My Family Heritage & History

This live version of Traust by Heilung really sets the tone for this blog post

Hey everybody,

Sorry for the wait. This blog post is quite longer and more dense than previous posts. Today, I am going to share a newfound interest and hobby of mine. Upon coming home from my trip to England and Scotland, I became interested in learning more about my ancestry and heritage. To not get too autistically detailed this early on in the post, I am overwhelmingly Germanic in my ethnicity with splashes of Celtic, Gaelic and some other random ethnicities too. Prior to my deep dive into my history, I thought it was the inverse, and in a weird way, it didn’t really feel right. I remember my grandfather David Deloy Dodds would tell me that we had a ton of ancestry in England and Scotland, but finding out through research and some help with Google Gemini, heritage location doesn’t automatically imply ethnicity. On my mom’s side I am overwhelmingly Anglo Saxon, Anglo Scandinavian, Danish and French which is mostly from Normandy (Frenchman of Norwegian/Danish viking and Frankish descent.) On my dad’s side he's a bit of a European mutt since he is also overwhelmingly Germanic from almost every European country in the northern and central regions of the continent. He also has a decent amount of Gaelic and Celtic ancestry and a small percentage of Northern/Sub-saharan African too which is interesting. It makes sense since I tan really easily if I’m outside too long lol! His mom was adopted as an infant and found out that she was half white and half African American, but we don’t know too much about her biological family tree unfortuneately.  That can change though. But to be honest, I mostly lean in my interest into my Germanic heritage since that is what I mostly am. 

Ever since I was in my late teens, I’ve been autistically obsessed with Vikings and Scandinavian culture. Initially, when I first went down this rabbit hole, I was hoping to see some Scandinavian ancestry but that interest has broadened to the entire ethnic group of Germanic peoples. When we go back in time, like 1500 to 2500 years in time, these peoples who are modern day Western and Central Europe, were essentially one people who came from Scandinavia and they spread out to central, southern and eastern Europe and even into Northern Africa. They were pagans who believed in the same pantheon of gods like Odin and Thor but their names and worship changed over time and became regional. They all believed essentially in the same gods and goddesses but their names were slightly different depending on where they settled and over a very long space of time (Odin/ Wodan/ Wotan/ Wotanaz, etc.) I’m sure some archeologist will fact-check my ass, but I believe the Germanic tribes descended from an ancient group of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic peoples who migrated to northern Europe thousands of years prior. But by the time they became a distinct ethnic group around 2500 years ago, they became a serious force to be reckoned with in the centuries and millennia to come. 

A year or so ago, I went down a deep dive learning about these ancient and medieval Germanic peoples who formed tribes all over the areas where they settled. I don’t need to give you a boring history lesson, but needless to say there were a decent number of these tribes and their descendants scattered around the globe. They were mercenaries, soldiers, warriors, raiders, traders and leaders. They lived a hardcore Warrior ethos or code who were fiercely loyal to their kin and tribe. Even though they fought and killed each other, they viewed other Germanic tribes as brothers or cousins and would oftentimes ally themselves with other tribes to protect themselves from what they perceived to be a major threat to their way of life. It is this “Warrior Ethos” that resonates with me and I strive each and every day to align myself with this worldview of being a fierce protector of those in my family and inner circle. 

Now that you have a cliff notes understanding of this group of people, now I can share with you my heritage. Although my ancestry hail mostly from the British Isles, mainly England and Scotland, they were a melting pot of peoples. I feel that people including myself don’t realize how diverse these islands were back over a thousand years ago. And no I’m not talking about diversity in the modern sense. A few centuries prior to Viking raids into these islands, there were a few Germanic tribes from the continent who migrated to these islands for a variety of reasons. These people are what we now call the Anglo Saxons. These Germanic people consisted of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and some Frisians who came from southern Denmark, Northern Germany mostly and some from the Netherlands. Shortly after Rome’s hold in Britain dissolved, many Celts vied for power and ones with significant influence hired Germanic mercenaries, mostly Anglo Saxon, as personal security. Long story short, it ended up being a massive migration of these germanic tribes to the British isles of what they called England and they almost completely wiped out the Celtic population in what they would call England.

My ancestry on both of my parents' sides that does hail from the British Isles were mostly Anglo Saxon, Anglo Scandinavian (peoples mostly of mixed Anglo Saxon and Scandinavian descent), Norman (Frenchified Vikings who hailed from Normany, France and conquered England in 1066 AD) and Norse Gael/Hiberno Norse (Vikings who settled and intermarried with the Celts and Gaelic peoples. Both of my parents also have splashes of Gaelic, Celtic and Pictish ancestry which were the indigenous peoples who lived on these islands centuries and parts of modern-day Germany and France prior to these germanic migrations and raids but not as much as I initially thought.

