It all goes back to Kirby Cook

Well at least 5 branches of my tree go back to Kirby Cook. My tree is very braided. I finally sat down and did a diagram of my direct lines that are intertwined. This doesn’t include some of the side branches that weave in and out through the siblings of these ancestors, as well as other connections I haven’t yet found.

The double lines indicated marriages. As you can see on my maternal side, my grandparents were 2nd cousins. On my paternal side, my gg grandparents Lizzy and Joe were 1st cousins and then their daughter Lucinda was 2nd cousins with her husband through a different line.

And beyond this particular strangeness in my tree, siblings that marry siblings happen more often than I would have expected. This is where we are complicating my DNA research on a massive level. I’ve expanded the above chart to show one of these instances. If I started putting too much of this into the tree, it would start to be a complicated mess of lines, because this is a situation that happens a LOT in various branches of my family. I had to move a few things around from the original chart and I’m only including the left side. But as you can see Josiah James has two children, B. M. and Lizzy. These two married the twin children of Oliver Long, John and Nannie. While I’m only actually descended from Ruby, the daughter of Nannie and B.M., I have DNA matches who are descendants of John Long and Lizzy Martin. Those cousins and I potentially share DNA segments from Oliver Long, William Martin and Kirby Cook and their respective spouses and ancestors as well. Figuring out which ancestor gave us those segments is beyond complicated. In those situations, I hope to find “clean” matches, who are descendants of one of those ancestors through a line that didn’t intermarry with someone else in the family. I am going to give them the term DNA Unicorns in my research!

Some genealogists who research their family tree are able to nearly determine which ancestor contributed each DNA segment. Something tells me that I’ll spend decades and not have it that sorted. (Barring a huge leap in DNA technology that is.) But I am very interested to know more on how much DNA I have that comes from Kirby Cook and Lizzy Adams, so I’ll at least strive toward that goal. I think mathematically, I should have almost 8% DNA from that one couple and their ancestors, when a normal couple at that generation would have only given me around 1.5%. William Martin and his wife contributed over 4.5% as well.

I’m also pretty certain that these “tangles” occurred between relatives on both my maternal sides and paternal sides, for instance a great uncle of my father’s marrying a great aunt of my mother’s. As I look at my mother’s DNA matches and their trees, I’ll often see surnames from my dad’s side somewhere in their tree, in addition to the obvious match with my mother that is is more direct. With both sides of my family living in pretty much the same two counties for 200+ years and having large families, this isn’t even making me surprised anymore. If anything, realizing I found another tangle in the tree is just another normal day of genealogy for me.

Payne in my Martin

I mentioned last week that in my DNA research into the Martin branch, that I had found a bit of a mystery. One of my possible 3rd cousin matches shows up as a Jon Payne, with around 67 cMs matching (over 7cMs segments only).  I sent an email attached to the match and received a reply from Jon’s mother, who managed the DNA test. When doing her tree, she kept hitting a brick wall on James Payne, Jon’s GGGG grandfather. So she did both an autosomal DNA test and a Y-DNA test on Jon, hoping the Y test would give insight as to which branch of Payne’s his family was. Well the Y-DNA test came back that Jon’s Y-DNA wasn’t matching the Payne’s at all, but the Martins. Specifically, the same group of Martins that I have recently found to be “my” Martins in the Martin surname project.

This of course didn’t add up. Unfortunately, her time to devote to solving the problem was minimal. She gave me some of the basic information and I told her I would look into the mystery as best as I could. And much more quickly than I expected, I discovered a theoretical result.

In the DNA world, they call incidents like this NPEs or Non-Parental Events. This can occur when the father of the child is different per the DNA than the paper trail indicates, as in an affair (or worse a rape?), or neither parents’ DNA match the child per the paper trail, usually because of adoption and name change. Since adoptions weren’t always as formal as they are now, or stepchildren would sometimes take the surname of the stepfather, this can make it complicated to decide which type of NPE happened. I didn’t want to assume someone wasn’t exactly faithful in their marriage, so I kept adoption in mind as a possible theory as well.

