[Granville-Hough] 16 Jun 2009 - Hough Origins

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:45:54 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Hough Origins -16 June 2009

Our Origins as Houghs

When I first got to England about 1960, one of the first things I did 
was go to the British Museum (and National Library.) I was interested in 
where the Hough family had originated. Quite readily, I found that the 
name was most frequently located with Cheshire and vicinity. At some 
time before 1200 some refugees (from Flanders) had been placed between 
the Saxons of England and the Celts of Wales. Among the names which 
traced back to that buffer group were Hough and another I recognized as 
Ainsworth. I had cousins who had married Ainsworths. Hough had gone 
through variations of Hogh, de la Hogh, Hoghe, etc, but it was 
phonetically Huff. I accepted this writeup, or legend, as perhaps close 
enough, because when later I worked on all the Hough and Huff families 
of the US, I found more could actually trace back to Cheshire and its 
religious groups, such as Quakers, than to any other source.
As I have studied genealogy, the surname has always been the most 
important indicator. Now I know that surnames did not become mandatory 
for England until about 1300, so whether the name is Hough, Ainsworth, 
Chisholm, or Hollingsworth really has no meaning for the generations 
before. LetÆs say three brothers had to choose surnames, or be given 
them by a tax (or census) enumerator. Brother John had a mill for 
grinding grain. He became John Miller. Brother Joseph made a living 
fishing. He became Joseph Fisher. Brother Mark was a hunter, so he 
became Mark Hunter. Three brother founded different families, so we 
assumed no kinship. Now we know they all carried, and passed down, the 
identical YDNA. So it is with the Hough, Chisholm, and Hollingsworth 
families. We have a common ancestor somewhere in our background. Thanks 
to Leif Ericson, we even have a few Eskimo cousins in Greenland. (The 
settlement he established did not survive, but his people who adopted 
Eskimo ways did survive, and they are there today, speaking Greenlander, 
a mixture of Old Norse and Eskimo, and looking like any other 
Greenlander Eskimo.)
Now, about that legend of Houghs being in a buffer group between the 
Saxons and the Welsh. I have found no further reference to any refugee 
group from Flanders to England, but what I do find is plenty of evidence 
of a refugee group from Norse Dublin, Ireland, to Western England about 
902 AD. Their leader was Ingimund, a Norseman who left Norway after or 
during its unification under the ruler, Harold the Fine-Hair. (There 
were other Norse refugees at that time who settled in Ireland, Iceland, 
the Faroes, Shetland, the Orkneys, Isle of Man, Western Isles, Skye and 
anywhere else on the coast of Scotland or Ireland which looked 
promising.) Some rather haughty leaders such as Ingimund tried the Norse 
kingdom of Dublin, and Leif Ericson, who tried Iceland; but they 
violated local customs and were banished. Ingimund then tried to settle 
in England. On his second try, he besieged Chester, and lost; but the 
Queen of Mercia agreed that Ingimund could settle on the Wirral, the 
land now across the Mersey River from Liverpool and lying between the 
Mersey and Dee Rivers. There the Norse and their Irish supporters 
established their own little kingdom, speaking Old Norse, having their 
own parliament or assembly field at Thingwall. It appears that there 
were Norse additions from other places for 200 years. It was an 
effective buffer against the Welsh from the Saxon point of view. Those 
of us with the ôso-calledö Viking YDNA, I1a or other I variants, 
probably descend from most of those settlers in the Wirral Peninsula, 25 
to 30 generations ago.
When interest in YDNA became prevalent, there was an effort to identify 
those with Viking/Scandinavian ancestry in the Wirral Peninsula and in 
West Lancashire. The population influx has been 60 fold, and all sorts 
of admixtures must exist. The research group selected surnames that were 
recorded before 1572, including Hough, from the Wirral Peninsula and 
picked a control group from more recent names. After doing the YDNA 
analyses, the old-name group showed a significantly higher percentage 
with the Viking-associated YDNA. So our people have been there a long 
time and are still there. So I conclude my particular group of Houghs 
most likely goes back to the Vikings of Wirral.
Are there other possibilities? Yes, indeed there are. The Normans who 
came with William the Conqueror in 1066 were Franco-Vikings, not long 
removed from Norway. Among these were undoubtedly some with the same 
YDNA that we have. They left their upper-class progeny all over England, 
wherever they could grab and hold land, though not numerous in the total 
population. So far as I know, no Hough has traced back to the Domesday 
Book or to William the ConquerorÆs underlings, but other surnames with 
our DNA may so trace. It merely means our common ancestor is back in 
Norway, with some descendants going to Ireland and others to Normandy. 
We must keep in mind, there were no English surnames for most people 
before about 1300, and still no inherited surnames in Iceland such as Hough.
Then there were the Danes who gave Alfred the Great so much trouble. Did 
they have the same YDNA as we do? So far, there has been no 
distinguishing feature among descendants which defines a Dane versus a 
Saxon. They have different YDNA from us, so far as I can determine.
How accurate is the YDNA? I can answer that with a recent testing of 
John Emile Hough. I had traced his family as probable cousins and 
descendants of Francis Hough of GA, AL, and Wayne Co, MS, but I did not 
know from which son of Francis he descended, or if he belonged in some 
different Hough family. He did the 67 marker test and he and I match 
completely, marker for marker. He knew his ancestry back to Francis. He 
and I are either 5th cousins, or 5th cousins, once removed. We have 
apparently had no mutations, and his test validates the Francis Hough 
family tree. If anyone else claims to descend from Francis Hough, but 
with a completely different YDNA, I would say that person has an 
ancestor who was involved in some sort of hanky-panky.
I would make one point about the I variant occurencies in Central or 
Eastern Europe. I would suggest this happened when the Swedes and other 
Scandinavians made their way southward over the river systems to 
Constantinople in historical times rather than the much earlier post 
ice-age time when they were moving northward through central Europe to 
Scandinavia. That is just a best guess on my part.
This is as far as I have gotten in this new quest for early ancestors. 
It does not answer the question posed to me about recent tests, which I 
hope to re-analyze for future discussion.