So, on to the meat and potatoes of this post. I am obsessed with giving context so people have a little bit of an idea what I am talking about. So, my heritage. Like I said, my ancestry mostly came from the British Isles and Denmark. I remember when my grandfather David Deloy Dodds was alive, he shared with me our ancestry and mentioned on his line we hailed from these islands. He would tell us that we had ancestors on the Mayflower (William Bradford who is my 9th great-grandfather from my maternal line) and he would share our ancestry who came from England and Scotland, migrated to the Salt Lake Valley and eventually settled in a small town in Utah called Panguitch. He also mentioned that we were direct descendants of some heavy hitters in English history like William I “The Conqueror”.

At this point in time, I was hoping that we had some Scandinavian ancestry which I was stoked to find when he mentioned we had Danish and some Norwegian going really far back in our family tree. I’ve learned that what he was telling our family about our family history was an ancient, oral practice called “Oral Tradition.” In ancient and medieval Scandinavia and among other Germanic peoples, they didn’t have the technology over a thousand years ago to have written records of their history , so they would tell stories of their history and heritage own their history in the form of oral tradition. Centuries later would these oral traditions be written down and be called Sagas. The kings and houses of nobility would talk about who they hailed from and where as a way to legitimize their divine right to rule that they could trace their lineage back to their chief god Odin/Wodan, etc.

Fast forward to after my trip to England and Scotland, a trip I will cherish for the rest of my life, I went down the rabbit hole of family history. I got access to my parents’ Family Search accounts and went down the gnarliest deep dive of my life. I’m going to try to not bore you to death although I can’t make any promises and you can leave at any time. You’ve been warned, it’s a lot. And being the autistic person I am, I can’t not do a cliff notes version of this, there is just so much epic information. I can’t say I didn’t warn you lol. Ok, so upon my older brother doing a 23andme and seeing that his dna is over 96% European and nearly 70% of that is in the British Isles. There is also a dna marker that I learned about called haplogroups which tells you your direct line passed on by one’s parents for thousands of years. There is a y-haplogroup which tells you where your father’s direct dna marker originates from that was passed on from his father, and so on and so forth. And then there is a mtdna that is passed on from one’s mother. Y-haplogroup tracks your paternal line and mtDNA tracks your maternal line. So I found out through my older brother, Greg’s 23andme profile that our y-haplogroups from a millennia to 30,000 years ago are I-P109 which is a subclade of I1 and I-M253. Our most recent haplogroup I-P109 comes from southern Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) and parts of Finland which specifically comes from the Viking settlers who raided and settled in the British Isles. My I-M253 y-haplogroup comes from an admixture of proto-european, hunter-gatherers and proto-germanic peoples who would eventually over tens of thousands of years migrate and settle in northern and central Scandinavia and parts of the Baltics. My maternal haplogroup is H1 which is a very common and powerful group that came from mainland Europe. I know it’s very broad compared to my paternal haplogroup, but since my mom’s ancestry mostly hail from the British Isles, I would assume it’s either Celtic or even Germanic in origin.

I also found out that just because someone has a lot of dna markers in any given location, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are of a certain ethnicity/ethnicities. So, I looked at my family search accounts provided by my parents and found out that a massive amount of my English and Scottish ancestry were from the northern and eastern areas of England, right in the heart of the Viking Danelaw (mostly Danish vikings) and in both the Scottish lowlands and highlands which was heavily settled by Norse (Norwegian Vikings.) I was hoping to see some Scandinavian ancestry and I was literally floored with what I found. Not only did I find Viking ancestry, I found a ton from nearly every area they went to from places like the British Isles, France and even Russia/Ukraine. My ancestors ruled the British Isles with an iron fist and founded some of the most powerful kings and queens the world has ever seen. Most of them assimilated with the local populations in the areas they settled and some of them stayed back in their Scandinavian homelands after they were done raiding. Their descendants would be knows as the Norse-Gael (Foreigner Gaels), Normans (Viking descended Frenchman) and the Kievan Rus. My Kievan Rus viking ancestry came from Sweden to what is now Russia and Ukraine, sailed down to the Byzantine Empire and became the personal body guards to the emperor and were known as the Varangian Guard. I have a tiny amount of Icelandic ancestry but it is exclusively during the Viking Age. In my deep research I found out that the people of Iceland are basically the same as my Norse-Gaelic ancestry in the UK since they were mostly Norwegians who grabbed some Celtic and Gaelic baddies and settled there, Greenland and then founded Vinland (North America). Of the Viking women, I am a direct descendant of women like Gunnhildr Gormsdottir “Mother of KIngs”, Brynhildr (a Battle-maiden valkyrie), Sigrid “the Haughty”, and Aslaug, the daughter of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer and wife of Ragnar Lothbrok Sigurdsson. I love the name Brynhildr and if I ever have a daughter, I want to name her this because its such a sick name. It’s a valkyrie name literally means “Battle-Maiden.” Needless to say, these women were badasses. They secured their kingdoms and realms through alliances with other people. If it wasn’t for women like these, the men wouldn’t of had the resources to go on their various campaigns and change the course of history.

