Zdravstvuyte!
Ya budu pisal po angliyskiy, potomu cto ya ne govoril po russkiy dolgoe vremya.
I belong to a Vassoevich (Vasojevic) clan from Montenegro. The first written mention of the clan comes from Dubrovnik archives in 1444, with a report about a trader's caravan attacked by the Vassoevich, Byelopavlich, and Piper clans. It means that Vassoevich were established as a clan by then. That would mean that the progenitor, whose name is assumed to be Vaso, was born at least 100-150 years before that, at least by 1300 A.D. There is also an allegation of an even earlier mention of the clan in 1281, but we have not able to validate that.
I do have Turkish census data from 1485 and 1497 from the village "Recica", which is Lijeva Rijeka, and it shows some early Vassoevich names. Among them, it shows the name Mioman, who is supposed to be the son of Vaso, but the census data clearly show that not being the case. Mioman is shown to have 2 brothers, and to be a son of one Stoja, so Vassoevich's oral tradition has been probably skewed about the early development of the clan.
We have nothing about the origin of Vaso, but a bunch of unfounded, and, on occasion, phantasy-based theories. As we have seen, Vassoevich, Byelopavlich, and Kuchi clans are all haplogroup E (based on a few samples I have seen from each), but Piperi do appear to be haplogroup I.
My first guess would be that E-V13 represented here came in with Greek colonizations after 800 B.C., which inhabitted Dorres (Drac, Dyrracium), Lyesh, Colhinium (Ulcinj/Ulqin), or Budva, and then moved inland over the next 1500 years. The Old Greek language was over time supplanted by a flavor of Illyrian, which was then subsequently replaced by Slavic. Interestingly enough, Medieval Montenegro (then called Duklja/Doclea) was by 1420s an official Catholic state, after which Orthodox Christianity was endorsed by the crown.
It's unfortunate that the history of Vassoevich has been largely re-written by those clan members who over time became loyal to different ideologies authored in Belgrade. Some of them even excavated a tomb in Lijeva Rijeka a few years ago, then hurried up to say it's Vaso, and they errected him a monument and a church, without a DNA analysis or anything else...
Anyway, just wanted to draw your attention to some ideologies that are cluttering up the actual DNA makeup of the Vassoevich clan.
Nino (originally from Northern Montenegro)