A Tale of Triangulated Segments - DNA & early records from Clones & North America (Peter McWilliam)

great okay well we're ready to go on to the next talk and it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Peter McWilliams now a Peter is a member of the lower historical society the Craig and Historical Society the an Irish genealogical research Society he's going to say a few words about his own background in his talk so I won't spoil a surprise for you but a painter is going to talk to us about triangulated segments and this is a really exciting topic in genetic genealogy because it has the potential to bring us back much further in time than we was possibly imagined and Peter himself has done this particular study on which uses a combination of records from clones and American family records on the other side of the pond so here to talk to us about a tale of triangulated seconds please give a warm welcome William okay Morris can you work can you hear me at the back yeah and thanks very much for the invitation Morrison thank you all for attending and I just want to emphasize this is very much a collaborative project with Jeff and when I'm talking about early records I'm talking about the 1802 1830 period now this is my main collaborator Jeff Blakely was an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and he's about my age so you can see that he's moved into the supervisory classes the backdrop here is obviously not Madison in fact it's Israel and for the last number of years he's been engaged in a summer dig in Israel so on his way either there or back he dropped into either London or Ireland's we've had a number of opportunities to discuss genealogy now Jeff's ants are one line of Jeff's ancestors migrated from clonus in 18-49 and Jeff and another American collaborator Lauren Prince attracted a chain migration from clonise to Mercer County Illinois in the mid 19th century think sort of 1835 to 1875 and comprising something in the order of 50 families including a branch of my family that I wasn't aware of myself I was a professional geneticist I escaped into genealogy a number of years ago but unfortunately the onset of DNA testing has sort of dragged me back in and if Morris isn't listening I have a small confession that my main interest is really in local history and in early records you know around 1800 and before and what DNA testing can add to those records and genealogy I grew up in Monahan and I live in Dublin my ancestry back to 1800 first many lines back as far as 1700 and before is south Ulster so if you think bambridge Murie South Armagh intro roamed and Ganim ahkna - Tana and then Montana and of course clothes and over half of my second great grandparents of Presbyterian but you can see that I have I'll talk later early about a couple of landed gentry lines that I have now because of this sort of Presbyterian background I've always been interested in this 18th century Ostrogoths migration particularly sparked by the fact that the fourth great-grandfather was a ship's captain from urate and he was involved in the migrant trade from URI to Philadelphia a new ork in the period 17 1762 1775 and this one I mean this is a picture of Carlingford Lough with nourish ship now in the background and war on point where migrants embarked and I was because my ancestry is all in South Ulster I was slightly surprised I shouldn't be but I was slightly surprised with my first family tree test when I realized how many American cousins I have now I have a lot in the nineteenth century but there are a significant number who are tracking into a southern us which presumably must be part of this 18th century Ulster Scots migration just a little housekeeping this talk is based in part on a paper that Jeff and I wrote for the Irish genealogist which is the Journal of the Irish genealogical research society as a family based study with its some advantages some limitations are earlier today we heard a super talk by Martin McDowell on local history but there are other local DNA projects in clonus Chemical gun who's going to be talking tomorrow I set up a firm on amor Monaghan Florida project on family tree and fawn core has a role a project with about 10 participants so it's going to be interesting to see how these different approaches or what information we get from these different approaches now I just want to distinguish between close and distant cousins now it's a slightly arbitrary distinction but if we if I look in my sort of ancestry test for example I first and second and sometimes even third cousins it can it's often possible to estimate the relationship directly from the shared DNA because we share a lot of DNA with us and of course in this period we've got really good online Irish records and the situation when we get into the 1818 authority hearing it is trickier we fare a lot less DNA with forth and more distant cousins the spread is correspondingly greater so we really can't estimate the relationship directly from the amount of shared DNA and there are a number of techniques to get around that and today I'm going to talk about triangulation progress and genealogical puzzles the records that I'm going to talk about influence I'm going to get its Protestant families I'm going to talk about the church vans records are good with some 18th century coverage Presbyterians we have some brick walls before 1820 so we have to use alternative records and today I'm going to talk about land records think tie the plot phone books