The Gills of Lande Ke, Punjab, India

This Web page and all its contents are dedicated to my father, Sardar Jagdish Chander Singh Gill who inspired me to take up the project when I was still a young boy.

Because of my father's personality and his ability to socialize with "one and all", it was easy for me to get started and start gathering information from him. In my eyes, he is the grand ambassador of the Gill Family.

I am thankful to all my elders who had the patience to give me the necessary information for building the family links whenever I had the opportunity.

I am also grateful to Sardar Manmohan Singh Gill, my grand uncle, to gave me access to his father, Late Sardar Anokh Singh Gill's memoires which helped me complete the chain to thread 46 Generations of known "Gill Clan" from 950 AD to 2006 AD.

Darji's vision and his endless efforts in writing his memoires before and after the 1947 partition of India have been a great source of information in the compilation of this work.

I will welcome your valuable suggestions and need further input to other individuals names, data and pictures to make this tree grow.

Ancient history:
GENETIC GROUP: HAPLOGROUP L (M20)

We are the members of haptogroup L, a lineage defined by a genetic marker called M20. This haplogroup is the final destination of a genetic journey that began some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y chromosome marker called M168.

The very widely dispersed M168 marker can be traced to a single individual—”Eurasian Adam.” This African man, who Lived some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago, is the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendants migrated out of Africa and became the only lineage to survive away from humanity’s home continent.

Population growth during the Upper Paleolithic era may have spurred the M168 Lineage to seek new hunting grounds for the plains animals crucial to their survival. A period of moist and favorable climate had expanded the ranges of such animals at this time, so these nomadic peoples may have simply followed their food source.

Improved tools and rudimentary art appeared during this same epoch, suggesting significant mental and behavioral changes. These shifts may have been spurred by a genetic mutation that gave “Eurasian Adam’s” descendants a cognitive advantage over other contemporary, but now extinct, human lineages. Some 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans are descendants of the second great human migration out of Africa, which is defined by the marker M89.

M89 first appeared 45,000 years ago in Northern Africa or the Middle East. It arose on the original lineage (M168) of “Eurasian Adam,” and defines a large inland migration of hunters who followed expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East.

Many people of this lineage remained in the Middle East, but others continued their movement and followed the grasslands through Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia. Herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game probably enticed them to explore new grasslands.

With much of Earth’s water frozen in massive ice sheets, the era’s vast steppes stretched from eastern France to Korea. The grassland hunters of the M89 lineage traveled both east and west along this steppe “superhighway” and eventually peopled much of the continent.

A group of M89 descendants moved north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country. Though their numbers were likely small, genetic traces of their journey are still found today.

Some 40,000 years ago a man in Iran or southern Central Asia was born with a unique genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new Lineage diverging from the M89 group. His descendants spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.