RootsChat.Com
General => Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing => Topic started by: 4b2 on Tuesday 15 October 24 08:44 BST (UK)
-
This is a thread to post details of the bricks walls you’ve broken through with the help of DNA.
- a paternal gg-grandmother disappeared after the 1881 census at the age of 20; I’d spent some time trying to find where she may have gone with no luck; I had one DNA match, who given the size and common ancestry I presumed was a half 2nd cousin via this gg-grandmother, but he had no tree and did not reply to a message; given it was quite an uncommon name with only four occurrences in the birth indexes, I decided to piece together their trees, starting with the one that had a Welsh mother’s maiden name, given the relevant ancestry is Welsh; within 5 minutes I pull up a 1901 census for the match’s grandfather the first thing I see is Churchstoke, Montgomeryshire and then Aberhafesp, Montgomeryshire in the place of birth column; the second being my gg-grandmother’s place of birth; I scroll right and see the name Annie Elizabeth – my gg-grandmother who’d eluded me for 13 years
- direct paternal g-grandfather's mother's mother (same as above) - I was able to piece together this line via word of mouth info correlating enough with the census, but wasn't 100% sure as my g-grandfather's birth was not recorded; have correlated four lines of ancestry in DNA matches to prove; what would have been a line only based on word of mouth is proved with some lines going back to 1500
- 4X g-grandmother Ann Evans born in 1802 in a large town; don't have the father's name, so wasn't sure if I had the right baptism; I had what looked like the probable marriage for the parents, but no idea of where the lines might go from there with common names, no ages or places of brth; when going through a 2nd cousin 1x removed’s matches I found matches for the maternal line of Ann Evans; what I had listed as a 1802 dead-end now has the maternal line extended back to c. 1600
- a 4X g-grandmother was listed as born c 1795 in a certain village, but there was no baptism to be found; I looked through the parish registers and found a family of that name with baptisms up to 1790; the wife was 35 at that time, so you'd likely expect two more children to be born; I presumed this was the line of ancestry; a child of this ancestor had the full name of the suspected father as a forename; DNA showed this was to be correct; what would have been a 1795 dead end now has lines back to the 1500s
- a 5X g-grandmother from Scotland was difficult to place with poor records; Mary Armour - just happened to be the name of one of the poet Robert Burns' aunts, living in the same area at the same time; and some people had put that connection in their tree despite inadequate proof and ignoring the fact that said aunt died without issue; DNA showed my Mary Armour was another Mary Armour for whom there was no baptism
- when my best friend's father took a DNA test it turned out we were related; his paternal grandfather was born out of wedlock, though they did have a surname for the alleged father; that surname turned out to be correct with multiple clusters of matches confirming his ancestry; however the big question was why he had so many shared matches for a line of my ancestry with no paper trial, with the closest match being 56cM (half 3rd cousin); after whittling it down I was able to determine a 4X g-grandfather fathered two children by infidelity in 1838 and 1840, before moving about 20 miles away; in this test I was able to find matches that confirmed the parentage of an ancestor born around 1700, which I'd suspected from documents, but there was no convincing proof
- my maternal g-grandmother was born in British India and I didn't know what her surname was or where she may have been born; a very long-term and brutal dead-end; via collecting 10 DNA tests I was able to get a firm handle on the parents, who crop up a couple of times in records and thus I have a good idea of where my g-grandmother's baptism may be; the DNA matches correlate multiple lines of ancestry; a 1900 dead-end now has some lines back to 1600
-