straight records records in the Registry of Deeds now if you think what we get out of the church record we get connections spousal pairs parents children and what we're hoping is that we can use DNA to link land records I mean these are going to be lists of names by townland can we link those and of course there are whole ream of other alternative records both in clonus and any other parish you care to mention but I'm going to just use the land records as an example here ok just a little more detail on the clonus records we have baptisms marriages back to 1793 and then a combined register with best three minutes and the scattering of baptismal records back to the 1780s one point I want to make about these is that these records through familysearch.org have been online for a very long time so there have been available for everyone so if I go into my ancestry tree and just go search born clonus I'm going to pull up a whole pile of people I have access to a number of other family trees so I could really build a database of people who are claiming clonus ancestry now I'm not saying an individual one will have any genealogical significance but it certainly has a really good it's really good database I've mentioned the Stonebridge Presbyterian Church and clonus the marriage records start at marriage baptism both start in 1820 now the estate that I'm going to talk about is the barrett-lennard a state which has oops wrong one which has a whole series of renfro's in fact all the way back to 16 33 and because work oh yeah I have also I and others have abstracted something in the order of three hundred deeds from the general clonise area and those can all be accessed at the Registry of Deeds indexing project because we're kind of interested in having records as widely available as possible norm prince has transcribed the Church of Ireland baptisms and marriages and they can be found the Irish genealogical project archive obviously for free I have a lot of the marital energy state records of being published in Makaha record but probably the most detailed one is the seventeen forty six seven one and I have uploaded that to my own family website that this link I've also put up some records for a smaller estate in the region a foster estate okay that's fine just to look a little closer to what we might expect to get in the estate records and this is a sort of an extract from a much larger table I've created and I have here a series of as a subset of largely of rural town lands and the number of lease hook-ups the number of lease holders in 1791 1817 and then followed the tie the pocketbooks and what we can see is that the number of leases in this period it's identical pretty much identical between 1817 and the tithe clockman books but there's a really sharp fall-off between 1791 by 1791 and then back as we go back further and what seems to have happened is that sometime around after 1800 the linen industry in the parish was really booming and as head Lisa's felt you the landlord opted to lease directly to the occupiers so what you're getting here is all of the leases here they're only getting ahead Clemens and you can see just from the numbers I've got here of entries for the Registry of Deeds these are largely going to cover had tenants and in fact of the 300 our deeds I've looked at only a handful will mention occupiers by name and just one further point that tie the plot notebooks also own only record Lisa lease holders so that coffee errs and laborers without leases will not be present in in those records okay if we get on to clone at the parish and the families clonise is quite a large parish 250 town lands I liked the relief because you can see that all the town lands are defined by drumlins parish is half in county monaghan on half in Fermanagh and this is the county line the main Church of Ireland is in the diamond being flown us but sometime early in the 19th century there were two chapels of these one in a hydrants II will not shown here in truf near Arras lay so in if you're looking at the records later arm you're going to they're going described as the town division the Western Division the eastern division Stonebridge Presbyterian Church is here and the barrett-lennard estate has a lot of time lands round clothes but it stretches out all the way to this little pink dot which is Smith borough okay moving on to families been talking about echoes lately and my grandmother's family the Henry's the first mention of Gilbert of the echos family is Gilbert echoes who appears in census of 1659 as the titular doll of manner of Shanna Shanna and the state is in this region here in 1671 he purchased the manor of Internet and County Tyrone and that became the main family seat his grandson used the manor of Canada to provide portions for his younger children now the estate actually remained in the family tonight until it was sold through the Land Commission in 1907 the land commissioned deeds are in prony and they're an absolute treasure trove of wills and deeds and so on now what is of interest to us is one of Daniels younger children a daughter Isabella who married the Reverend Francis Lucas in 1650 whose cure it in parish a member of the Lucas family of Castle Shane near mama hunt they can't they live in the town land of Cockaigne in 1667 the barrett-lennard state archive records a lease of Matthew Blakely the townland alpha was then from Kirk Hill now Ron Kirk and for the next hundred years he and his descendants occupied agate Ron Kirk of the