So how did Jon end up with Martin Y-DNA? Y-DNA is passed father to son, and mutates a lot less than other parts of DNA over the generations, making it ideal for tracing surnames through multiple generations. So somewhere in Jon’s paternal ancestry, there was a Martin father, rather than a Payne. So where did it happen? Well because Jon’s mother knew that Jon did have a match to a Payne cousin (Noreen) at the 4th cousin range and both her line and Jon’s line matched up at James Payne, that would be the best place to start looking for divergence.

Jon and Noreen should match up like this. James and Melvina had Hanson and Hattie and a few generations later, we have Noreen and Jon as 4th cousins. I have a private tree on Ancestry for DNA testing, so I grabbed some information from other public trees about James and Melvina and their family. They were from Virginia and married in the county next to where most of my family lived in Kentucky. They are seen with some of the children in 1870 in that county. By 1880, James and Melvina, with Hanson (and other children, but not Hattie) were in Christian County and what a fascinating surprise I found on the census record, but two families away, my GGG Grandfather, John Martin, widowed and living with his daughter Lizzy and her family. John is 74 at the time. Isn’t that a strange coincidence? I looked around and there are a couple of other Martin families on the nearby pages, but John’s other son, my GG grandfather Josiah James, is in a different area of the county. Hattie Payne is born in 1881. Could John Martin actually be the father of Hattie with Melvina, instead of James Payne? Granted he was getting up there in years, but it isn’t unheard of for a man that old to father a child. This would make Noreen and Jon half 4th cousins. And this scenario would make Jon and my mother the same, as this diagram shows.

The DNA certainly matches at the amount of shared cMs for half 4th cousins. The amount shared between Jon and my mom is a little higher than average for this cousinship, but my mom is descended from John Martin through two lines, so that would make sense. But does Jon match up with any others in this Martin line. Unfortunately, there are only a few other matches currently on the segments my mom shares with Jon and only one has responded to my emails at this time – Jane.

Jane and I are working on the pretty likely theory that she and I share William Martin, the father of John Martin as a common ancestor. That’s about the only match we’ve been able to see just yet and several clues make this theory plausible. So if Jane is truly descended from the same Isabella Martin who is daughter to William Martin in my tree, all of this aligns up pretty nicely with the DNA numbers as well.

Jane and Jon share 22 cMs of DNA. If we assume John Martin is the father of Hattie Payne, this would make Jane and Jon 5th cousins. My mother shares 45 cMs with Jane, which is accurate for double 5th cousins.

I see no other point where James Payne and Melvina or their ancestors would have intersected my branch of Martins in a time frame that would make sense based on the DNA numbers. But I feel like I need more data to be more than about 75% confident in this theory. So my plan now is to reach out to more cousins that triangulate on the shared segment with Jon, Jane and my mother, as well as matches that triangulate with Jon on the other segment he shares with mom. I’m also going to reach out to other people who trace their ancestry back to James Payne to see if they have done DNA testing and if any of them are showing matches that will help back up my theory. I am almost certain we will be able to eventually determine if John is actually Hattie’s father or if the NPE occurred in a generation prior. What we will likely not know though is if John fathering the child was from a consensual affair or if it was something more distasteful. We don’t like thinking poorly of our ancestors, but they ARE only human and sometimes much less than perfect.

Martin Mysteries

And some DNA triangulation fun too! As I’ve blogged about previously, the Martin branch of my family is a pretty important one. This branch accounts for a very large chunk of my ancestry, as I have several ties back to John Martin and Happy Cook. DNA hasn’t yet broken down this brick wall, but it gave me a couple of mysteries and through some known (and recently discovered) cousins, I’ve been able to triangulate at least one segment of my mom’s DNA back to John and Happy.

