http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Cash

My mother bought some investment properties in Launceston, Tasmania, one of which was known, she said, as Cash Martin. There was a story that it was bought with money(“cash”) from turning in Martin Cash, but I rather doubt this tale.

The anthropologist John Relethford discusses the Irish Travellers in his “Reflections of Our Past”. He notes that they are genetically Irish, not Gypsies.

There is as far as I’m aware only one genetic study on the Irish traveller community details of which are extracted here and which indicates a genetic connection to certain counties in Ireland. This connection would in my view correspond with both the family names & the phenotypes.

http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7929

Steve,
The common perception of Irish Travelers (official term), Tinkers (People who mend pots and pans – considered derogatory), Knackers (People who remove dead animals – considered derogatory), Pavee (Preferred term by the people themselves), is that they are descendant of native Irish people who had their lands confiscated by Oliver Cromwell and roamed the countryside ever-after as homeless people engaged in odd jobs. Other say that they were displaced by the Plantation of Ulster. In the countryside they sometimes are engaged in farm labor, but more usually in horse trading. They are known as thieves, and will raid a farm yard at dawn and be gone before the farmer can stop them.

I read a paper about 7 years ago that analysed their DNA and found that they were most similar, on a county by county basis, to people from Co Cavan, which straddles the border with Northern Ireland. They are definitely genetically native Irish people, though IIRC they had more haplogroup I than most groups. I remember them as having more blonde hair then average, and predominantly blue eyes.

By way of illustration, there are Travellers near where I grew up called Cash, and one of them was sentenced to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) for stealing a horse, his grandson is Pat Cash the tennis player.

I was looking it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry_(etymology)

The basic roots of the word “chemistry”, essentially, derive from the ancient study of how to transmute “earthen” metals into “gold” in combination with thoughts on alchemical spells as well endeavors into a quest for the Philosopher’s stone. The majority of authors agreed that the word “chemistry” has an Egyptian origin, based on the ancient Egyptian word kēme (chem), which stands for black. [4][5] In short, most agree that alchemy was born in ancient Egypt, where the word “Khem” was used in reference to the fertility of the flood plains around the Nile.[6]
Some, however, maintain that the word “chemistry” has a Greek origin, based on the Greek word χημεία (chemeia) meaning “cast together”.[7] Others reason that the word alchemy is derived from the Greek for “The Egyptian Art”.[8]

Still portrayed in popular culture as some kind of wild and naughty romantic ideal.

And no, that was not an excuse to post a Shakira video for Agnostic’s benefit, or to squeeze Rafael Nadal into the conversation.

Oh OK then, I’m lying, it was.

The endogamy rates are fascinating. I was reading that Parsis have a very high amount of Gujarati ancestry on the maternal side.

Lots of these minorities have admixed; this reminds me of your Roman Empire and Jewry post. Mixture may have been much less in the time of entrenched Abrahamism but in my opinion it wasn’t really until the 19th-20th century where such identities crystallised and intermixture was forbidden.

Invisible though – not an issue at all.

When I was a kid, the word gypsy was used admiringly, as a romantic symbol of freedom, independence, wildness and non-conformity – free spirits. No doubt a gross distortion of the reality. And when I was older and in the spell of Flamenco, Gitano music was a thing to be admired and emulated.

My Mother said, I never should
Play with the gypsies in the wood;
If I did, she would say,
You naughty girl to disobey.
Your hair shan’t curl and your shoes shan’t shine,
You gypsy girl, you shan’t be mine.
And my Father said that if I did
He’d rap my head with the teapot-lid.
The wood was dark, the grass was green
Along came Sally with a tambourine.
I went to sea – no ship to get across,
I paid ten shillings for a blind white horse.
I up on his back
And was off on a crack,
Sally tell my Mother that I shan’t come back.

One exception: many Gitans of Southern France, who tend to be of Spanish “Gitano” origin, are pretty brownish (e.g. the Gypsy Kings: one of the original founders is actually of Northern African descent, but you couldn’t tell him from the others on the picture).

Where else but a Guardian editorial could you find such a wonderful euphemism?

“Rolling caravans do not lend themselves to rooted integration, and especially when they are decoupled from standard western ideas about property rights.”