The Lennox Chronicles

DNA Over Deeds (With Charters):  E-BY5775 Linking Colquhoun, Kilpatrick & McCarter By Tiffany McCarter Evans — The Lennox Chronicles Plain-English takeaway: We match Y-DNA breadcrumbs (E-BY5775 and daughter branches) with page-cited medieval charters . When documents and DNA point the same direction, we build testable working theories —and we show our receipts so anyone can follow. What we’re doing (no jargon, promise) Y-DNA passes down the direct father-to-son line. Every so often it picks up a tiny mutation—call it a breadcrumb. Scientists give each breadcrumb a name (a SNP ). If a group of men share the same SNP, they usually share a distant paternal ancestor. Our project follows one breadcrumb cluster in the Lennox: E-BY5775 . We put charters (land grants, witness lists, place-names) beside modern Big Y-700 results . Where both sets of evidence agree, we have a testable working theory . Where they disagree, we adjust. That’s “ DNA Over Deeds—But Not Without Charters...

  The Tears That Named a Monastery:  Scotland’s Earliest Charter Story by Tiffany McCarter Evans Imagine: ChatGPT AI Creation by Tiffany McCarter Evans Imagine Scotland before kings wrote Latin charters, before castles dotted the hills, and before surnames even existed.  The year is around A.D. 565 , and into the rugged northeast comes a monk with a fire in his eyes and a student at his side. The monk? Columcille — better known today as St. Columba , the Irish saint who founded Iona. The pupil? Drostan, son of Cosgrach , was destined to be remembered as the quiet saint of Aberdeenshire. Their destination? A patch of land in Buchan that would one day become Deer Abbey . The First Scottish “Charter” We call it a charter, but in truth it’s a miracle story, a legal note, and a folk etymology all rolled into one. It survives not in stone but scribbled into the margins of a gospel book — the Book of Deer , now one of Scotland’s national treasures. Here’s the tale:...