RootsChat.Com

Does anyone have records for Cumming families in the Grantown area? Very little seems to be available. I am looking for:

1. Mary Grant and James Cumming of Easter Duthil. She died 1805, he died before 1790
2. Patrick Cumming, d. 1771, farmer at Easter Duthil, assumed to be brother of James, wife Margaret Cumming.
3. Mary Cumming, dau of Mary & James, above, married Alexander Grant who died c. 1790, farmer at Duthil (aka, Wester Duthil)
4. Gilbert Cumming, wife Ann Taylor dd. 1802, Gilbert emigrated to Albany, NY in 1803

Any Cumming leads welcome! There isn't much on this family name.

thanks!

Richard, thanks for that honest assessment! Here's what's leaving me muddled, however.

Of the 6 people who match my brother, we have linked 5 of them to our family tree within about 8 generations or less. Most of these are people that have a genetic distance of 2 or 3. So it's a bit hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that the person with the genetic distance of 1 could link up to our tree as much as 1,000 years ago. The only place he and my brother do not match is in CDY, which mutates fast and is listed as a range of numbers, and none of 7 matches happen to have the same range for the SNP CDY. Go figure!

cheers,
Laura

I'd love some advice from any of you who are more adept at the intricacies of DNA testing than my family is!

We had my brother's Y-DNA run on Family Tree DNA since he is a direct male descendant of our line, and he turned out to be a perfect match with someone who had a different last name. This has to be a NPE on the part of this other person, but we can't figure out how. While his last name, Terry, appears in the land records and church records of the very small local area where our ancestors lived, the name doesn't appear on our family tree, so there is no obvious place where someone might have had a child and handed it over to a brother-in-law or something like that. How do we go about eliminating possibilities to figure out how many generations back this event might have happened? Then we would at least know which group of men to start investigating.

Did you look at the microfilm of the actual parish records for Laggan? Since that is where the marriage took place, it seems the most likely place to start. There is an Alexander Davidson, married to Isabel Cattanach, who had children baptized in Laggan in the 1780s. while there doesn't seem to be a son Alexander, it's rare that an entire family's birth records made it into the parish records--some children inevitably aren't there, or the records were badly kept or lost.

If the family is from Laggan, you will probably learn some useful details by reading Letters from the Mountains, written by Anne Grant who herself was from Laggan. It covers the right time period and is available on line at Google Books and doubtless from other sources.

I have quite a bit of information on the Clan Allan, particularly the Auchterblair line which is his Mother Elizabeth's line. She is the daughter of Lt Joseph Grant but I've never found a mention of Joseph's wife. Perhaps that is where the Gordon comes in? Just about everyone on the tree seems to have married another Grant!