Links Mentioned
I1 Haplogroup essay from Eupedia.comhhhdna.com by William Clark Hardin
Hardin Source Document Repository by William Clark Hardin & Patricia Hardin
Family Tree DNA Hardin Project (order test)
FTDNA.com Public Hardin Page.
I1a Hardins Short Name: Can we for convenience call this family something more memorable like "The Viking Hardins"?
...because
they are of Norse ethnicity. "Norse Hardins" is good. Or "Hatter
Hardins" since the Pendleton District, South Carolina Hardins produced
a number of
hatters. Any better ideas, fellow researchers?
"The Haplogroup I1 is sometimes referred to as the "Viking haplogroup." -Wikipedia. "Haplogroup I1 (formerly I1a) is the most common I subclade. It is found mostly in Scandinavia and Northern Germany, where it can represent over 35% of the population. Associated with the Norse ethnicity, it is found in all places invaded by the ancient Germanic tribes and the Vikings ... I1 is identified by at least 15 unique mutations, which indicates that this lineage has been isolated for a long period of time, or experienced a serious population bottleneck. Although the first mutation splitting I1 away from I2 may have arisen as long as 20,000 years ago, people belonging to this haplogroup all descend from a single man who lived less than 5,000 years ago." - www.eupedia.com/europe/origins_haplogroups_europe.shtml#I1
Overview of The Viking Hardins in America
A layman's history -- No Viking sailed across the Atlantic in 1700 and
took up residence in Virginia, of course. The Vikings sailed before
1000 AD exploring, pirating, and settling the coasts of nearby
countries, including England. The Viking blood worked into the general
population of England hundreds of years before America was settled. The
Hardins who were our fathers were possibly Highland Presbyterian Scots
who fled the country after losing one of many wars to England before
1600. More likely, our fathers were descendants of Lowland Scots or
English whom the English shipped to Ulster during the 1600s to occupy
Irish land. They were Protestants. Poor settlers when they arrived, the
Scots could not pay the impossibly increasing rents. It was leave or
die, and so many "Scotch-Irish" somehow found their way to America --
the Hardins probably among them. "In the 1710 to 1775 era, over 200,000
people emigrated from Ulster to the 13 Colonies, from New Hampshire to
Georgia. The largest numbers went to Pennsylvania. From that base some
went south into Virginia, the Carolinas and across the South, with a
large concentration in the Appalachian districts; others headed west to
western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and the Midwest." - Wikipedia
Where to Start
The most reliable place to start research is with the earliest known ancestors of Hardin men who have had a Y-DNA test. See those records at William Clark Hardin's HHHDNA.com. Bill also has a Hardin Source Document Repository linked from the above page. Other sites displaying Hardin Y-DNA are Family Tree DNA Hardin Project where you can order a test - The 37 and 67 marker tests are most useful - and here's FTDNA's Public Hardin Page.
More Than One Hardin Family
Examining hhhdna.com, you notice first that the surname is used by many entirely unrelated families. The Viking Hardins are unrelated to Revolutionary Col. Joseph Hardin and influential Tennessean, The French Hugenot Hardoins, the frontier Indian-fighting Hardins in Kentucky or Ohio or Texas, nor ex-president Harding, nor to the psychopathic multiple killer John Wesley Hardin. There are killers in our family, yes, but they killed their wives and others out of the public eye probably including Indians. They served as enlisted men in all the wars and were killed in them, including the U.S. Revolution and the U.S. Civil War. From present knowledge they were not particularly militaristic. Most were agrarian. They liked to live beside running water. My own Hardin ancestors had a knack for losing possession of their farms.
Earliest Known Viking Hardins in America
Study the i1a Hardins on hhhdna.com. Their color code is light green. Links will show you the name of the tested man and his earliest ancestor as he has determined it. In this section I will list the name and place of the earliest known ancestors so that we might have a try at projecting back to the whereabouts of an earlier, yet to be documented, generation, and finally, to the common ancestor. The migration path suggested by the map above is my best guess so far. The FTDNA-supplied odds are that all the following people have a common ancestor are kin