The House of Strickland

The Strickland family was one of the long-established landed families of northern England, rooted above all in Westmorland and the wider world of the northern gentry. Their story is the familiar but still fascinating English pattern of manor, parish, county, and crown: a family whose standing rested on land, marriage alliances, local office, religious identity, and a fierce concern for continuity across generations. In this case, the family is also tagged with the haplogroup R1b1a1b1a1a2b1c1b3, presented here as the primary family haplogroup. In historical terms, the House of Strickland stands for the durable culture of the county family, where reputation was built not simply by great national drama but by holding estates together, serving in local society, and preserving family memory over centuries.

The name itself is tied to a place and to a distinctly northern setting. The family took shape in the old county landscape of Westmorland, in a region where lineage, landholding, and tenacious local identity mattered enormously. Like many gentry houses, the Stricklands rose through a combination of inheritance, prudent marriages, and service. They belong to that important layer of English society below the great magnates but above the ordinary freeholder: influential, visible, and deeply embedded in regional life. Among the best-known figures are Sir Walter Strickland (1411-1487), a major representative of the family in the later medieval period, and Sir Thomas Strickland (1497-1569), who carried the family name into the turbulent religious and political world of Tudor England. Through such figures, the Stricklands show how a county family could endure by adapting carefully while keeping one eye firmly on ancestry and estate.

Sizergh Castle

The great location anchor of the family is Sizergh Castle in Cumbria, historically in Westmorland, the seat most closely associated with the Stricklands for many centuries. Despite the name, it is less a fairy-tale fortress than a layered family house with medieval origins, developed and altered over time as the needs of defence, comfort, and status changed. That, in a way, makes it even more interesting, because it preserves the real texture of gentry life: towers, halls, later domestic additions, gardens, and the accumulated traces of generations who lived not in abstract heraldry but in actual rooms. Sizergh is especially important because it embodies the family ideal of continuity. It was not just owned, but inhabited, adapted, remembered, and made into a monument of family identity. The site is well known today and can indeed still be visited, which makes it one of those rare places where the long story of an English family can still be encountered in stone, wood, landscape, and atmosphere rather than only on paper.

Ancient DNA

From the DNA perspective, the Strickland family is here linked with the haplogroup R1b1a1b1a1a2b1c1b3. It is important not to turn that into a fairy story of exact personal descent from named ancient individuals. What we can say is that a number of ancient samples are related or linked within this broader paternal line and help sketch the deep background of the kind of ancestry found across parts of Iron Age, Migration Period, and early medieval Europe. Examples include Migration Period Hungary Rakoczifalva RKF247, Celtic Iron Age Harlyn Bay Cornwall I16440, Late Iron Age East Kent England I19873, Quadi-associated Bratislava Slovakia I11712, Early Medieval Pohansko Moravia Czech POH27, Viking Age Skara Varnhem Sweden VK40, and Viking Age Oland Sweden VK335. That is a wonderfully broad geographical spread, and it reminds us that the paternal lines later found among English gentry families often belong to a much older European story of movement, settlement, and regional mixing long before surnames, coats of arms, or county seats came into being.

Explore your past

If you would like to see how your own DNA may connect to deep ancestry, historic populations, and families linked to lines such as R1b1a1b1a1a2b1c1b3, upload your DNA to MyTrueAncestry and explore the past in a more personal way.