As many as 250,000 Russians may be of Scottish descent

As many as 250,000 Russians may be of Scottish descent, one of the worlds leading historians tracing the legacy of the Highlanders who made Tsarist Russia their home during the 17th and 18th century, has said.

Edinburgh, Oct 1 : As many as 250,000 Russians may be of Scottish descent, one of the world's leading historians tracing the legacy of the Highlanders who made Tsarist Russia their home during the 17th and 18th century, has said.

Bryan Sykes, professor of genetics at Oxford University, said several Scots -soldiers of fortune, seafarers and traders - travelled from their native Scotland to do business with Russia.

Many of them settled in their adopted home, took wives, had families and started dynasties which exist to this day.

Prof. Sykes is now looking for people with the surname Learmonth in Scotland and Lermontov in Russia to come forward for genetic testing to prove the historic link.

Prof. Sykes, whose earlier work found that most Scots were descended from nomadic tribesmen who moved north from Iberia, said: "Like most British people, I was completely unaware of this migration of people to Russia, until an academic colleague made reference to Russian families who claimed a British progenitor".

"And even though they could not speak a word of conversational English, they were able to recite fragments of British nursery rhymes and Scottish songs, apparently passed down the generations by oral transmission.

'A good outcome to this experiment would be to introduce a man from Moscow to a man from Motherwell. Both would probably have no notion of how their family diverged and developed in different parts of the world, but they would now have an undeniable genetic proof of their relationship that supersedes lost or unreliable records," said Prof. Sykes.

Russia though has thousands of Lermontovs. The Lermontov Society, founded 15 years ago, believes they are descended from George Learmonth, a Scottish adventurer who fought for the Poles but was captured by Russian forces in the late 17th century. As a mercenary soldier, he swapped sides and decided to stay on in Russia, where he married a local girl and started a family.

Also the Lermontov crest, which first appeared in 1782, is very similar in characteristics to the Learmonth heraldic crest, which was first registered in Scotland in 1672.

Prof. Sykes opines that George's descendants most likely changed their surname to fit in with the Russian society.

He has now launched an online genetic analysis company, which will extract DNA material from both Scottish Learmonths and Russian Lermontovs by means of a simple cheek swab.

He will then analyse the male chromosome material in each sample to determine whether it stems from the same source.

"Hopefully, we will prove there is a clear link. DNA will give us an answer, which cannot be gleaned from historical records, which can often be misleading. From there I hope to go on analyse the Scottish families, such as the Reids, Crichtons and Greigs and their Russian equivalents, to establish the connections. It may well be that one in 1,000 Russians have Scottish ancestry, which is quite a substantial number," said Prof. Sykes.

The Greig and Crichton families are particularly strong in the Moscow area, whereas many Reids or Reads can be found in St Petersburg.

Alistair Learmonth, a civil servant from Linlithgow, who can trace his family tree in the area to around 1700, said he would be volunteering for the DNA analysis.

"It will be absolutely fascinating. My belief is that we all came from two Learmonth brothers who came up from England around the 11th century. By the 16th century, the Learmonths were a powerful seafaring and trading clan in east Scotland, particularly in the East Neuk of Fife," said Learmonth.

"What you have to remember is that at that time the eldest son inherited everything, so younger sons had to find another way of making their fortune. Many of them became soldiers and went overseas to fight with the Prussian and Polish armies. Some of them obviously made it to Russia," the Scotsman quoted him, as saying.

ANI