It's all relative

I saw a post recently in a group on Facebook asking if she and her husband shared matches does that mean they were related. The answer of course is possibly, but not necessarily. I am going to use some of my family as an example.

Both my mother and my father have roots that go back to Colonial Maryland in Prince George and Queen Mary's county. For my father this is the Pyburns, for my mother it is her Traherns. Both families end up in the same area of Virginia, the Pyburns by the mid 18th century show up in records for Lunenburg and Bedford and the Traherns are in Pittsylvania county (formed from Lunenburg) by the 1780's. Additionally two collateral families who marry into my mother's family (not my direct line) take this same path, the Brashears and the Walker (Sylvanius Walker and Tandy family) family.

Things get even a bit more interesting when you look at the Pyburn family. My direct line arrives in Tensaw in 1784 where they end up being neighbors to my ancestor Peggy and her husband Charles Juzan. Well as neighborly as the wilderness was at that time. Turns out that Peggy goes on to marry James Trahern and my line is developed. Peggy and her husband Charles Juzan are the godparents of at least one child of Adam Hollinger and his wife Mary Josephine Juzan. One of their sons marries Teresa Innerarity, the illegitimate daughter of  Mary Pyburn and James Innerarity. Thus relatives I have in my Juzan line share relatives in common with my Dad.

Whenever I see a Brunson, Bronson or Brownson before 1810 I know that inevitably the line comes from one of two brothers who arrived in Connecticut in the 17th century. The same goes for the Copelands of Virginia, a name I see often enough in tree's for DNA matches of my mother, but oddly not for my father who is a Copeland. Funny how DNA works that way. That's not to say there isn't a handful of folks with small matches to both my parents, I just haven't figured those out yet.

If I start to talk about relatives on Dad's side, well it starts to look like I have a straight family tree. I don't, I don't even have cousins marrying cousins in my direct line in all the information I know about, (the closest is second cousins and only one of those), but we do have some first cousin marriages in the family. With Dad though, it's more that his family has lived in the same place for over 200 years. After a while, you just are related to about half the county who also descends from people who have been in the same place for 200 years. Which is why a recent DNA match matches my dad in two places, one from a match from his maternal grandmother, and the other, to a match through his maternal grandmother. Neither of us comes from consanguinity, we just come from families with a long history in the panhandle.

Take that in account with some of the rather large families Dad connects with, I mean he has one ancestor with over 100 grandchildren, 28 coming from my direct ancestor alone, and then make him a relative of another family who had 12 kids, and you get the picture. Before long you are kin to everyone, you just need a map to figure it out.

The funny thing is, Dad's family is so close and intertwined while my Mom's, aside from the Choctaw part, is not at all. And yet, she has some of the largest DNA matches with 4th through 6th cousins, and heck, sometimes with Dad it seems as if we are lucky to get a small one at 4.

So my point is, DNA is grand, but you have to take it in hand with genealogy and a grain of salt. After all, it's all relative.

Longhunter Roots and DNA

Update July 2016- we have had many more Wallen matches with the descendants of Doswell Rogers along this segment ( and on one other) since I wrote this blog. Also, we have confirmed DNA with one of Susie's sons with James Wallen (first cousin of Joseph.)

My mother is a linear descendant of Joseph Rogers and his wife Susannah via their son named Henry. Ydna has not only proven that Joseph Rogers was a son of Dauswell (Doswell) Rogers and his wife, but that Dauswell Rogers was a descendant of Adduston Rogers. While YDNA alone cannot prove definitively that Dauswell Rogers is the son of Adduston Rogers and his wife Catherine Dauswell, I am comfortable at this point in saying that these are his most likely parents, primarily because his name is the surname of Adduston's wife.

If in fact though Adduston Rogers and Catherine Dauswell are the parents of Dauswell Rogers, then the DNA matches on my mother's 11 the chromosome in the table below have to at least partly come from Dauswell's wife (unknown name but possibly Ann who signs release of dower in 1795.) I can say this because one of the matches in this section (over half of the 11th chromosome) matches in part to a descendant of Dauswell Rogers who does not descend from Joseph Rogers but his brother William. The table below lists some of the identified and larger segmental matches my mother has on the 11th chromosome.

