YDNA meandering Elmers and Thompsons

After having been accepted into the R1b-U106 yahoo group, I used my access to contact a verified U106 person who shares a lot of my more off-beat strs. He and I are in much the same boat. There are a lot of people generally like us in R1b but on closer inspection we're part of a pretty small group of individuals who are similar to each other.

He and I have discussed some of our autosomal matches in common too, which is also pretty interesting considering the nearness of Y DNA. It's near enough to make us wonder about family convergences.

He in turn sent me a close match for both of us among the Elmers. Well one Elmer in particular. I've had a match with a single Elmer at SMGF for a while and have included them in my maps. They match at about the same level as the Knowltons at SMGF.

The Elmer he was showing me is from a different branch of the same family and where the Elmer at SMGF mismatched me on 3 markers..this Elmer only mismatched on 1. Now that is very interesting.

The Elmer at SMGF is a 34/37 match and because the other (Daniel we'll call him) Elmer is tested with FTDNA we have fewer numbers to match on, but he's a 31/32 match.

31 markers isn't enough to prove a shared family without some really good paper trails but considering that this Elmer matches me where the other Elmer does not, he could well be a 36 out of 37 match.

Not too shabby.

Flipping back over to Autosomal DNA for a minute, I believe I've seen these Elmers before. One of the autosomal matches for my father who lists Thompsons also has this Elmer family in her tree. They marry into her Thompsons in New Jersey. The scary thing is that this Autosomal match also has Seeleys in her tree from the same area and I'd guess that these Seeleys are probably related to my Seeleys..although that should definitely be looked into.

These same Elmers marry into a local Seeley family.

So there are a lot of options left open by something like this. We could be Elmers who at some point became Thompsons through all the myriad ways that can happen. I could be seeing a tie to my father's Seelye family and through the interconnectedness of all things, be seeing these Elmers that we are also related to a couple different ways. I could also be seeing a group of interrelated people from the same area in Britain who came to the new world.

It turns out that the home town for the Elmers in Britain (Braintree) is something like a hundred miles from Knowlton in Britain semi-mythical home of the Knowltons who are also 34/37 DNA matches.

All of that is really interesting, but I want to take a moment to look at those Thompsons again. While researching the Elmers who are pretty well documented, I of course ran into those Thompsons from the autosomal match. They seem well documented but the problem is, there are too many documents.

I've found 3 or more different trees for the same Benjamin Thompson who marries Elizabeth Elmer in the 1700s. One goes to Ireland and on to Yorkshire and another seems to be a mixed tree that eventually leads up to the same Thompsons who marry into the Hollingsworth family for Judith Heald's family (although a different branch). A third leads back to William Thompson, reverend in Massachusetts in the 1600s.

This is the family I'd like to look into a bit more because William Thompson has a son Benjamin Thompson who is born while William is away in Virginia. William later becomes estranged from Benjamin and his melancholia is sited as a source.

This Benjamin Thompson is not the same one who marries Elizabeth Elmer, but in some trees is his ancestor. So William Thompson leads to Benjamin Thompson who marries Susannah Kirtland, who leads to Ben Thompson who marries Elizabeth (unknown) who leads to Ben Thompson who marries Anna Newcomb who then leads to Benjamin Thompson who marries Elizabeth Elmer.

This is not the most popular tree for these Thompsons by far. The Thomas Thompson 1677 from Ireland tree is more popular. The thing that interests me about it is the proximity to these other families, the story of melancholy and estrangement which can lead to uncertain trees and the fact that Reverand William Thompson is from Winwick, Lancashire England in the 1690s less than 45 miles from Malpas, England where the (top tier YDNA match at Ancestry.com) Edwardsons are from.

All very interesting and in need of more research.

Paternal Genome Analysis

My dad was recently tested at 23 and me as well, which has been a great tool for finding both relatives on his side and on my mom's and there were a few surprises.

One of the people that I could definitely match trees with on my father's side turned out to be a genetic relative for my mother. Several of my Hollingsworth related genetic relatives went to my mom as well as most of my Swedish matches and a chunk of the Finns.

Both sides have a German contingent which was unexpected for my father and my father has more "All" Irish matches than I would have thought because I wouldn't have thought there were any. My dad carried the few Danish matches that I had.

In the basic tools his Genome analysis is much like mine. 100% Northern Europe. Not worth posting the graphic.

His Ancestry Finder results were kind of interesting too. I would have assumed he would carry my French matches because of August Michel, but he doesn't. That goes with my mom as well. He does have someone from Jamaica though...which is interesting and would be good to contact.

I would be the Netherlands was a bit unexpected but then when I look at my Seelye family (paternal grandmother) it begins to make sense.