neighboring town land of leg McCallum by 1800 there seemed to have been two Blakely families in the parish one Presbyterian one Church around and I honestly don't know whether they were related so the Presbyterian family were occupying time lands in this region the Church of Ireland were occupied entire lands in this reaction Geoffrey is descended from this group finally around 1800 there were a lot of Henry's in the in the parish almost all of them Presbyterian well I presume they came in sometime after 1703 but the first reference I have to them is in a marriage settlement of 1783 and I'll talk about them in the last portion of the talk okay just to summarize that we have the Reverend Francis Lucas and marrying Isabella echoes both born in the 1720s they're my fifth great-grandparents and we have Matthew Blakely and his wife Alice Lucas who both died the 1840s and they were Jeff's second great-grandparents and in 18-49 their children including Jeff's great-grandfather Edward emigrated with Alice's sister Isabella her husband Johnston Lipton and door for Alice and they went from through Liverpool to New Orleans of Mississippi to Mercer County Illinois where they appear in the 1850 census and the question we're asking is what if any relationship between this Alice Lucas on this Lucas family and the DNA tests that we have in the project I've test I paid for tests for some close relatives so I have four who are mashing both the apples Lucas and the Henry lines the actors Lucas have much deeper genealogy so I was able to identify eight individuals to take tests from this line and then only four and restricted for third cousins for these Henry's so I only have four of those Jeff has identified eight people to take tests descendants of either his second great-grandmother Alice or her sister Isabella and in addition me just emphasize this is an ongoing project additionally more distant Blakely's identified by rebuilding trees from family search and ancestry on a continuing basis some of these have also contributed DNA and in fact I talked about those in the paper I mentioned earlier okay why do we think is a relationship between Francis Isabella Lucas and Alice and if we look at if we look at the children of Francis and his imbalances from a will in the long tradition papers we have a list of the names of their children and we have a list of the names of the children of Matthew and hours from diplomas baptism Rachel registers and we can see that all of the names here all of them are represented here so a very least this is claimed with relationship whether it's legitimate or illegitimate we don't know but Jeff on his first visit to clonus in 1973 looked at the conus baptismal registers and he identified Alice Alyssia illegitimate daughter of Charles Lucas the turnaround of chromakey now that's at home and in the shanna estate and presumption is Charles Lucas here is the youngest son of Francis Isabella so you just assumed that was his armful a few years ago on another visit to Crowley where he came across the will of Charles Robert Lucas who died in 1845 and this is in fact what sparked his contact with me and the major Charles Robert married late night in 1811 even though children major beneficiaries will was Thomas son of his brother Frank and then there was at the end of the world through these four requests - funny tracks and Mary Ann west allis Gordon Charlotte Lucas who went to America so we revisit the conus baptismal record registers and we identify Mary Ann and this year Charlotte and we can presume these of all of these three are children illegitimate children of Charles Lucas and Mary McGuire so Jeff rejected a lot of the legwork in the genealogy searching identified direct descendants of Mary Ann West and Alice Gordon both took DNA tests both downloaded to Jed match and we then compared their DNA tests to all of the others in our database and we come up with this and this is my first sort of example of triangulation so I want to go through it just in a little bit of detail with a descendant of Francis I'm Lucas naturally descendant of Alice corn on chromosome 15 particular location she also matches the descendant of Mary Ann West in the same discipline place now just remember we have 23 pairs of chromosomes one paternal one matter so if we just think of the first two lines it's conceivable but this is on say the pattern chromosome and this is on the maternal chromosome we need to show that these two actually indeed match each other to complete the triangulation which is the case this proves that these three have a common ancestor who is it and as as it happens I'm the descendant of Francis on Lucas the descendent of Palace Gordon a significant Ulster ancestry including some ancestry in our math which I also have so it is conceivable that as well as this hypothetical Francis Lucas's Bell echoes Nash we could have a match somewhere in the distant past in our Armour ancestry however the descendent of Mary Ann West only has one Irish ancestral line the overwhelming bulk of her ancestry is in fact Scandinavian so it seems safe to conclude that the common ancestors are in fact Isabella and Frank which leaves the question if Alice Lucas wife of Matthew Blake is not the daughter of Charles Robert Lewis who is she is she a member of this family at all so we did in as part of our sort of search of all of our database we identified a further triangulated match this time between descendant of Isobel and Lucas a descendant of Alice Lucas