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.

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.

Iberia Scandinavia Beringia West Africa Colombia California
A2 / B2d · maternal lines E-M180 · paternal Y-DNA I-P109 · grandfather Y-DNA Colombia → California

I

The Name

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

O campo — the field.

II

The Colonial Crossing

Spanish settlers carried the name across the Atlantic to Colombia — one thread in centuries of colonial migration.

III

The Ancient Road

But Colombia's people were already old. Maternal haplogroups A2 and B2d trace an unbroken line — 16,000 years — from Beringia down the Pacific coast.

IV

The Middle Passage

The paternal Y-DNA — E-M180 — is West African. 17,000 years old, carried to the Americas by force during the transatlantic slave trade.

V

The Northern Thread

And one more line: I-P109, a Scandinavian haplogroup carried south by Lombard migrations into medieval Iberia — then onward to the Americas.

VI

Convergence

Three continents. Five migration routes spanning 17,000 years. All converging in one place — Colombia — and from there, to California.

The Blood

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

Below, the broad strokes of what the DNA carries. Haplogroups — the oldest signatures — trace unbroken paternal and maternal lines across tens of thousands of years. Everything else shuffles with each generation, but these two threads run clean.

Ocampo father

European
58.1%
breakdown
Spanish & Portuguese
55.7%
Broadly Southern European
1.1%
Ashkenazi Jewish
0.5%
Broadly European
0.8%
Indigenous American
26.2%
Sub-Saharan African
9.7%
breakdown
Senegambian & Guinean
4.4%
Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean
1.7%
Nigerian
0.6%
Broadly West African
1.8%
Angolan & Congolese
0.8%
Southern East African
0.2%
African Hunter-Gatherer
0.2%
Western Asian & North African
3.3%
breakdown
North African
1.2%
Coptic Egyptian
0.4%
Broadly Arab, Egyptian & Levantine
0.7%
Broadly Western Asian & North African
1.0%

Y-DNA: E-M180 — a West African lineage, 17,000 years old. Carried throughout sub-Saharan Africa by the expansion of agriculture and iron-working. Shares an ancient paternal line with Pharaoh Ramesses III.

mtDNA: A2 — Indigenous American, 16,000 years old. Arose in Beringia at the end of the Ice Age, then followed the Pacific coast south into the Americas.

Tabares maternal grandfather

European
56.9%
breakdown
Southern European
54.8%
Ashkenazi Jewish
0.6%
Eastern European
0.3%
Broadly European
0.2%
Indigenous American
36.0%
Sub-Saharan African
4.5%
breakdown
Senegambian & Guinean
1.4%
Nigerian
0.7%
Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean
0.2%
Broadly West African
0.7%
Angolan & Congolese
1.3%
Southern East African
0.2%
Western Asian & North African
1.3%
breakdown
North African
1.0%
Broadly Western Asian & North African
0.3%

Y-DNA: I-P109 — Northern European, fewer than 1,300 years old. Rooted in Ice Age Scandinavia. A branch was carried south by Lombard migrations into medieval Italy.

mtDNA: B2d — Indigenous American, 3,000 years old. The parent lineage B2 crossed from Siberia into the Americas 17,000 years ago, expanding rapidly down the Pacific coast.

Otalvaro maternal grandmother

European
47.0%
breakdown
Spanish & Portuguese
42.1%
Broadly Southern European
2.3%
Ashkenazi Jewish
1.1%
Broadly European
1.0%
Italian
0.5%
Indigenous American
33.0%
Sub-Saharan African
15.8%
breakdown
Senegambian & Guinean
5.9%
Nigerian
5.8%
Angolan & Congolese
2.4%
Broadly Congolese & Southern East African
0.4%
Broadly Sub-Saharan African
0.5%
Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean
0.2%
Southern East African
0.1%
Broadly West African
0.5%
Western Asian & North African
1.9%
breakdown
North African
0.9%
Levantine
0.1%
Broadly Arab, Egyptian & Levantine
0.1%
Broadly Western Asian & North African
0.8%

mtDNA: B2d — the same Indigenous American lineage as her husband. Both carry the signature of women who walked south from Beringia.

Your father carries more Neanderthal DNA than 91% of others tested — 278 variants from humans who walked Ice Age Europe 40,000 years ago.

Sources