First the easy one, triangulation. Jerri is a newly discovered cousin. She’s descended through the daughter of one of John Lee Renshaw and Sophronia Adams. (My maternal grandfather is a son of this couple.) Since I knew how she connected to my family I ran a triangulation in Genome Mate Pro on the shared segments she has with my mother. This was the result of one of those segments. (Last names removed for privacy.) The side is shown a B, for Both, as it turns out both my mother’s parents are connected in this particular case.

Oh wow, look, there’s Tanya! She’s a known cousin through the Martins. I don’t know any of these other matches just yet. But this segment somehow belongs to both of the two known cousins, and my mother and seemingly on the wrong sides of the family if I didn’t know all the connections in this tangled tree. This makes sense to me, but I’ll trace it out here to make sense for others. (Sorry for my terrible drawing. As much as I love computers, I hate doing diagrams on the computer.) I skipped a few generations, but I think you can understand the basic idea.

So it would appear that this segment actually traces all the way back to John and Happy, but maybe farther. So now I have emailed the other matches on this segment and hope to determine if they are also descendants of John and Happy through other lines, or if by chance, they are related farther back than John and Happy, perhaps through another child of John or Happy’s parents. The number of generations and the size of the shared segment are less likely to share farther back, but there’s always a chance! I did hear back from the Thomas on the list, but haven’t yet been able to connect the dots.

Now to the two mysteries. One is less of a full mystery, but just a is that really the right person mystery. One of my mother’s shared matches was Jane. None of the shared segments with Jane triangulated with a known relative. But since she did share 4 segments with my mother, and she had Martin as a surname in her match information, it was worth contacting her to see if we could figure out how we are connected. At this time, we think her ancestor Isabella Martin is the same Isabella Martin who I have listed as a sister to John and James and daughter of William. Isabella was living with James and his family in 1850, but I couldn’t find her after that. Jane’s Isabella looks to have married and moved to Texas between 1850 and 1860. So the DNA makes this a possibility that these are the same person. We are now working to find documentation that may back up this theory.

One of Jane’s matches is Jon. Jon has the surname of Payne, but his mother did Y-DNA testing and it was determined that Jon actually has Martin Y-DNA. In the DNA world, this indicates what is considered to be a NPE, Non-Parental Event. Either a Martin fathered one of Jon’s ancestors, even though the records show the father was a Payne, or possibly an adoption with a last name change happened. I’ve done some digging and the Jon Payne/Martin post deserves its own blog to fully describe what I think I’ve found. But because Jon is apparently also a Martin, at least through DNA, and triangulates with Jane, this strengthens our theory about Isabella Martin being who we think she is. Y-DNA testing showed Jon was part of the Martin Surname Project group 03, which includes a William in Christian County, who seems to be my William. I’m contacting the others in Jane and Jon’s small triangulation groups to see if they can also help confirm our theories on this segment.

I’ve also found a couple of other matches that may be Martin related and I’ll report on those as I get more information on how the connect.

A Martin here, a Martin there, Martins everywhere….

For many of my branches, I start hitting a brick wall between 1800 and 1850. This was around the time nearly all branches of my family began arriving in Western Kentucky. I really struggle with pre-1850 census records and KY laws during that time didn’t require birth or death records. Even after 1850, vital statistics laws were pretty flexible, so sometimes it was recorded at the county level, sometimes they made it to the state level and more often than not, no official death record exists. This continues to around 1911 when KY formalized the process more along what we see today with regard to birth and death records.

The Martin branch is one of these lines where having better records before 1850 could really help. From what I’ve been able to determine so far with available records and the research of some wonderful Martin cousins, is that I can trace myself back to John Martin, born 1806. John married Happy Cook, prior to 1830, possibly in TN and had 11 children that I have found so far. Three of those children, Elizabeth, Josiah James and Amelia “Milly” are all GG grandparents of mine.

The records for the Martins are a mixed bag. They were recorded in the census and a few death records are available. But then we hit the dreaded common name issue. John is the son of William. He has a brother, James. And these common names, as well as a couple of others were used with regularity in the generations. Add in a few “stray” Martins that also appeared in Christian County between 1850 and 1860 and another (maybe distantly related) Martin branch in the next county over that filters into Christian County a little, also with similar common names, and it becomes a jumble of John and James and William. I start getting a headache each time I attempt work on this branch.