and a different descendant of Francis our Lucas and we have a triangulated mash just as a technical note this descendant of our Lucas is actually not objet match so we had to look the tests of the other two on the respect family tree tests to confirm the triangulation and they must have a common ancestral couple which is likely Frances Lucas and Isabella Eccles so can we fit Isabella and Alice into what we know about Lucas family tree and sometime around 18th before 1830 35 my second great aunt Anna Maria Dixon constructed a family pedigree now she was minor beneficiary in the will of Charles Robert Lucas she was born in 18 team so she would have known the living members of the of this group so the it seems a reasonably reliable source she identified the three children of Isabella and Frank who themselves had chosen these two here are well known within the family you know the genealogies really well some of them have in fact contributed DNA to the project they know rather less by Frank who died married with two married daughters and one son some married in 1835 the Jeff and I were able to track his descendants but unfortunately they seem to have died out in the 1950s which is unfortunate because DNA from that would have been really nice but the question is could they have been isabella Lucas Lipton or Alice Lucas lately and it is consistent with the evidence but really all we can say by its very nature DNA is never going to give us a conclusive answer all we can say is that we can win just sit on the result we're waiting will more documentation camilo more matches come in which might further support or refute attention but we are never going to get an absolute answer with DNA it's just one additional piece of proof that we can add okay so that was Church of Ireland in the parish I want to switch now to Henry family and Presbyterians in Florence I just put up photograph of the meeting house and I couldn't resist a stone bridge over the river thing and just to note the river thing going along here it in this area here it actually separates out the parishes of clonus and you leave them now the main record that we have for this used here is an 1835 census of the stone bridge Presbyterian Church generated by the minister the Reverend William white and he details 180 families by townland giving parents and children and the numbers here are the numbers indoors in each time round so you've got to in the town land of drum Terry you've got to in the town land of Allen Keith who happen both to be Henry's the major concentration is here in the town land grants room or the time round of the meeting house for the 13 families 14 in nearby creevley and then they spread out unto thee from an abortion note that there are real the major urban center is thrown us and there are very few presbyterian families here so we're in fairy these are farming families but there are also very few in sort of the shinnok estate here what we're seeing is the clustering of these the estates I mentioned in Brown the barrett-lennard estate with tyrannize around clonise an eye towards smith borough the Foster estate has town lands in perishable even one in Kronus and it has a Renfro that actually are a rent book from 1803 to 1820 which is really nice and you can see that both of these estates are really useful for Presbyterian genealogy and records okay now in 1819 the Synod of Ulster sent her a directive to ministers suggesting they keep marriage baptism records and so a lot of the presbyterian records actually start just exactly in this period which is a problem for me because I have sort of six eight second great-grandparents who were born in the decade and a half before that so I have a string of Presbyterian brick walls going to use one of these as an example here today dr. Richard Henry died in clonise in 1898 aged I see was he born in clonise now if we think about Richard Henry's parents we've got a Henry father and then a mother of unknown maiden name we've got a grandfather with three unknown maiden names great-grandfather seven unknown names add in sisters who Matt will marry out and as a consequence what we're looking for our fourth fifth sixth cousins who appear in the records post 1820 and many majority will have unknown names how do we go about tracking that how do we identify these cousins well we can triangulate with known third cousins and I have a number of Henry second and third third cousins and look for those who have clonus ancestry we can try and triangulate directly to place common segments of people who have clonise ancestry now inevitably in this we're going to have to try and build match trees identify matches build them back and so you can get them into close obviously segment triangulation is the gold standard but that's not always possible so sometimes we're going to have to combine segments of triangulation with pedigree triangulation for ancestry manifests and what we're trying to do is create a database of names and we're looking for recurring names and places essentially this is what I think genealogists do in adoption studies I'm just trying to do it quite a lot earlier with rather less by way of records okay just using the sort of preview the the criteria I mentioned I put a whole series anything that looked as though it could be connected to the Henry family on to Johnny pearls DNA painter site 100 I've just extracted sort of a subset of examples here and this is a group based descend of Richard Henry and are enjoying Donelson I just