- among the ancestry of the same g-grandmother was an Ann Chisholm; there was no apparat baptism for such a woman in India, so that was pretty much a dead-end; several trees on Ancestry have managed to botch a line of ancestry for her to a notable Chisholm family; doing my usual picking with dead ends I decided to look for previous marriages of Anns before her marriage to my ancestor; this despite her age at burial gave her as 13 at that marriage; I found a marriage of an Ann Pamby to a Joseph Chesson, 18 months earlier; this Joseph Chesson was also listed as Joseph Chisson, and I found the three are found interchangeable; Joseph died 10 months before Ann's marriage to my ancestor; it seemed convincing, but I wasn't 100% sure if my ancestor was this Ann Pamby; to increase the uncertainty this Ann's father was a solider Robert Pamby, who was recorded in the military musters as consistently born c. 1778; the musters list the place of birth only as England in all except one when they were more specific in listing Cambridge; N.B. it's quite often the musters list a major city near where an ancestor was born; on mustering into the army Robert gave a separate age, giving him born c. 1775; while the only possible baptism I could find was in 1772 in Ely, 17 miles from Cambridge; I wasn't sure if I had the right man or if this really was the right line; to make it even more uncertain my baptism candidate Robert Pamby married in 1792 and that wife died in 1832; yet my Robert is having children in India from 1808; my aunt's DNA results yielded no link; but when I received the results for two relatives on my grandmother's generational level I found within around ten common descendants of Robert Pamby, baptised in 1772, via his only surviving child born in England; these DNA matches correlated with my matches who shared the line of ancestry; this went on to be one of my most interesting lines; I found that shortly after Robert married he moved to London, but could not find work and was in a bad way; rather than seeking relief he took it on himself to try and provide for his family himself when he was caught stealing 50 kilos of biscuits; for which he was locked up in Newgate Prison at a time when such a theft could have attracted the death penalty; he returned to Ely and had two more children; I noted that the baptisms for Robert end in 1798, despite his wife being 28; it seems their marriage must have been on the rocks, for in the Cambridgeshire Petty Sessions of 1802 his wife is found being brought before them for breaking a man’s noise with a wooden bottle and saying “If he is not dead I wouldn’t mind finishing him.” The next we hear from Robert he is boarding a ship to join the Madras army in 1805, but all does not go well; first the flotilla he is part of sails to Brazil to collect further supplies, but before it does the ship Robert is on crashes into the only atoll in the Atlantic and sinks; he is moved to a new boat and then travels to South Africa where the British overthrow the Dutch colony before arriving in Madras; Robert quickly remarried; while his wife remarried in 1819, as a widow
Unsolved lines:
- direct paternal line - have some definite ancestors from matches, but not the full line; there are three matches that are half 2nd cousins once removed via whoever my paternal gg-grandfather is, but it happens whoever that was had another child by infidelity
- unknown 3X paternal g-grandfather - NPE - have found lots of common ancestry in matches, but can't see how they fit together, presumed more NPEs; the biggest puzzle in this cluster are the four matches who are mostly closely related, two are descendants of one set of parents and two are descendants of another st of parents; yet only one with connects to further DNA matches, and her line having DNA matches proving back to the 1720s; so it looks like whoever my ancestor committed infidelity with a woman who gave birth to his son in marriage, as well as producing my gg-grandmother by illegitimacy in 1837
- paternal grandmother was born out of wedlock; no DNA matches on that line until ~4th cousin matches (from my aunt), have been able to determine one line back from a 1814 birth with a few different lines proved beyond that; have another cluster with not many matches on another line, with that line having matches proving back to an ancestor born in 1746; very difficult to find how they fit together; there is a Scandinavian line coming in somewhere from here for which I only have matches on MyHeirtage; I also have about a 2nd cousin match on MyHeritage who may link in somewhere here, but having completed much of her tree can't see any link, other than it being in the general area of my grandmother's unknown ancestry, where the known lines are in Wigan and Liverpool
Anything can be potentially solved back to the late 18th century and earlier.
