A History of the Stringers

The Stringer lineage is a long and winding one, from the best that your humble scribe has been able to deduce, the Stringers common ancestor  came from a real life Atlantis called Doggerland, which was kind of between the British Isles and Continental Europe. Somewhere during this time they intermarried with the subspecies or breed of Neanderthals.  When the island sank into the Northern Sea the Stringers migrated to the Germanic counties and became a part of the Norsemen or more commonly called the Vikings. 

From Doggerland to the North

    The meaning of Norseman was "people from the North" and was applied primarily to Nordic people originating from southern and central Scandinavia. They established states and settlements in areas which today are part of the Faroe Islands, England, Scotland, Wales, Iceland, Finland, Ireland, Russia, Italy, Canada, Greenland, France, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany.
Norse and Norsemen are applied to the Scandinavian population of the period from the late 8th century to the 11th century. The Old Frankish Nortmann "Northman" was latinized as Normanni, famously in the prayer A furore normannorum libera nos domine ("From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord!"), attributed to monks of the English monasteries plundered by Viking raids in the 8th and 9th centuries, and entered Old French as Normands, whence the name of the Normans and of Normandy, which was settled by Norsemen in the 10th century.

 

From Scandinavia to France

    The Stringers were a part of the Norsemen who conquered apart of Northern France now called Normandy.  Stringer (more properly Strenger) is in fact Old Norse for “the Stronger” and where we get the word Strength, which is rooted in Germanic origin.  Hypothetically William Stringer would have been called William the Stronger or more simply William Strenger.

The Normans

The Vikings started to raid the Seine Valley during the middle of 9th century. After attacking and destroying monasteries, including one at Jumieges, they took advantage of the power vacuum created by the disintegration of Charlemagne's empire to take northern France. The fiefdom of Normandy was created for the Viking leader Rollo (also known as Robert of Normandy). Rollo had besieged Paris but in 911 entered vassalage to the king of the West Franks, Charles the Simple, through the Treaty of Saint Clair-sur-Epte. In exchange for his homage and fealty, Rollo legally gained the territory which he and his Viking allies had previously conquered. The name "Normandy" reflects Rollo's Viking (i.e. "Northman") origins.
The descendants of Rollo and his followers adopted the local Gallo-Romantic language and intermarried with the area's original inhabitants. They became the Normans – a Norman-speaking mixture of Scandinavians, Hiberno-Norse, Orcadians, Anglo-Danish, and indigenous Franks and Gauls.
Rollo's descendant William, Duke of Normandy, became king of England in 1066 in the Norman Conquest culminating at the Battle of Hastings, while retaining the fiefdom of Normandy for himself and his descendants.

From Normandy to Nottingham  

As a people, the Stringers are Anglo-Norman

The Anglo-Normans were mainly the descendants of the Normans who ruled England following the Norman conquest by William the Conqueror in 1066. A small number of Normans were already settled in England prior to the conquest. Following the Battle of Hastings, the invading Normans and their descendants formed a distinct population in Britain, as Normans controlled all of England, parts of Wales (the Cambro-Normans) and, after 1169, vast swaths of Ireland (the Hiberno-Normans). Over time their language evolved from the continental Old Norman to the distinct Anglo-Norman language (an Old French dialect).
The composite expression regno Norman-Anglorum for the Anglo-Norman kingdom that subsumes Normandy and England appears contemporaneously only in the Hyde Chronicle.^[1]

Following the English Conquest of 1066 the Stringers settled into Nottinghamshire county England, It is in Nottingham where they took the name Stringer.

Historians have studied the Doomsday book compiled by William I of England in search of the first record of the Stringer surname. It has been determined that the Stringer name is of Norman origin, and was first found in Nottinghamshire England, where the held a family seat from early times. Where they Lords of the Manor of Eton, and were conjecturally descended from Fulk IV, who held the lands of Eton from Robert de Bully at the time of the taking of the Doomsday Book in 1086. The lands at that time consisted of two mills and a garden. Eton is the celebrated site of the battle of Idle in 617 between Redwald and Ethilfrith of Northumbiria.

Fulk IV, Count of Anjou

Birth:   1043 

Death: 14 April 1109

Fulk IV (in French Foulques IV) (1043 – 14 April 1109), called le Réchin, was the Count of Anjou from 1068 until his death. The nickname by which he is usually referred has no certain translation. Philologists have made numerous very different suggestions, including "quarreler", "rude", "sullen", "surly" and "heroic".