sort of point out that I've taken this match from family tree this match from 23andme this group is not a triangulated group they're our triangulations within it for example our M is also a Henry third cousin triangulating with s W and first SW and our deed of illness ancestry and when I say involving townlands in the barrett-lennard estate they also appear in the church records and the chi department looks references in the Registry of Deeds there's a whole series of useful records with respect to them BG is Canadian and I was able to pull her Andhra ancestry back into a marriage in 1836 in Stonebridge Presbyterian Church a baptism of Catherine Andrews I think in 1818 in the church volunteers of the townland of Maharani I can find her with her parents in the 1835 Stonebridge census and I can also track them back generation to an 1802 1803 in the town land of Maharani in the Foster estate now this recurring names so yes I should actually share two fragments with SW and the second one we have William Brown son of Walter brown under Jim Martin care of intra this match is a triangulation between ARS waer her parents from Dawson dilemma and a gin martini these two Jane minds are roughly contemporaneous if we look at the children we can make a direct we have here some entries from for the title and from theory 1835 Stonebridge census and we can see a direct correspondence on Elizabeth analyzer John Henry what we are interested in Henry's we have Alice Alice with Sarah Matilda with Matilda Sarah Joseph Martin so we can presume it's likely the chain fits into the into this family group this Jaime Martin has a grandson who was Joseph Martin Moorhead I think and it's possible that she she fits into this and it's possible that these two said their ancestor could be a common ancestor of SW they are in other words we are in a position to create a hypothesis that we can test further I'm not stating that as fact it's just something that we can weaken now here I have also have a second sure fragment where they are here these three are all on ancestry oath and all Pharaoh match em h and k share a sphere armstrong marriage in 1750s now if you remember they are earth has an ancestor dawson Delamare and we can see spear and delamare in the town land of drum gali in the tithe books so in principle what we're asking is can we is can we make a connection through DNA to lit someone in the tithe books now this a stand alone has no you know significance it's just part of looking for more matches looking for more documentation it's just a possibility and what an even more nebulous warming we're in a way why am in her has in her family family tree tracks - and the marriage are the young couple in sorry yeah I am a young couple in the 1901 census and I was able to track the wife back through the civil records to this marriage here on Jane hen rate of anima kif so that is in itself an intricately interesting triangulating with JN who has no stated Irish ancestry but does have the back in the mid 18th century a Whittaker widows marriage and those two are pretty common names in tonus it's nebulous but the question is can we then pull him back into fairness can we add names into a list that might connect up with other names that would appear as more people test and match it's just we are short of records and we are trying to get the value from every record source that we have now I just wanted to ask just how far back can we triangulate and the this is gray stone behind second Bali Bey Presbyterian Church the top two names of Reverend James Noel who was born near Lima voddy and Letitia Harris of clonus and in fact her mother was France's on Lucas and what I have here is a triangulated match with my first cousin and two fourth cousins who themselves are third type of second cousins trying to match on chromosome 11 and this is part of a much larger triangulation group so it's actually a five-way triangulation and the two additional members da and Kb who themselves are fourth cousins have common ancestor Thomas Miller who was born 1773 to Abbeville South Carolina now if we trace genealogy back from him we come to a Margaret Patton a Millar was born 16:55 in the town land brewski Monaco's parish which is near Lima Valley we have deeds that link John Murrell father of the Reverend James Morrell back to Samuel a real at least a quarter of Bally Quinn can land about taya parish in 1700 now the limo valley is actually in drama cause felt a as the parish immediately south of that so we're talking of a few miles now we haven't got enough data were not close to identifying a common ancestor at best were triangulating to place but there's a serious sort of caveat here and that is that if we follow Thomas Miller one line we go back to Margaret and if we follow on a different line over two generations we come to an ancestor who was born in Ireland where in Ireland now in worst case scenario it's clonus and the focus of the triangulation goes from Nevada to film us and a tip a rule of thumb I picked up from Jim Bartlett's segment ology blog was that if you're going from a secure triangulation back for each generation you go back you need at least one additional match what I'm really trying to emphasize is just how difficult it is I mean I think this I'm not sure whether we can resolve this whether we can resolve to place whether we could ever identify common ancestors it's just a numerical look at how difficult it is to get back this far okay some just as in confusion I mean