-
- yesterday I began going through my mother's paternal line, which I hadn't looked at much, as the lines are solid with DNA matches; though there was a big question re. a 3X great-grandmother for which I had no matches on any line (with multiple tests) [see below *]; I had one line with an ancestor born c. 1761, Richard Lewis, living in a part of Wales where only Welsh was spoken; a big issue there is that patronymics were used variably by different people in different ways at different times; e.g. in this area I have an ancestor still using patronymics in 1808, while another family were not using them in the 1720s; this consists of records in parish registers where you will get something like Richard, son of Rees Edwards - whereby that child will become known as Richard Rees; and there is no indication of what naming system they are using (unless they use multi-generational patronymics, e.g. Peter, son of Richard Rees Edwards; add to that - first sons may had have kept their fathers surname, while younger sons did not; with the very limited pools of names and surnames used in Welsh-speaking Wales, this makes it very difficult to progress through the 1700s; I found a cluster of matches descended from a Thomas Lewis, b.c. 1763, some of which overlapped with less distant matches to the family of Richard Lewis, b.c. 1761; it turns out both Richard Lewis, 1761 and Thomas Lewis, 1763 were both sons of a Lewis Morris, who is found buried in 1811, at the same farm as Richard Lewis, 1761 lived at later
* Regarding the 3rd great-grandmother, I had long been aware that I had no DNA matches to prove her ancestry, and have a few tests from descendants, and she came from a large family; if she had been born of an NPE it didn't make sense why her mother's line was not showing up; her name was Emma Thomas, and was baptised as such in April 1848; the early censuses list her as born 1847-48, but she is later reported to be a bit older; no birth certificate; I also noticed that there is a preceding baptism in the tiny new chapely she was baptised at, in Dec 1846 - Emma Thomas, illegitimate daughter of Elizabeth Davies, of a certain farm, servant; this was curious as my Emma Thomas' mother's maiden name was Elizabeth Davies and the first name is given as Emma Thomas; however it turns out that Elizabeth Davies was another Elizabeth, who married in 1850 and was then living at the same farm with her parents, but without this illegitimate child for who I can find no further record of; to add to the intrigue, if my Emma Thomas was born around her baptism in April 1848, her mother would have been three months pregnant when she married; and further in the 1851 census Emma Thomas is listed as a step-daughter to the head of the household, along with the other children of her mother's 1st marriage; so my suspicion is that my ancestor Emma is the same Emma that was baptised in 1846, and she was adopted
-
My great grandmother was born June 1868, christened as Polly Campbell, purportedly the daughter of William Campbell, but later called herself Mary Ann Young and on her marriage certificate her father is given as Robert Young. The Campbells lived in a smallish village and I found a Robert Young who was likely to be her father, but couldn't be certain he was the father of Polly/Mary Ann without DNA confirmation.
This Robert Young married Dec quarter of 1868 and I have a 32 cM DNA match to a descendant of his marriage giving a relationship of half third cousin.
Unfortunately this match has not responded to my message, as actually their father, who would be a great grandchild of Robert Young, was adopted by a brother -in- law and taken to America. On their family tree my match is following the wrong (adoptive) family back !
-
Nice stories 4b2 and I can relate to some.
My 2xgreat gran was born 31 Dec 1863, illegitimate, her mother married in summer 1864 and the baby was baptised as the child of the new husband, a male servant. Turns out he was quite recently a widower and his wife died of a long battle with TB in November 1863. Food for thought. Always best to do a DNA route to confirm or deny things though.
-
I'd always wondered where my dad's Middleton surname came from. I got as far back as an ancestor who was born around 1820 in London but no idea where his dad was from.
Then one day I was looking through DNA matches and found some matches with a possible Middleton ancestor but they all had mixed up names. So I made a guess as to what the correct name should have been and searched that in the family trees section of Ancestry. That broke my brick wall. It was a tree that had Middleton ancestry going back to about 1700 in north Lincolnshire and around 1790 one family group moved to Canada and were the ancestors of those DNA matches, and they had a cousin called Robert born 1790 who fit as the father of my ancestor who was born in London.
So I now know my Middleton line was in Lincolnshire in the 1700s thanks to those very distant cousins (about 6th or so) in North America and the guy with the amazing tree that included Middletons in Crowle, Lincolnshire.
-
A nice story on how a brick wall was demolished. I wish I could do the same for one of mine, the most recent male ancestor who is a brick wall. A sailor who appears in Cornwall when in marries in 1814, almost certainly in the Royal Navy, remains there until the late 1830s and then disappears! One spelling of his name suggests he came from Suffolk but DNA matches are elusive.
-
A couple days ago with the help of DNA and others, I was able to figure out how I related to a match.
Our trees didn’t converge, but one location did: Barnard Castle, Durham, England. Theories went from an affair to adoption, but after digging through Durham Records Online, we figured out we were full 5th cousins!