I asked Dr. McDonald to analyze my father's results and he said that he tested totally British with the tiniest probably insignificant amount of African.

So it would seem to me that most of the continental diversity I had, I got from my mom. I don't think that means my father's family doesn't have it, it's just that he may not have inherited it from his parents in the way that I didn't pick up a bunch of matches from the Netherlands and Jamaica.

Here is his map:

All the dots overlap in Britain. Here is his scatter plot:

Where I was in the soft spot between Britain and France my dad lines up as more English.

Shifting over to DIY Dodecad here is my father's admixture:

---------------------------

FINAL ADMIXTURE PROPORTIONS

---------------------------

10.70% East_European

52.89% West_European

27.20% Mediterranean

0.09% Neo_African

5.57% West_Asian

0.82% South_Asian

0.65% Northeast_Asian

0.02% Southeast_Asian

0.00% East_African

1.33% Southwest_Asian

0.74% Northwest_African

0.00% Palaeo_African

And here is his Dodecad Oracle result:

[1,] "CEU" "2.7351"

[2,] "Orcadian" "4.5262"

[3,] "Orkney_1KG" "4.8476"

[4,] "N._European" "5.1663"

[5,] "Argyll_1KG" "5.3784"

[6,] "German_D" "8.1553"

[7,] "French_D" "9.5645"

[8,] "French" "9.7545"

[9,] "Mixed_Germanic_D" "11.0269"

[10,] "Dutch_D" "11.4072"

[11,] "Kent_1KG" "13.6581"

[12,] "British_Isles_D" "15.5764"

[13,] "British_D" "15.603"

[14,] "Cornwall_1KG" "16.3898"

[15,] "Slovenian" "18.3699"

[16,] "Irish_D" "18.9789"

[17,] "Swedish_D" "19.1611"

[18,] "Norwegian_D" "19.8417"

[19,] "French_Basque" "21.5444"

[20,] "Hungarians" "22.599"

[21,] "Portuguese_D" "24.2288"

[22,] "Spaniards" "25.0297"

[23,] "Spanish_D" "26.2921"

[24,] "IBS" "26.5104"

[25,] "N_Italian_D" "27.6466"

[26,] "FIN" "28.1464"

[27,] "Tuscan_H" "29.143"

[28,] "TSI" "29.3426"

[29,] "Tuscan_X" "29.6094"

[30,] "North_Italian" "31.4779"

Again, like me "white people from Utah" are at the top. Orcadian and Orkney are next where I registered as Northern European. Then he hits Northern Europe and Argyll, German, French etc. Bearing in mind that Orkney is a melting pot for Norse and Scots, it seems to be in line with what I would expect about my father's family. Orkney seems to be a designation for a lot of British people and that's probably because of it's position as a crossroads for different colonizations and invasions. I don't think it would be too surprising if people with a lot of New England roots were compared to Orkney or Argyll.

Having uploaded his results to Gedmatch.com there were some interesting twists. He has matches with those people who first made me suspect Thomas Jacobsson the Finn as well as a few new Finns not in my list. He also carries my Ashkenazi matches and my Irish matches who also themselves seem to have Ashkenzi matches.

And, because Gedmatch shows smaller segments than 23 and me I can see that my dad and I share the largest X match I have.

For those of you familiar with highschool biology and sex ed...that shouldn't happen. I guess I can't say "shouldn't" it's just not expected. A man gets his X from his mother. So my father got his X unchanged from his mother and I got my X unchanged from my mother. In effect it would mean that my paternal grandmother and my mother are related...distantly.

That is completely reasonable because both my families have a similar background. Migrated to the U.S. in the same time periods, lived in the exact same communities and hung around with the same people. The real question would be "how could they not be related?".

This brings me to another interesting thing that I've been noticing. Hyper-relatedness. I read a lot of people saying that matching beyond 5th cousins is unreliable, yet I seem to only be able to reliably match with people as far away as 6th and 7th great grandparents and 8 and 9th cousins.

The reason I'm able to match up at all seems to be because I can take a family tree to the 1700s...even into the late 1600s. Even to me that seems a bit old to be showing up. None of these are close matches mind you. My dad and I don't match with anyone more that 0.43%..so less than half of one percent of our DNA is shared with anyone else.

I don't think it's any accident that I'm finding these matches in old East Coast, colonial families that are well documented but it makes me wonder if I'm going to be able to connect with someone who is related to my 1834 Thompsons or 1840 Williamsons. How can I find them if I'm overshooting the mark by 100 years?