Match	CH	Start	Stop	cM total	SNP	Ancestor
JM me	11	0	134	158	28796	My mom
MP	11	23	111	74.2	16167	adopted
JKP	11	23	70	36.8	7697	[i]
WM	11	22	75	42.1	4306	[ii]
CLR	11	27	51	20.1	4103	Blevins[iii]
DC	11	34	110	63.3		Wallens[iv]
RFW	11	35	70	23.0	2491	Wallen[v]
KRM	11	37	106	52.5	5954	Wallen[vi]
AB	11	78	108	27.9	6759	Rogers[vii]
JB	11	78	117	37.5	4223	Rogers[viii]
NP	11	80	111	27.3	6683	Rogers[ix]
LJR	11	80	120	41.4	8934	Rogers[x]
PP	11	80	113	29.1	7052	Rogers[xi]
LR	11	97	120	5	1462	Wallen[xii]
PM	11	80	115	30.8	6691	Wallen[xiii]

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[i] No information

[ii] No information

[iii]  David M. Blevins born 1776

[iv] Margaret Wallens born 1836        

[v] No information on lineage, surname is Wallen

[vi] Elisha Wallen and Mary Blevins

[vii] William Rogers and Hurd, son of Dauswell Rogers and wife (Ann?)

[viii] Louisa Rogers, dtr of Joseph Rogers and Susannah, granddaughter of Dauswell Rogers and wife

[ix] Henry Rogers, son of Joseph Rogers and Susannah, grandson of Dauswell Rogers and wife

[x] Henry Rogers, son of Joseph Rogers and Susannah, grandson of Dauswell Rogers and wife

[xi] Henry Rogers, son of Joseph Rogers and Susannah, grandson of Dauswell Rogers and wife

[xii] Elisha Wallen and Mary Blevins

[xiii] Elisha Wallen and Mary Blevins

It is important to note that 3 of the above matches, sharing 5-52 cM in common have trees all descending from Elisha Wallen and his wife Mary Blevins, and that none of these three matches have another surname in common. The fourth Wallen match I have been unable to trace further back than Margaret Wallen born 1836. Three of the matches are large enough matches to be included here, but I have insufficient information to determine how they are connected. None of the Rogers matches listed match the matches at the beginning of this segment, but all match the crossover KRM who is a known Wallen and Blevins descendant who in turn matches the descendant of David M. Blevins born 1776 who resided in the same county in 1810 that the Wallen and Rogers lived in. Genealogy on the Blevins family does give him a father, but given the information I can find, and my lack of knowledge of the Blevins line in general, I am not comfortable stating how David M. Blevins relates to Mary Blevins the wife of Elisha Wallen.

What is clear then is that the majority of this 74 cM segment (63.3 cM) has a definitive connection to the Wallen/Blevins family line, and over half of it is definitively shared between descendants of Joseph Rogers and his wife Susannah, with almost all of that (27.9 of 37 cM) matching a descendant of one of Joseph Rogers brothers, William Rogers.

So what does this mean? The only logical conclusion would appear to be that the descendants of Dauswell Rogers (5 in total including my Mom) are directly related to the descendants of Elisha Wallen and Mary Blevins. If we rule Dauswell out as the source because there is no direct tie between his presumed parents and the Blevins or Wallen family, that leaves only his wife as the source of this connection. That would mean that the mother of Joseph and William Rogers had to be a Blevins if she was not a daughter of Elisha Wallen and his wife Mary Blevins since we have the one lone Blevins alone match in the mix.

Granted we don't know enough about David M. Blevins to say his mother was not a Wallens either, but in some way shape or form, Dauswell Rogers, who is of an age to be the son of Elisha Wallen and his wife Mary Blevins, is married to a daughter, niece or other close female relative of one if not both of these individuals.

What I can't explain is why this particular segment has stuck around intact for so many generations. Dauswell Rogers is my mother's 5th great grandfather, yes that is right, and so this dna segment has to come from a 6th generation or later MCA pair. Granted my mother's large segment could be a fluke, but the others almost as large are about equally as distant from the Wallen family. So in fact when I looked at the total cM as a guideline for when and where to look, I ended up looking too close and not far enough back. Even with the unknown's in my mother's family, Joseph's wife Susannah, his son's wife Mahala, and George Washington Adams, the intact match of half the chromosome makes it highly probable that this DNA doesn't come from one of them.

In order for the match to not come from the Roger's line we would have to have to many if's to complete. First, the descendant of William and one of my other lines would have to match. Then, they both would have to go back to the Blevins/Wallens within 2 or 3 generations. Then we have the segment length, other than the MCA pair of Elisha Wallen and Mary Blevins, it seems highly unlikely that a spouse of a Rogers could impart the exact same and missing DNA to the connection that is provided by the Rogers. For that reason it seems logical to me that the match is coming from the wife of Dauswell and not a more recent ancestor.

Genealogical facts put the Blevins, Elisha Wallen and Dauswell Rogers in the same place from the tithable list of 1765 in Pittsylvania up to Dauswell's death. This connection makes a lot of sense when you pair it with what looks to be a family connection by DNA.