-
I have related the story of my Blackstone/Blacksell brick wall before
I had information from the family records from 2 states that all had Blacksell/Blacksall and a Blackson for good measure
There was a web link to a Richard Blackstone convict with the story of 1 son between the couple and then 8 children to the mother by another man - this link here is a great story
https://heddonhistory.weebly.com/blog/alice-robson
It was only until I had taken a DNA test that one of the 1st responses was a great granddaughter of Alice who had tested - and given the info in the link it was confirmed that not only was Alice my GGGgrandmother but also the mother of Charles Blacksell whose family has grown and grown - and the aforementioned 8 children in Tasmania
I still have a brick wall regarding Blackstone but it confirmed a name change and to stop looking in Lincolnshire
-
(9) With the new depths one can plumb with Ancestry now charging for the privilege of showing all shared matches down to 8cM, I opened up the matches for a 2nd cousin for my grandmother today. I'd looked around his matches before, but not found any conclusive coordinates.
I began pawing through some of the lower cM matches that peeled off from the main cluster of matches. Finding a clump of closely related people with common matches from ancestors born c. 1850 I quickly spied a few names that looked to be the same - Schuchman, Shookman and others. The happened to converge in the area of one of my dead ends - in the vicinity of Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany.
An ancestor from here, who had found his way to Madras and eventually Singapore had left a clue of his origin when he advertised his music school with he being "of Darmstadt". More useful, was a reply to his son asking in a German magazine if any of his father's brothers were still alive, to which he got the reply "only Peter Haller, großherzoglich hessischer Oberconsistorialkanzlist in Darmstadt, Roßdorferstraße 49".
A search for this Peter Haller reveled his parents were Heinrich Haller and Elisabeth Ahl. While my ancestor Maximilian Joseph Daniel August Haller was listed online as having two different sets of parents and widely reported to have married a Miss Lower, both of whom died in Germany. It appears there was a case of mistaken identity, with there being a Maximilian Joseph Daniel Haller (minus the August) born around the same time.
I'd previously asked a German genealogist to flesh this out, as I am not familiar with the records and can't read those I have found online. But he did not reply after I accepted his terms.
So I hoped I may find some clues in DNA matches. It seems very few Germans have taken tests. But many people from the US, with German ancestry have. So virtually all my deeper German matches are from such people, and thus the common ancestors are born in the 1700s.
Of the matches I found with links to Schuchman, Shookman, I found that there were inconsistencies in the trees, with the common issue of bridging the gap back to Germany and the leavings of novices who botch together trees with anything that comes to hand. After some time I had several relatively close matches going back to Schuchman in Darmstadt and it looked like the common link might be Philipp L Schuchmann (1748) m Anna B Rahmgens. But then I found another line of cousins, more distantly related to those first research,; and these ones had a slightly closer line to my prospective ancestors.
The prospective mother of my Haller ancestor was Anna Sophia Catherine Dielmann, who was a 1st cousin five times removed of the DNA match with the largest cM of 18, with the common ancestors of three DNA matches being Johann Andreas Kilian (1709) m Anna Margarete Ramge; and another 7 came via the parents of Anna Margarete Ramge. The first three had two descents from Ramge.
-
(10) When I began tracing my family tree on the night of the 23rd of December 2009, I found my grandmother in the England and Wales Birth Index. The birth was in 1918, and so the mother's maiden name was listed. It was the same as her birth surname. As a complete novice this meant nothing to me. An error, I thought. Her younger sister's birth index entry also had a mother's maiden name listed, and was not the same as the birth surname.
At this time the most recent census available online was the 1901 census. My father didn't know the names of his grandparents, just his aunts and uncles, only one of who was born for the 1901 census, as well as the name of the farm they lived at. That was enough to be able to trace the line.
So I traced my grandmother, as a child of that family, at the same farm. Shortly thereafter my father's cousin, who I'd never met before, turned up at my home. Only I was in. She told me that both my paternal great-grandfather and my paternal grandmother were born out of wedlock. The penny dropped with the same surname as mother's maiden name in the birth index. To my novice shame, at that point (about 1-2 months into research) I'd botched in an invented line from my great-grandfather. The cousin shared ancestry via my great-grandfather, but not my grandmother. Yet my grandmother, when on her death bed, had revealed her niece by marriage that she had been born out of wedlock and raised as a child of her biological grandparents.