He was the younger son of Geoffrey, Count of Gâtinais (sometimes known as Aubri), and Ermengarde of Anjou, a daughter of Fulk the Black, count of Anjou, and sister of Geoffrey Martel, also count of Anjou.

When Geoffrey Martel died without direct heirs he left Anjou to his nephew Geoffrey III of Anjou, Fulk le Réchin's older brother.

Fulk fought with his brother, whose rule was deemed incompetent, and captured him in 1067. Under pressure from the Church he released Geoffrey. The two brothers soon fell to fighting again, and the next year Geoffrey was again imprisoned by Fulk, this time for good.

Substantial territory was lost to Angevin control due to the difficulties resulting from Geoffrey's poor rule and the subsequent civil war. Saintonge was lost, and Fulk had to give the Gâtinais to Philip I of France to placate the king.

Much of Fulk's rule was devoted to regaining control over the Angevin baronage, and to a complex struggle with Normandy for influence in Maine and Brittany.

In 1096 Fulk wrote an incomplete history of Anjou and its rulers titled Fragmentum historiae Andegavensis or "History of Anjou", though the authorship and authenticity of this work is disputed. Only the first part of the history, describing Fulk's ancestry, is extant. The second part, supposedly describing Fulk's own rule, has not been recovered. If he did write it, it is one of the first medieval works of history written by a layman.^[1]

Fulk may have married as many as five times; there is some doubt regarding two of the marriages.

His first wife was Hildegarde of Beaugency. After her death, before or by 1070, he married Ermengarde de Bourbon in 1070, and then in 1076 possibly Orengarde de Châtellailon. Both these were repudiated (Ermengarde de Bourbon in 1075 and Orengarde de Chatellailon or Châtel-Aillon in 1080), possibly on grounds of consanguinity.

By 1080 he may have married Mantie, daughter of Walter I of Brienne. This marriage also ended in divorce, in 1087. Finally, in 1089, he married Bertrade de Montfort, who was apparently "abducted" by King Philip I of France in or around 1092.

He had two sons. The eldest (a son of Ermengarde de Bourbon), Geoffrey IV Martel, ruled jointly with him for some time, but died in 1106. The younger (a son of Bertrade de Montfort) succeeded him as Fulk V.

He also had a daughter by Hildegarde of Beaugency, Ermengarde, who married firstly with William IX, count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine and secondly with Alan IV, Duke of Brittany.

From then to now

Fast forward 505 years to a time when records are a little more stable and we come to Richard Stringer, who’s descendent Nicholas Stringergnt. would own great swaths of land, and build the beginning of the Kilnwick House. His descendent Fancies Stringer would serve as a Captain in the American Revolution for Burke County Georgia, and his descendent John S Stringer would serve in the second revolution between the confederate and Union States for the side of the confederacy representing Alabama. After the civil war they would migrate to Texas buy property, and finally settle through Oklahoma and Texas.

Stringer Paternal DNA

Paternal Haplogroup:R1b1b2a1a1*

R1b1b2a1a1* is a subgroup of R1b1b2, which is described below.

Locations of haplogroup R1b1b2 circa 500 years ago, before the era of intercontinental travel.

R1b1b2 is the most common haplogroup in western Europe, where its branches are clustered in various national populations. R1b1b2a1a2b is characteristic of the Basque, while R1b1b2a1a2f2 reaches its peak in Ireland and R1b1b2a1a1 is most commonly found on the fringes of the North Sea.

Introduction

Haplogroup R is a widespread and diverse branch of the Y-chromosome tree that is extremely common in Europe, where it spread after the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. The haplogroup appears to have originated in southwestern Asia about 30,000 years ago. It then split into two main branches. R1 ultimately spread widely across Eurasia, from Iceland to Japan, whereas R2 mostly remained near its region of origin. Today it can be found in southwestern Asia and India.

Because of recent immigration, both branches of R are now found worldwide among men of European, Middle Eastern and South Asian descent – though our haplogroup maps indicate only their pre-colonial distributions.

Haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1

Today R1b1b2a1a1 is found mostly on the fringes of the North Sea in England, Germany and the Netherlands, where it reaches levels of one-third. That distribution suggests that some of the first men to bear the haplogroup in their Y-chromosomes were residents of Doggerland, a real-life Atlantis that was swallowed up by rising seas in the millennia following the Ice Age.