Also, most of my matches to date have been indirect. Meaning they're not people who appear in my tree. Most family trees have parents and siblings, somtimes just one child and their parents in a line back to the past. Autosomal DNA is relevant for cousins, wives of cousins, step siblings and moms only listed as "mary" or "elizabeth" so I have to effectively make new trees for my matches with branches that reach wider than tall. I also have to do the same for my own tree. Each mom without parents or siblings is a loss of hundreds of years of information.

The other danger that I've seen is in being labelled a "collector". I've contacted genetic matches only to have them ask how many people are in a tree. When I answered thousands they were done working with me. That's because when people think of genetics they think of their parents and siblings. Some might stretch it to cousins. Rarely will their patience go beyond that.

Trying to use our genes to gather information has been at the same time, fascinating and frustrating. Every step I take leads to more steps.

Now I have my dad to use as a wedge to split out my mother's family. The next logical step is to find a relative that is outside of one or the other grandparent to split matches even further.

For instance. If I was able to get a Seelye cousin or known Thompson (my dad has no Thompson cousins my grandfather is an only child..as far as we know). I could then split out hits based on matches that overlapped with my dad and that cousin. The same goes for my mom's family. Finding a known Price or Hutchinson outside of my grandparents family could make matches more meaningful.

Meaningful is "expensive". In times like these it's hard to come up with hundreds of dollars to spend on frivolous pursuits. People have families right now they need to take care of, third great grandparents can take a back seat.

Needle in the Needle Stack, Pioneer Style

Butler county Pennsylvania has presented a conundrum. I can't find any references to Levi Thompson. There actually seem to be very few Levis at all. I did find a Levi Campbell who would be much younger than Levi Thompson, living with a Thompson family, but that's about as close as I've gotten.

The other side of the coin is that Butler county is thick with Thompsons. Thompsons are early settlers in the county and by the 1870s there are so many it's hard to keep track. The unfortunate issue I have is that Levi was born around 1834-9. So the first census he would appear in would be the 1840. Assuming that he knew he was from Butler PA because he had some waking memory of living there, he's probably listed with his family then. The issue is that the 1840 census doesn't list everyone in a household. Just the heads of households and number of people in the household between certain ages.

So I will probably end up making a survey of the Thompsons there in 1840 who have children between the age of 1 and 10. The thing is that there are so many and there are enough origin stories to make your head swim.

Several sources say all the Thompsons of Butler are related to a single John Thompson born around 1755 near Juniata who is the son of John Thompson a Scot.

Others say there are two different Thompson families in Butler that are unrelated one straight out of Ireland with three brothers, James, Anthony and Moses and another from Lancaster county with it's own three brothers, John, James and Matthew. Still further in the same history of Butler it relates that one of the first Thompsons in the area was from Cumberland and of Scotch Irish heritage named William Thompson. All of this is taking place around 1796, but a quick glance at the 1803 tax list for Butler will tell you there are more Thompsons than these.

Connoquenessing Township:

THOMPSON, Andrew        ---

THOMPSON, James         400     (single man) 

THOMPSON, John          400     (B.G.) 

THOMPSON, John          400     (Muddy Cr.) 

THOMPSON, Matthew        50     (single man)
THOMPSON, William       400

Middlesex Twp., Butler Co., Pa.

THOMPSON, Anthony       400
THOMPSON, Hugh          ---
THOMPSON, John          400
THOMPSON, John          400     (blacksmith)
THOMPSON, John          400     (Con. Creek)
THOMPSON, John          400     (weaver)
THOMPSON, Martin        400
THOMPSON, Moses         400     (single man)
THOMPSON, William       100
THOMPSON, William       400     (single man)

These are not the lists from all the townships, but you can see that you have several John Thompsons to try to keep track of and little more identifying information. Some could be sons of those first settlers, or totally unrelated.

That is the thing I keep running into. Most of the histories of a place assume they are written for the current residents not for someone in a different state a hundred plus years in the future. They assume you can tell John Thompson from Lancaster from John Thompson from Slippery Rock or Dr. John Thompson who owns the furnace and mills. You would know which one you belonged to because it's 1895 and you're looking back fondly on the awesomeness of your family over that last hundred years.

These guys didn't have DNA testing and excellent paper trails. They were hunting wolves and fighting natives on the frontier and for their grandchildren, myth and legend was just as reasonable as a tax list.

So I'm working at gut feelings. I think Levi was likely there in 1840 but probably gone by 1850 because in 1855 he's married and having his first child. Where he is in 1850 is hard to say. He could be in the next county over still in Pennsylvania, he could be in Kentucky or Ohio he could already be in Indiana..he could be farther west.

