Ocampo

/oʊˈkɑːm.poʊ/

From the Galician o campo — the field.
We come from people who planted seeds
and gave them time to grow.

This little corner of the internet is our family's field.
Each of us keeps a garden in it.

The Roots

The name traces to Lugo, in the green northwest corner of Spain they call Galicia — a Celtic land of rain, granite, and the Atlantic.

From there it crossed an ocean to Colombia,
and from Colombia to California.

where
  • Beringia · A2, B2d (maternal lines)
  • West Africa · E-M180 (paternal)
  • Iberia · I-P109 (grandfather's paternal)
  • recorded history · the crossing, Colombia → California
  • shared prehistory · out of Africa
when

The trunk180,000 – 275,000 years ago

Two people in Eastern Africa.

Follow any mother's line back far enough and it meets one woman, L. Any father's line meets one man, A. All four of ours start here.

The crossing≈ 60,000 years ago

Out of Africa, at the narrow strait.

A few families crossed the Red Sea at the Bab-el-Mandeb into Arabia. On the mothers' tree, L3 → N. On the fathers' tree the trunk forks: DE turns back west; F goes on to become nearly every man outside Africa.

The men who went west≈ 17,000 years ago

Ice-Age West Africa.

E-M180 grew up in the pockets of West Africa that stayed green through a dry Ice Age, and later spread across the continent with farming and iron. The Ocampo paternal line.

The Middle Passage≈ 400 years ago

West Africa to Cartagena, in chains.

The paternal line's last road. Almost every West African line in Colombia came this way — across the Atlantic in chains, through Cartagena, into the gold mines of Antioquia. Nothing in the reports says who; the road says how.

The men who went north≈ 48,000 → 30,000 years ago

Ice-Age Europe, then Scandinavia.

I-M170 were among the first people in Ice-Age Europe. I-M253 settled the north; in parts of Scandinavia nearly half the men still carry it.

The men who came back south≈ 1,300 years ago

Scandinavia to Italy, then Iberia.

I-P109 is barely fifty generations old — a Scandinavian branch that Lombard migrations carried south into Italy and, later, Iberia. The Tabares paternal line.

The Spanish crossing≈ 500 years ago

Iberia to Antioquia.

The name from Lugo and the Tabares line from the south of Spain crossed with the Spanish and climbed into the mountains of Antioquia — where the two paternal roads meet.

The women who went east≈ 24,000 → 16,000 years ago

Across Beringia, then down the coast.

Two maternal branches take the same road a few thousand years apart. A2 waits out the ice in Beringia and then runs the Pacific coast; B2d follows through East Asia. A2: the Ocampo maternal line. B2d: both maternal grandparents.

ConvergenceToday

Four lines. One department in Colombia.

Every report says the same recent place: Antioquia. West Africa, Beringia, Scandinavia and Iberia met there — and from there the name went to California, where the seeds were planted.

The blood

Roads are one thing. Blood is another.

The name tells one story. The DNA tells a wider one — three continents, written in a language we only recently learned to read.

Below: what three people's reports add up to, in you — and the two lines in each of them that pass down unchanged.

Where the blood comes from, and where it goes.

Hover a ribbon or a node.

What that adds up to, in expectation

Half of your autosomal DNA comes from your father and a quarter from each maternal grandparent — on average. The shuffle is random, so the real numbers differ; but this is the centre of the distribution, and no report has computed it for you.

Sources