As two of the Martin ancestors of mine are female, I kind of ignored the side branches a little. I also resigned myself to the brick wall that is John’s father William for later investigation. But then DNA became a factor. In starting to browse my mother’s 55,000 Ancestry.com DNA matches, many of the ones with trees had Martin as a common surname. To properly figure out where this genetic cousin fit into my tree, I had to start expanding the Martin branch beyond my direct line and verify the information I had was correct. I felt a Martin induced migraine coming on. But if this DNA could possibly get sorted, maybe we could find a common ancestor further back than William? Maybe some of my male Martin cousins who still carried the Martin surname could do the Y-DNA testing to help us get through the William brick wall.

So I reached out to a Martin contact from a few years ago, Gary Martin. Gary was pretty sure his James Martin was brother to my John Martin, both sons of William. However, he was unfortunately not a DNA match to either my mother or uncle. As Gary would be 4th cousins to them both, that isn’t a big deal. Even with pedigree collapse, 4th cousins don’t always share DNA. Gary graciously shared his Ancestry tree with me and I did a little double checking of both his documentation back to James and my documentation to John. All the paperwork checks out the best I can tell. Even to the point that father William was living with John and his family in the 1850 census and a few doors down we see James and his family. DNA would make me feel even better about this coincidence being “proof”, but it’s a reasonable assumption at this point. (James has a death certificate that lists William as father, so that helps as well.)

I  hope to find a “clean” Martin DNA cousin,  perhaps another one of James’ descendants in the DNA matches that isn’t intermarried into one of the other lines. (Again I mention how very braided my family tree truly is.) This is a pretty difficult concept, as several of the Martin descendants later married other branches in my tree, such as the Adams, Long, Renshaw and Cook families. I have found a couple of matches who aren’t specifically part of the William, John and James section, who have Martin ancestors on their tree in similar locations and dates as my early Martins. The dates seem to indicate potential brothers of John and James, but possibly cousins. But the tree owners don’t appear to have logged into Ancestry within the last several months.

Now my journey is taking me further down the DNA rabbit hole. I’ve downloaded the raw DNA data from Ancestry and uploaded it to Family Tree DNA and GEDMatch to help maximize my potential DNA matches. I’m using DNAGedcom and now Genome Mate Pro to pull these matches together to analyze segments. Nearly all of these are free tools designed to help sort and analyze your matches. I am reaching out to contacts on Ancestry who have a Martin surname in their tree to also upload their data to GEDMatch, which will help with triangulating and determining segments that may be specific to the Martin lines. If you are a potential cousin with any of the surnames listed in my lines, I would love to have your help. Please check out my DNA Match page and follow the instructions to upload your DNA to GEDMatch and let me know the kit number so I can better triangulate who is who!

Kissing Cousins – my “braided” family tree

I plan to do a more comprehensive post and hopefully a diagram soon showing better how extremely “braided” my family tree is. Not only is my direct line to my ancestors pretty twisty with several 1st and 2nd cousins marrying each other over the years, the indirect lines are pretty complicated too. My family is almost as bad as the European royals!

This isn’t exactly a strange situation as well. Most branches of my tree lived in rural Kentucky from the early 1800s to now. Growing up, I would joke that I was related to 75% of the small town where I grew up, but looking at how much intermarriage is in my tree and related families, I’m not sure I was far off in that estimate. In these small towns, especially prior to transportation becoming much easier and faster, young adults were often limited to courting within a very small radius of home. And guess who happened to live within that radius? Yep – cousins! It was either Joe married Cousin Sue, or he didn’t get married at all. Waiting and hoping for a new family to move into the area was also an option, but society placed much more emphasis on marriage and having kids, than it cared about the funny looks marrying your cousin might bring to the folks in more populous areas.

