Following the Threads of Family Lines Back to Many Places

Sometimes family lines are as hard to follow back to their origins 

as untangling a ball of thread

Before I started delving further into my family's past, I had the mistaken notion that, in the past, generations of people lived and died in one village and that only some moved any distance away where they once again put down roots for the family generations that followed. If this was the case then genealogy would be a search for places from which my family rarely budged. I couldn't have been more wrong. As I recently read when doing research on my Colonial American lines, "The truth is that there had always been much more going and coming in early America than the chroniclers have conceded."1 And it wasn't just in early America that this was true.

Although it did make sense that people would move around more in the new world. Their ties with the old country were weaker and the attachment to the new lands wasn't as strong so their moves in the new land weren't as surprising. My Matheson family from Skye moved in a way that I wasn't expecting, however. After settling close to his twin brother, Murdock, in PEI, my 3 x great-grandfather, Kenneth, moved to Ontario with his family. Why did that happen? The subsequent moves west in Ontario were explained by a general migration to the west as new land opened up. The next generations of the family continued the westward drift, going as far as Regina before retrenching to Winnipeg. Well, except for my great-grandfather and great-grandmother who decided to move to Selinas in California towards the end of his life. Why did he do that?

It looks like I have some research to do to better understand the lives of my ancestors in North America, particularly focusing on where and why they moved. But it wasn't only the family in the new world who didn't stay put. I have been able to find information back to the mid-1700s for one of my families who were in Northamptonshire, well, at least for a time. It appears that the family also had ties to Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire and some of them lived for a while in Kent. Their moves seem to be connected to their religious nonconformity. At least, that is something to look into when I look into that line again.

Some of that nonconformist line also ended up in London. But then, London was a big draw. I have more than one family line with links to the Big Smoke. They came from all over drawn to the magnetic big city and there they mixed with one another to create a confused lines that look like a tangled ball of thread. Each time I pluck a family thread to follow it takes me back to a different place, most of which are in England but the one thread that I would dearly like to follow would take me back to somewhere in Ireland. Just where did they come from?

Sources:

 

¹Bridenbough, Carl. Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience, Society in Rhode Island, 1636-1690. Brown University Press, Providence. p88

Images:

By This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60917199 

DNA Update: A Cousin Tangle

Is it the math or the tangled relationships that make using genetic DNA so hard to grasp? Sometimes it seems to be the proliferation of shiny new tools used to manipulate DNA results whose terms and possibilities are quickly adopted by those in the know which seem to leave me in the dust. Then again, maybe it's just my lack of practice.

How I envy those with compliant relatives willing to share their spit or cell scrapings. But it's time to stop dreaming about "what if" and working with the information that I have. To further my education, I signed up for a week long course about genetic DNA at the Society of Genealogists which just happened to be on while I was in London. I still haven't unpacked a lot of the information from the sessions but I did buy a new book that was recommended.

The book is Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies edited by Debbie Parker Wayne. It covers many DNA related topics. The first one I looked at was Kimberly Powell's article on "The Challenge of Endogamy and Pedigree Collapse". Turns out that I have pedigree collapse in my line with the odd number of matching CMs for a distant cousin match. This line reaches back to the early 1600s so nothing is written in stone but the information I was given shows multiple tangled connections.

It is the tangled intermarriages before the common ancestors shared by me and my target match that, I believe, explain the odd CM number that my distant cousin and I share. Working down through the generations since our shared ancestral couple, my match and I are 4th cousins once removed which doesn't explain the 54CM DNA match. According to the "Average autosomal DNA shared by pairs of relatives" chart on the ISOGG website, average shared CMs for 4th cousins once removed are 6.64. Even 4th cousins have only 13.28 average shared CMs. But what about multiple intermarriage connections which, in this case, are thought to precede the common match? In that case, my match and I would be 4th cousins once removed more than once.

According to the article in Advanced Genetic Genealogy, the probable shared CMs can be calculated by figuring out each shared relationship and adding the probable CMs together. Well, there was intermarriage in the background of the ancestral couple which my match and I share. Quite a bit of intermarriage.

As the family trees show, Lydia, the granddaughter of John Tripp and his great grandson, Jonathan Tripp married. They were 1st cousins once removed.

But they were more than that as their mother's were sisters which made them 1st cousins on the maternal side as well. This meant that my match and I were related on 4 lines which, I believe, makes us 4th cousins once removed 4 times which would give us a probable amount of shared CMs of 26.56 (4 x 6.64) according to the probable shared CMs on the ISOGG chart. There is always a degree of variation in the shared CMs which may account for the actual CMs being 54 or perhaps there is further pedigree collapse in this line or even endogamy as this line is to Colonial American ancestors. On a more personal level, the inter-relatedness of Lydia and Jonathan Tripp does given me pause.

Sources:

https://dnapainter.com/tools 

https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_statistics 

Wayne, Debbie Parker. Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies. Wayne Research, Cushing, Texas, 2019