Shortly thereafter I purchased the birth certificate of my grandmother, then costing about £7. No father was listed. I found her baptism in the Methodist circuit. No father. I obtained her marriage certificate. No father. I looked up a possible maintenance claim in petty sessions. Nothing.
I had raced through many branches of my tree within months of starting. But was left with three gaping holes:
1) great-grandfather born out of wedlock
2) grandmother born out of wedlock
3) great-grandmother born in India, without a surname or a likely place of birth
6 of 16 gg-grandparents missing (37.5%), and with little hope of ever finding them. It became something of an obsession. To the extent that I contacted map divination practitioners (who refused my requests), and had dreams about the name of my unknown great-grandfather being revealed to me.
My father first took FTDNA in 2013, and I found nothing at all in the matches. In about 2016 my aunt took a test with Ancestry. I looked through the matches, then a complete novice, and didn't see anything of much use.
Later my maternal aunts tested and I had much closer matches that obviously related to the unknown line 3) (above). But at a quick glance, I couldn't see how exactly the matches fitted together.
In early 2023, I began looking at those closer maternal matches, and after a lot of digging got to grips with how you can use DNA, and was able to solve 3).
Returning to 1) and 2) was more difficult. I've outlined in this thread most of what I've found on them. There just wasn't enough matches available. I've been able to determine a few ancestors, but with gaps of two generations. On 1) there is a 92cM match, which I was able to determine from just the name Margaret Evans, when ProTools became available. But it's just too much of a mess to solve at this time.
On 2) I only had matches that looked like 4th cousins, and couldn't really see how to put them together.
When I began going though my matches, I had a 49cM one that I could see had common ancestry in Wigan, which is nowhere near my paternal ancestry, all of which is from the England-Wales border. But as I became more accustomed to working with DNA, I found this 49cM match was clearly relating to my grandmother's unknown father. With a few lines provable back to c. 1700. But attempts to put various groups together were very tentative.
Often, for about two years I check my new matches on Ancestry. It's been very bare of late. I was waiting in a hotel restaurant in Morocco for 8 hours until my flight. I logged on to Ancestry and checked my new matches...
-
90cM
"Please let it be on one of my unknown lines!", I pleaded.
My Ancestry subscription has expired, but I could see the preview of three shared matches. It was on my grandmother's unknown Wigan line, with the 49cM match listed first.
I scrambled to subscribe. Spending 20 minutes trying to find where they had hidden the 12 month option.
I hadn't bothered to notice that the match only has one person in his tree. But with an uncommon name, undeterred I put his name in the birth index. One match, within a short drive from Wigan. I found the names of his parents, the father who could be ruled out as being Irish (as per the ethnicity estimate). The mother was a little more tricky as she had quite a common name and no obvious candidate in the birth indexes. But one had a birth index entry with the mother's maiden name - Charnock.
From my looking into the other matches I found that I was very likely a descendant of an Elizabeth Gaskell, b. 1850 in Wigan, out of wedlock ) Though with a father listed on her marriage. I had previously traced her descendants - who had the surname Charnock, or Lee-Charnock. All of the descendants over two generations remained in Wigan, except one family who moved 95 miles to the England-Wales border... 5 miles from where my grandmother was born. So I had assumed that these were good candidates for my grandmother's father, but there wasn't enough evidence.
Now with the new match of 90cM, the glue was there to show how more clusters of matches related. Some time earlier this year I noticed that I had a few likely 4th cousin matches that I'd accidentally filed in the wrong group due to coincidental overlaps and had been written off as unknown. Going through them again I saw there were two clusters that had ancestry from Radnorshire - somewhere I had no known ancestry from. I was aware that the woman who married one of my prospective Charnock ancestors that moved to Wales was from Radnorshire. But these clusters were very difficult, with a few births out of wedlock. And the whole area was difficult to research. However, elbow grease was applied and I found those Radnorshire groups correlated with the co-ordinates of both the Charnock (Wigan) and Radnorshire line. The Charnock husband died in 1908 in a mining disaster, and afterwards the Welsh mother removed to her home region on the Welsh border. And with her sons being 17, 14, and 12 when my grandmother was conceived, it's safe to say it was the oldest one.