Multiple branches of my family tree lead to some of the most iconic Scandinavian peoples in the ancient and medieval periods. I have pedigree collapse (multiple family branches leading to the same ancestor) with heavy hitters like Rollo the Walker who invaded France and founded Normandy, Ragnar Lothbrok (his sons Bjorn Ironside, Ivar the Boneless and Sigurd “Snake-in-the-Eye”) Harald Hardrada, Sweyn “Forkbeard” Haraldsson and his father Harald Bluetooth (the guy who the company got their name and it’s logo comes from an runes from the Viking Age), Somerled (Scottish viking king of Norse and Gaelic descent) Eric Bloodaxe, Siegfried the Crusader (First Norwegian warrior king to fight in the first Crusade to the Holy Land), and the list goes on and on. I was blown away with how much Scandinavian ancestry I had albeit most of it comes from the ancient and medieval periods. In more recent centuries, between the 16th and 19th centuries, I found out that my dad has a Norwegian and Swedish branch and my mom has a Danish branch. So I am as Viking/Scandinavian as you can get. 

I need to clarify something. Most people, myself included at one time, assumed Vikings as a ethnic group. They weren’t. Viking was a seasonal job description. They were mostly Scandinavians and some other peoples in the North Sea region who raided, plundered and traded all over Europe and parts of North Africa and the Middle East. The Scandinavian peninsula (modern-day Norway, Sweden and Denmark) in the early medieval period was under a lot of economic stress and they were having a very difficult time with growing crops for their families and they became desperate to put food on the table. So, a good portion of the young men would go “Viking” in search of better lands, adventure, glory, fame and wealth. Some left their homelands and some stayed home. I found out that less than 1% of Scandinavians were Vikings which makes sense since not many people had the resources to live and sustain that type of lifestyle and living during a time of extreme poverty and drought those peoples became desperate. You know the saying, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” 

So back in England and Scotland, I have a decent amount of purely Anglo Saxon, although most of that ancestry comes on my mom’s side. My dad has some but most of his Saxon ancestry was mixed. I found out through my research that I am a direct descendant to some of the greats like Alfred the Great, Edmund Ironside, Harold Godwinson and King AEthelwulf, King Ecbert of Wessex to name a few off the top of my head. The wild thing is that I have ancestry of every major player of the year 1066 AD. This was a pivotal year in medieval Europe which is when Anglo Saxon England completely changed. It was the year Harald Hardrada, king of Norway sought to claim England as part of his kingdom but in battle he took an arrow to the throat. Harold Godwinson strived to protect his lands and people from the Viking onslaught and the imminent attack from the Normans by William the Conqueror. The wild thing is that I have a pedigree collapse of multiple branches on my parent’s trees to Hardrada and William and on my mom’s side through her dad I am a direct descendant to the last Anglo Saxon king of England, Harold Godwinson. So I am a direct descendant of these men who from that time forward changed the course of history in the British Isles and therefore the entire world. In my ancestral context, it was a massive family feud of epic proportions!

Now, going back to ancient European history, we are going way back to the Germanic tribes who contributed to the sacking of Rome. I was blown away with how much Germanic ancestry on both of my parents family tree of multiple Germanic tribes from the Migration Period around the Fall of Rome. Here are a list of a few of them: Goths (both Ostrogoths and Visigoths), Vandals who put the Roman Empire to its knees, and after that other tribes like the Lombards (Longobardi), Old and Anglo Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians, Burgundian, Franks and a few others. It is such amazing stuff to learn about these fierce warriors and how these rag-tag groups were able to raid, conquer, trade and settle all over the continent. These peoples along with the Celts, Slavs and other European groups would transform the continent and produce some of the strongest empires, kingdoms, principalities and realms the world had ever seen. My ancestors fought against Rome, fought in all of the Crusades, and fought against each other. A lot of my ancestors were of royal and noble lineage, while a lot of them were also commoners, much like myself. I have ancestors who were part of Knight Orders such as the Knights Templar and Teutonic Knights, Vikings, Varangian Guards, Raiders, Traders, Kings and Queens, Viscounts, Dukes/Duchesses, Stewards, Landowners, etc. They were also normal people like you and me. 

As you would suspect, I am so proud of my mixed heritage. My profound love for my European roots knows no bounds, and I deeply resonate with my Scandinavian and Germanic ancestry. It is surreal to have authentic, legitimate genealogy and thanks to my LDS faith for being the “gold standard” of family history for doing the heavy lifting for verifying that these people are indeed part of my parents' family trees and it’s not wishful thinking. I know that my history points are most likely inaccurate in certain aspects, but I am writing this based off of my research and off the top of my head. This is a blog post from a normie’s perspective, not a freaking historical dissertation lol. I want this blog to be more dense in material while also being engaging so you don’t get bored and stop reading haha. I hope you all enjoy the heavy read and I’ll see you all on the next one.