Elijah Brown ancestors

I know there are some descendants of Elijah Brown of Cumberland County in this group and, like me, you have likely been unable to trace his ancestry beyond John Brown who left London on 17 Apr 1635 and arrived in Boston in June 1635. There have been (from my sceptical perspective) unsubstantiated claims that his father was Angus Brown of Fordell, Fifeshire, Scotland.


I have never found anything that would substantiate that, though, in spite of many online searches of various combinations of "Angus Brown", "Fordell", etc., and in spite of poring over multiple baptism records for the many John Browns who lived in London when our ancestor did.


I recently had my DNA analysed by 23andMe.com.  It is an interesting site/company.  Most of my ancestry results from the DNA were what I expected.  The site has also linked me with 911 other people who are DNA relatives, and I have been chatting with a couple of them.  One did, in fact, turn out to be a 3rd cousin.


The big surprise was my haplogroup, i.e., the genetic grouping that is traced back through patrilineal descent.  I had always expected it would be R1a (a group common in Scotland) or R1b (the more prevalent genetic group in the UK).  It turns out that I am I2b1, also known as I2a2a.  I had never heard of it before; so, I did some reading on it.  It is an older genetic group that likely predates the arrival of those other two in the British Isles.


Now, it gets interesting.


Here is the location of Fordell:

http://www.clanhendersonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/H2-Scotland-Map-Fordell.jpg


Here is the concentration of I2a2 in Europe:

http://cdn.eupedia.com/images/content/Haplogroup-I2b.gif


Note that the heaviest concentration in the UK is just across the water from Fordell and that the concentration is also relatively high in the area of Fordell, i.e., Fifeshire.


Hardly dispositive of the question, but certainly lends it some credence and warrants some additional research.


Art Brown