15 1/2 years in - the grandmother's mystery father is set to rest. But not surprisingly there are a further three known births out of wedlock on this line. One of those I found last year with the father listed in Lancs. Quarter Sessions and confirmed by DNA. Another is on my grandmother's direct paternal line, an 1846 birth, which is another reason I had trouble placing this line before - fragmentation in the matches, rather than a simple linking of marriages. The other I mentioned already, where a father is listed on a marriage certificate. Though I am not convinced that is the correct man.
It turns out Wigan's favorite son - Richard Ashcroft - is also a descendant of this line. Bosh!
-
Good work, 4b2!
-
Spooky!!! My 2xGGM was Mary Charnock from near Wigan. Her mother in law, my 3xGGM, was Ellen Gaskell who was born in North Wales which has always intrigued me as that entire line is resolutely Wigan based going back generations.
-
Spooky!!! My 2xGGM was Mary Charnock from near Wigan. Her mother in law, my 3xGGM, was Ellen Gaskell who was born in North Wales which has always intrigued me as that entire line is resolutely Wigan based going back generations.
It does seem that everyone in old Wigan are related.
-
Further to my post on the previous page, I had finally found the 1700s origin location of my Middleton lineage but I could never figure out the correct wife for Robert Middleton born 1786 in Crowle, Lincolnshire who moved to London and had a son, Robert, in 1817.
I've finally got it. I checked marriage records in London and the villages around Crowle. I couldn't fine the right baptism record. There are some marriage records but further review showed none of them were the right family as Robert 1786 died (according to my tree) in 1821 so any Robert having children after that year could be ruled out.
Then I found a marriage record that I'd seen before and forgotten. The wife's name was Elizabeth Bulgin and then in my DNA I have a family who have a Bulgin line about 5 generations ago. It's weak but ProTools shows them in the right place with common matches and nothing else on their tree seems to fit with mine.
So they descend from Eliz Bulgin's sister and once I'd added their line to my tree, Ancestry popped up with a Common Ancestor going through the line of another sister of Eliz Bulgin, Which I think is strong enough to say I've found my 4th great grandmother on this line! Finally!
Records suggest that Robert and Elizabeth may have had at least one more child, but there's no confirmation in my DNA. As the child's name is Elizabeth and she was born just over a year from the marriage I think she probably is their daughter and there are living descendants for her, which is cool.
-
Further to my post on the previous page, I had finally found the 1700s origin location of my Middleton lineage but I could never figure out the correct wife for Robert Middleton born 1786 in Crowle, Lincolnshire who moved to London and had a son, Robert, in 1817.
Amazing. Great that we can still solve dead-ends going back towards 300 years. As mentioned in one of my posts above, I was able to use DNA to confirm a suspected line of ancestry going back to a man born, say, 1665. It's not typical, but with enough lifting it happens. In his case there are a few apparent gaps in his baptisms, and it's also known he was a merchant on Montserrat in the Caribbean. So my ancestor's baptism probably occurred in Montserrat, for where there are no (surviving) records for that time.
I've been working on another cluster of DNA matches recently, where the largest match is 30cM. In my experience, such clusters tend to be quite distant, and in this case there is probably endogamy, since these were small landowners who sought to keep land within relatives. With such clusters it's more difficult. If the MRCA is more in the late 18th century, then public trees are usually correct. While before that, public trees are either incomplete or highly suspect. So one has to do a lot more leg work, hoping to narrow in on a place and/or surname. In the case of this 30cM cluster, I got many matches with the surname Rogers in a dispersed rural parish. There was one match in the parish, but without Rogers in their tree. Putting in the leg-work to pad out the trees through the 1700s, I found most of the common matches are also descendants of a Dovaston family. This is one of the families that often intermarries with my ancestors related to the above mentioned Montserrat line (Rogers, maybe the same Rogers found in this cluster). But the further back the match is, the fewer coordinates there are to figure out where the match fits in. Most of these more distant clusters are inconclusive.
-
I can see some clusters like that in my matches. I need to start building trees for places where I can see clusters but can't work out the common ancestor. It's getting tougher to make new discoveries in my tree, so doing this and starting a chromosome browser account need to be my New Year goals and see if I can break down some more walls.