Just discovered I'm in a subclade of R-S24902

Hello. I'm a bit late to this post, but my nephew just got his Y-DNA results, and he's R-S24902. My brother--his dad--had autosomal results, so I was anxious for years to learn the haplogroup.

My dad was born in England, but his father was from Lithuania. This line is connected to Lithuanian doctor and composer Vincas Kudirka who was of the noble class and has connections to Polish nobility. There's a massive site called "The Genealogy of the Great Sejm" which is a database of thousands of surnames with links to info on people who were members of parliament and early Polish noble class. It makes sense there would be some movement across the Continent by this class of people. On the list of surnames, there are French and English surnames. Might be worth a look. Here's the link to the surname list: http://www.sejm-wielki.pl/s/i.php?l=A

Thank you for the reply, Juli.

I went to that site and, though there's no basis for me to trace a genetic link to any of the people listed on it, it's entirely plausible that I would have some distant cousins whose names are on the site.

My subclade of R-24902 is R-BY55802. Per FTDNA that puts me in a small group indeed.

With regard to cousins on the continent, I can tell you for certain that I have traceability to the UK as of 1630, when my immigrant ancestor got on a boat to Massachusetts Bay. His family surname, Terry, is traceable to northern Hampshire back to about 1490, where the documentation runs out. There are some potential linguistic clues to the family's origins, however.

Etymologically, Terry is not an Anglo surname. It's an English diminutive of the given name Theodoric, meaning that when surnames were instituted in England in the 12th century, my male line family elected to take the surname of the family's then-patriarch or progenitor, whose name would have been Theodoric or Thierry (from French) or Terricus (in Latin). There was a handful of Theodorics mentioned in Domesday, one of which was Theodoric the Goldsmith (referenced sometimes as "Terricus Aurifaber," or "Theodoric son of Deorman"). Theodoric the Goldsmith was a goldsmith and a moneyer to the crown, and served both Edward the Confessor and William the Conqeror in that role.

Interestingly, T the G and his fellow moneyer Otto had been brought to England from Germany by an Anglo Saxon king (probably Edward) specifically for the purpose of improving the coinage.

I have zero hard evidence that I am a male-line descendant of Theodoric son of Deorman, and no way to get such evidence. On the other hand, the coincidences do seem to stack up in favor of such a thesis. If Theodoric was prominent enough on the Continent to get a king's attention as a trusted hired artisan, I don't doubt his family was also of some prominence in Germany (or possibly Poland, depending on where one draws the boundary).