Doggerland was a low-lying region of forests and wetlands that must have been rich in game; today, fishing trawlers in the North Sea occasionally dredge up the bones and tusks of the mastodons that roamed there. Doggerland had its heyday between about 12,000 years ago, when the Ice Age climate began to ameliorate, and 9,000 years ago, when the meltwaters of the gradually retreating glaciers caused sea levels to rise, drowning the hunter's paradise. Doggerland's inhabitants retreated to the higher ground that is now the North Sea coast.

Genetic similarity to groups of people from around the world.

Last updated January 25th, 2008.    

Northern Europeans 

Northern Europe's prehistory was shaped by the advancement and retreat of ice sheets during the Ice Age, which reached its peak about 18,000 years ago. At that time the region was nearly uninhabited, covered mostly by mile-thick ice sheets and vast stretches of frozen tundra. But when the ice began to retreat about 15,000 years ago, the ancestors of many present-day northern Europeans moved northward from Iberia, the Balkans and the Italian peninsula.
We consider the Alps and Pyrenees to divide southern and northern Europe, the Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea to separate Europe from Central Asia and the Ural Mountains to delimit northern Europe and Siberia. The 23andMe database currently includes northern Europeans representing residents of western Russia, France and the Orkney Islands north of mainland Scotland. Our database reflects some of the genetic diversity of northern Europe prior to the era of intercontinental travel that began roughly 500 years ago.   

Neanderthal Ancestry

Genetic Evidence for Neanderthals

From bones like these three (Vi33.16, Vi33.25, Vi33.26) found in the Vindija cave in Croatia, scientists extracted Neanderthal DNA. Using these samples they painstakingly assembled the Neanderthal genome sequence.

More about Neanderthals

Neanderthals were a group of humans who lived in Europe and Western Asia. They are the closest evolutionary relatives of modern humans, but they went extinct about 30,000 years ago. The first Neanderthals arrived in Europe as early as 600,000 to 350,000 years ago. Neanderthals — Homo neanderthalensis — and modern humans — Homo sapiens — lived along side each other for thousands of years. Genetic evidence suggest that they interbred and although Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 years ago, traces of their DNA — between 1 percent and 4 percent — is found in all modern humans outside of Africa. Apart from the curiosity of finding what percentage of a modern human's genome is Neanderthal, the information has great value for science. By comparing our DNA with Neanderthal DNA, scientists can detect the most recent evolutionary changes as we developed into fully modern humans.

Matching Map

Examine the geographic distribution of the potential relations

This map demonstrates a relation to other Stringers

A word from Genealogist  Al Colbert

“Your haplogroup is R1b, which is pretty much stock Western European male. I set up a ysearch.org account, and the closest match was the Stringer person that shows up on your Ancestry match list. I am kind of surprised that you have so few matches...you appear to be a fairly rare variety of R1b. (By comparison, my uncle, who is a descendant of the Wades, has 91 matches, versus your 14.) The only downside to testing at Ancestry is that they do not do SNP analysis, which can get you a more specific subclade. If you go to ysearch.org you will see all of the matches. What makes me think that your line is rare is that no two names are repeated. I did, however note that there is a Kellum (Virginia) and Kallum (Pennsylvania). Using the fact that multiple copies of the same name occurs in the match list was how I found out that my Albert line was really descended from the Wades. Based on this, I would think that at some point, your paternal line must have been through Kellum/Kallum. At this point, check out this site (http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Kellam/default.aspx?section=yresults), as will I. What you are looking for is a good match with no more than 2-3 deviations from your results,,, total.

    I just ran through the results, and I'm firmly convinced that you are related to the Kellams. You only have one marker (442) that is way off. Every other marker matches at least one of the project members, with the exception of 393, but even then, your 14 is just one off of the modal 13 that all the others have. It looks like your haplogroup would be R1b1a2. It would definitely be worth your while to contact the project admin and send in your results for inclusion.

     I hope this isn't information overload, but I wanted to give you a quick crash course. My strong suspicion is that you will find good matches in the Kellam group on FTDNA (the link above). If so, just send a request to join to the project admin and he will probably ask you to forward your results so that he can match it up himself, since you didn't test with FTDNA. You will also want to tell him which current Kellam members are your closest matches. The important thing that you are looking for is a marker-by-marker match, with as few mismatches as possible.