Let’s illustrate this fact with the relationship between my sister and I. I use RootsMagic for some added tools that I can’t get with regular Ancestry.com. My sister is technically my legal full sister, but only my biological half sister. (She is the offspring of my mother and her first husband. My biological father legally adopted her prior to me being born.) My parents are at least 4th cousins, but actually are cousins a few times over, but I don’t think they realized how much when they married. I used the Relationship Calculator feature with RootsMagic to calculate the relationship between me and my sister.

Based on this, we are of course sisters, but also 4th cousins 4 times and double 5th cousins. And even though my biological dad isn’t my sister’s biological dad, they ARE related by blood! Below, the calculator shows they are double 3rd cousins (once removed) and double 4th cousins (once removed).

One of my favorite cousins when growing up and I always thought we were 2nd cousins. We didn’t understand, like most people, the whole once removed part. Technically, in a “normal” family, we would be 1st cousins 1 time removed. He is the grandson of my uncle (my father’s brother). Because of a spread of ages of my generation in the family, this cousin and I are only 6 months different in age. (We fought like siblings at times!) This is our relationship calculated out though with all the intermarriage!

What’s really fun is how this all relates to my DNA matches. My dad’s DNA is still processing, so all of my matches I’m viewing are for my mother. One of my predicted 4th cousin matches had a familiar username. Looking closer, it is a known cousin, but growing up I only knew her as the granddaughter of my uncle – on my dad’s side! But she shares 41 centimorgans across 3 DNA segments with my mother as well, making them double 3rd and 4th cousins (twice removed).

One of the DNA matches I mentioned in my blog about how to track down who those DNA matches may be in your tree, David G? Well he’s a 1st cousin once removed to my mother, and has 279 centimorgans shared across 10 DNA segments with her. But our shared ancestor Benjamin Monroe Martin first married his own 2nd cousin, Malissa through a slightly different line. One of their children Ethel is David G’s grandmother. After Malissa dies, Benjamin marries a 2nd time to Nannie Angeline, and has several children, one being my mother’s mother, Ruby. Because of this twist, that gives David G and my mother the following relationships.

These are all just illustrations of my direct line. I know for a fact there were descendants of my ancestors who married descendants of my other ancestors in lines that aren’t quite as direct. I know of at least 3 instances where two brothers married two sisters, and one of those instances the sibling couples were all 2nd cousins (at least!). And that of course makes all their kids double cousins. And what happens when those double 2nd (and more) cousins marry and have kids? The brother and sister end up being related like this.

So needless to say I have a terribly complicated family tree. I’m researching the best way to diagram some of this insanity for a future post, but this gives you a little preview.

Daughters of the American Revolution – Trying to find a connection.

Like most people that have ancestry branches that were somewhere in the Colonies in 1770, I have indications that some of my ancestors were Patriots in the Revolutionary War. Clues show 3-5 different ancestors may have served, but proving that? Well, that’s a LOT more complicated, especially if no one else along the way has proved it with a decent amount of accuracy.

Pretty green leaves!

When I started out on Ancestry.com, those lovely green leaves were so fun! Other people had supposedly done all this work and found all these links and documents. Then I started looking closer and not all of that matched up properly. Timelines didn’t fit, census records didn’t show the right people and those leaves became a lot less fun. One of my biggest headaches has been common names. Most of my branches are fairly common surnames. Add in the fun of common names like John, William, George, Sarah, Elizabeth and the like and finding the right person can be downright impossible.

My first potential connection was Moses Martin. Moses is a proven Patriot – a drummer in NC. He only served for 8 months, but he drew a pension. My maternal grandmother is a Martin and another kind Ancestry.com user had linked Moses to her father. (Turns out I have two other Martin lines as well, but that’s a whole ‘nother ball of yarn to untangle.) Sorting through all the documentation and my connection to Moses is pretty weak and likely not accurate.

