in Somerset and, mostly Dorset. It is the Dorest Collier’s that bring us to our biggest uncertainty….
Through y-DNA matching, I have a reasonably close match with a Collier in Australia who was descended from a Collier line in South Shields, Durham – the north-east of England and about as far from Devon as possible. In theory my Australian cousin and I are descended from the same line. The Durham Collier’s only seem to appear from about 1800 in South Shields so its possible that a male Collier travelled there and set up home.
Where it gets more confusing though is that I have another y-DNA cousin in New Zealand, with descent from the same Durham line – but his surname is Sanson (Sansom) and his Sanson/Sansom line is traceable back to Sansom’s in Dorset. However, I know from previous research that some of the Collier’s of Dorset tended to go under two surnames, e.g. Collier alias Sansom -or Sansom alias Collier (or other surnames). But they routinely drop one name for no apparent reason. This makes tracing them very hard.
So it is possible that my Joseph, who himself had connections to Dorset and was buried at Hawkchurch, in Devon/Dorset at different times, was actually descended from Sansoms or a different Collier line. I have no confirmed link to date, but keep looking to make sense of this.
Ancient Lines
The y-DNA has also shown much older links to Sweden and Norway suggesting a pathway via the vikings or similar invaders. This includes Skara 135 who was a man who lived between 900 – 1200 CE during the Viking Age and was found in the region now known as Varnhem, Varnhem, Skara, Sweden. Also Kopparsvik 260 who lived between 900 – 1050 CE and was found in the region now known as Kopparsvik, Gotland, Sweden.
The most ancient link is Denisova 8, an adult Denisovan man who lived between 134,400 and 103,600 BCE in the Altai Mountains region of southern Siberia, Russia. Our common ancestor was likely to be around 705,000 BCE.