we are lucky in this project we have landed gentry family with ancestry very good ancestry all the way back to the 1650s the Blakely families are present in Landry in church records land records they seem to have been heck tenants so that gives us in future the possibility of checking just how far back we can push DNA testing with a controlled known answer if you like again just to reiterate that a combination of documentary evidence and triangulation through DNA testing has allowed us to connect up these Blakely and Lukas families triangulation with cousins and with cousins in place identifies cousins behind the Henry recall who can be linked to church and land records I'm not sure if I'm never going to resolve my own Henry problem but in a number of cases that I've sort of talked about the possibility is that we can push other families back into the 18th century we've tracked a 19th century migration in our particular group of farmers across into North America Canada and it's possible at that level to integrate the records quite well you know add value to genealogies there of course 18th century migration is still challenging we need a lot more matches as we go further back and my point about triangulation back to 1700 will we ever get enough matches I don't know now I've worked all of my sort of examined all my family and so on by I it's tedious so I'm hoping and I haven't really sort of explored it gee works is one of a suite programs developed by Rob warden for adoption studies I mean he talked in Dublin in October and also I think in 2014 and in essence or added as a simplification if it's extracting data from some say ancestry test matches and trees and creating searchable databases are done hoping that might make her researching a little easier and my thanks to everyone who's contributed DNA shared genealogy and so on the project wouldn't have been possible without them and in process inevitably I've made a very large number of friends worldwide and of course particularly to Geoff thank you very much where do you sell you need more matters with this type of all of the Oh a lot of them are on ancestry and have downloaded to jet match well inevitably one of the frustrating things is that I've got mean loads of matches to my henry line on ancestry i've got loads of people who won't reply to emails i even have people who have taken portions of my family tree so that put it onto their own i'd still won't reply to emails so but no both all sources being 23andme found the family family tree they come in all shapes and sizes and I mean I think this sort of pedigree triangulation type thing you know where you're trying to do it without genealogy without my grandparents so you have to do oh yeah there's a lot there's a lot of linking linking up of sources there and how many people actually probably already got them all right so I'm just I mean I don't my why isn't clonus Jeff tried why and he his was one of those that we got nothing with I'm trying but I don't actually have a Henry why so and because we're starting you know with the family and working out I mean I think Karl with you his border project I think there are a lot of wise that have people have taken why in that so it's probably going to build but directly at this stage we have written we thought about it it hasn't fallen into our hands but we are always looking for that you know for that approach but yes I mean incorporating why of course but it I mean it just seems that you get very individual results with why I mean if we're looking at a few hundred Presbyterian families over the the 18th century are we going to get wise for all of them whereas I I mean I would say the autosomal test has connected in you know 30 40 families you know so good word only at 1800 we are picking up a lot of the getting a good representation your project is going to synergy well I think it is tremendous capacity in the future it's a very small project I have a number of cases my own relatives that have done why 37 and the closest matches those so that's the challenge we just need more people to test me on any of their questions from Peter I mean any questions about the records of Phyllis yeah Michael Peter you mentioned about the heads of the estate and changing the register yeah I mean the linen industry was probably booming around around the 1800 period I mean I've only started to sort of collapse you know at the end of the Napoleonic Wars so it was clear to the landlord that the under tenants were going to be in a position to pay leases and he could get more money by leasing directly to them rather than allowing the head tenant or a middleman to take a cotton so just referring the valuation then it was skipping out B would be over the owner of the biggest baby well Griffiths valuation only the lessor is just the immediate lessor so there could well that person could well have been leasing from an over landlord I mean there's a vertical structure all the way yes so okay know what I mean some of the tenants in Griffiths would be just a couple of yes sir over so are you saying the person of those then well I mean I'm told I'm talking 60 years before Griffith valuation so that process would already have happened by any other questions prepared great okay well I will call it a day there but thanks once again Peter for giving us a fascinating insight into your project hopefully you've come back and give us an update at some stage especially if you find something really really interesting so yes