Next up – the Long branch! Major Gabriel Long, as well as his father Rueben and a couple of his brothers are proven Patriots. Gabriel was given a land grant for his service in Christian County, KY, where I grew up. I can get up to a Charles Long, but cannot connect Charles to the other Longs that settled in Christian County. It seems two different Long families ended up in the same town from totally different branches. I haven’t completely given up this, as I feel that it is too much of a coincidence, but I’m putting it on the back burner for a bit.

My dad’s surname, Dunlap, might have had a connection, but nope – wrong John Dunlap. But I did find a clue to a Cherokee connection there – more to come with that!

My local DAR chapter contact has been helping and she thought there may have been something with the Cook branch, but that was weak as well.

Re-enactment of the Battle of Guilford County Courthouse – March 1781

I then came to the Knight link. Through my dad’s family, back and forth through maternal and paternal sides of each ancestor, we come to John Knight and his wife Sarah. I have good solid proof of my lineage to John and Sarah through their daughter Mary “Polly” Knight Oglesby. John is not a proven Patriot, but was believed to have served as a Captain in the Randolph County, NC militia and fought at the Battle of Guilford County Courthouse in 1781. John and Sarah’s story is quite interesting and most of the information comes firsthand from her testimony in her application for his pension (which was rejected). A transcript of some of the pension application and testimonies on her behalf can be found at RevWarApps.org

Romantics would find it to be a love story set in the time of war. Sarah, age 18, had grown up in the same area as John. He was 25 and had joined the militia after “some little dispute and difficulty with his family relations”. He had eventually been promoted to Captain and served until the end of the war. This is where it gets tricky, as in her testimony, Sarah was 84 years old, trying to remember all the dates, places and people. It was either 1780 or 1781 in June (she thinks 1781, after the Battle of Guilford Courthouse), the couple was wed in Randolph County, NC. She states –

“There was “cider” made out of early June apples at the marriage  makes her think it was June. She was married at the age of eighteen making her present age 84  years, by Captain Edward Williams, who was a magistrate in said County, as well as Captain and  that she was married by the publication upon three separate days of the “Banns” by a minister of  the name of Richard Shackelford at a meeting house within a mile and a half of her home. That  John Knight was then commanding a company and that he had a number of his men with him at  the wedding among whom were William Crabtree and Joseph Newton and that the house was  well guarded during the festival which continued two days and then said Knight rejoined his  Main company again.”

So basically, several members of his militia helped him sneak away to get married during a crazy part of the war. Apparently, the Washington DC folks deciding about the pension thought it was too fantastic to believe. They took issue with her timeline and wedding story. Since they were married by the Publication of the Banns, there is not likely a record of the marriage at the Courthouse of either Guilford or Randolph counties. The church may have it, but no church is listed in the testimony.

After the War, John and Sarah moved to the Red River area of Tennessee. Their home there burned, along with it, John’s papers proving his service. They relocated to Christian County, TN, raising their children. John shows up in census records and on tax lists after 1800 in Christian County. In 1823, John left on a trip to NC and GA to see if he could find documents proving his service to get a pension. While on this trip, John had a heart attack and died.

A few years later, Sarah and her children worked to get John’s pension. Despite numerous affidavits from people that had been at the wedding and served with John in NC, the pension application was rejected. The full scans of the documentation of this process (which appears to have lasted several years) shows that the pension board found the story of John and Sarah’s wedding to be incredulous and questioned the length of time he served after the wedding. They found her version of the timeline to be implausible and gave no consideration to the fact that she was 84 years old at the time of her testimony and the events had occurred 66 years prior.

So my quest now is to not only join the DAR through Captain John Knight and prove him as a new Patriot, but also to give some posthumous vindication for my great-great-great-great grandmother. I’m in the process now of gathering all the required documentation. I have documents for all generations connecting me to John and Sarah, as well as proof that should be acceptable showing John’s service. To make my case stronger, I’m trying to find documents or records of either their marriage through the church or land records. My search for these will be outlined in another post soon.

I’m sure as I climb through my family tree, I’m likely to find others that served and the proper documentation to officially link past and present.