I hope this helps...let me know if you need any further explanation or guidance!

Al”

The Kellum connection

The Kellums come from Kelhum England which is in Nottinghamshire county in England, which further demonstrates our central England origin.

Kelham is a small village in Nottinghamshire variously estimated as "3.36 miles,"^[1] "3 miles,"^[2] or "2.92 miles"^[3] to the northwest of Newark on a bend in the A617 road near its crossing of the River Trent.

Kelham is "a small but pleasant village and parish, upon the Worksop Road, and on the west bank of the Trent, 2 miles (3.2 km) north-west of Newark. Its parish contains 208 inhabitants and 1,800 acres (7.3 km²) of land, of which 484 acres (1.96 km²) are on the island formed by the two rivers betwixt it and Newark. It has long been the seat and property of the Suttons, who once held the title of Lord Lexington. It is now the property of John Henry Manners Sutton Esq., who resides at the Hall, which was a plain but elegant building, with a centre and wings of brick, with stone corners and window frames, standing in a handsome lawn, near the Trent. A curious wooden bridge which crosses the river close to the lawn has been taken down, and a light but substantial iron bridge erected in its place at a cost of £3,000. The church dedicated to St. Wilfred, had a handsome tower and three bells. It was new-roofed and completely renovated in 1844. Here is a richly wrought monument of the last Lord Lexington and his Lady, of fine stauary marble, but the figures are strangely placed back-to-back. The living is a rectory, valued in the King's books at £19 8s 4d, annexed to that of Averham, being in the same patronage and incumbency. The poor have the interest of £25 left by an unknown donor."^[4]

Stringer Heraldry

The Arms granted to Nicholas Stringer are as follows:

Per chevron sable and or, in chief two fleurs-de-lis of the last and in base an eagle counterchanged of the first.

The Crest is a griffon’s head erased vert, ducally gorged ar. chained or.

The “ducally gorged” aspect of the Crest would leave further evidence to the conjectural deriving from Fulk IV, Count of Anjou.

One cannot claim Arms unless they can verify their decent from the original person it was grated to, as a result, many people assume their own or have new Arms granted to them.

Seventeenth Generation

Richard Stringer

Birth in Darby End, Staffordshire, England

Death         Unkown   

other blog about Stringers

Sixteenth Generation

Robert Stringer
            

Birth in Eaton, Nottinghamshire 

Death    Unknown        

Fifteenth Generation

 

Nicholas Stringer (Gentleman)

Birth: 1614 in Nottinghamshire, England

Death: Unknown

On the subject of Gentleman

John Selden, in Titles of Honour (1614), discussing the title gentleman, speaks of "our English use of it" as "convertible with nobilis" (an ambiguous word, like noble meaning elevated either by rank or by personal qualities) and describes in connection with it the forms of ennobling in various European countries.
To a degree, gentleman signified a man with an income derived from property, a legacy or some other source, and was thus independently wealthy and did not need to work. The term was particularly used of those who could not claim nobility or even the rank of esquire. Widening further, it became a politeness for all men, as in the phrase Ladies and Gentlemen,... and this was then used (often with the abbreviation Gents) to indicate where men could find a lavatory without the need to indicate precisely what was being described.
In modern speech, the term is usually democratised so as to include any man of good, courteous conduct, or even to all men (as in indications of gender-separated facilities, or as a sign of the speaker's own courtesy when addressing others).

Kilnwick-on-the-Wolds

Kilnwick (or Kilnwick-on-the-Wolds) is a village in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It is situated in the Yorkshire Wolds approximately 5 miles (8 km) south of Driffield town centre and 7 miles (11 km) north of Beverley town centre. It lies 1 mile (1.6 km) west of the A614 road, and 2.8 miles (4.5 km) east of Middleton on the Wolds.

Kilnwick House

Kilnwick House is thought to have been developed on the site of a Medieval farm that was under the control of the Gilbertine Canons of nearby Watton Priory. During the Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536–39, the Kilnwick Estate was granted to Robert Holgate, who later became Archbishop of York, and passed on his death to the Earl of Warwick. The oldest part of the House at the time of the sale and break-up of the Kilnwick Estate in 1951 was Jacobean, having likely been built in the early years of the 17th century by Richard Thekestone, who held the manor in 1599 or Nicholas Stringer, owner from 1614.

from The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, Comprising a ... By Bernard Burke p 981