What the histories do give me is an idea of what was happening at the time and how people felt about themselves. These were largely Irish, Scots Irish and German frontier people and they owned that. They fought and died, spied and killed, farmed and paid taxes. They also intermarried, a lot and had a lot of children. One of the Thompsons had 11 kids. Imagine if every one did that. No wonder the place is awful with Thompsons.

There in lies the hope of the genetic testing my family has done. So far, even through genetic testing it's hard to tease out the Thompsons (everyone is related to a Thompson), but I may be able to pull out members of these other families that married in and through them and the histories I can find, be able to match my Thompsons with their "John Thompson from X".

Several families mentioned in the history of Butler also move on to Indiana and may, in the end, be the key to a migration route from Butler PA to Alexandria IN.

The End and the Beginning

When I ordered my records from the State digital archives I also ordered several other records from Madison County. From the Anderson Library I ordered some obituaries I thought might belong to my family and I also ordered death records from the county using the forms I got from the Madison County Historical society.

The Health department kindly mailed my original forms back to me in the self addressed stamped envelopes I sent them. I'm not sure if there was some error in communication or if there is some message there.

I did however get the obituaries from the library and they were most informational. One lists Rosa with several children and the other references Levi without naming him.

This is a nice little obit listing the children and even her sister who I now know is an Eaton, but sadly not her husband. The next excerpt is a bit more ...tabloid, but it does contain some good information for me.

Disappeared! How, why? What really happened? The text is so vague, what is "these 20 years ago"? Does it mean 1886? Were there no police or no sheriff in this town? What was this lawsuit? If he disappears in 1886 how can I pick him up in a veteran's roll in 1890 in Ohio? Why is his pension request only closed in 1902?

"A later day will have to be awaited in order to solve the mystery."

Butler County Pennsylvania

I did a search of the Indiana State Digital Archives and found a civil war record for Levi Thompson. His civil war records have been the most effective way to track him (as in the 1890 veteran's roll in Ohio). Unlike his other documents from the National Archives or his online indexes, this one listed some more interesting personal information. Including the thing that made me change the secondary title on this blog.

Eyes hazel; hair dark; height 5'10"; complexion dark; nativity Butler Co Pa. Not just a state or several states, but a COUNTY! So his wife was right. He's from Pennsylvania. Having spent more than a year trying to find such a minor piece of information...well it makes the smallest victory exciting.

Finally some concrete reason why he's not with the other Thompson families in the area and  a big bolster of support for those Pennsylvania genetic relatives.

I was also sent the information on other Thompsons in the area as well. At least two other Thompsons served in the vicinity. Both were 19 at the time, both born in Indiana, both named John and I've been able to find both in the 1850 census. None with Levi though. Without some further proof, it appears that he is unrelated to the other Thompsons serving with him, although the physical descriptions of the other Thompsons are very similar to him. 

For reasons I can't really defend logically, finding a place for Levi has been very important to me. I have a place. He does too.

Hollingsworths

As I've contacted genetic relatives and asked permission to view their trees, I've made it a habit to try to check them against each other to see if they have any matches. I have a lot of matches in the Pennsylvania area, and sorting them out can be pretty hard, not least because they are so interrelated. I began with just one genetic relative who happened to be from Pennsylvania and also happened to have Thompsons. She actually has two distinct Thompson families. One family beginning with Robert Thompson born 1786 in Lancaster Co PA and the other beginning with James Thompson born 1668 Wicklow Ireland (but moved to New Jersey).

Previously I had gathered a list of surnames surrounding the Lancaster PA Thompsons to see if they appeared fairly often among my genetic matches. Many of them did. When I find a pattern in my matches in simple surname searches at 23 and me, I like to search through the trees I have shared to see if there is anything there.

What I've found is that the New Jersey Thompsons marry into the Hollingsworth family right there in the early 1700s with James and his wife Ann Hollingsworth. I also found that a second Genetic match had Hollingsworths in her tree right there at the same point. The second match was related to Randal Malin who marries Mary Hollingsworth (sister of Ann).

What really blew me out of the water was that a third genetic match was related to the Hollingsworths at Mary Hollingsworth born 1816 in Illinois.

The other odd irony is that the Hollingsworths seem to be active right in the same area of Pennsylvania and Delaware that the New Sweden colony was. Some were even married in the old Swedes church.

Of course there are no Hollingsworths in my tree that I know of (but that's what I know). I seem to be related to people who are related to Hollingsworths, but I do not genetically match with two Hollingsworths I've seen at Gedmatch.dom.

They may not be my family but clearly they are to be watched.

http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/d/a/r/Earl-L-Darrah/GENE3-0005.html

Finns, Swedes and Danes?

The long haul to figuring out my Y DNA results has left the playing field for Thompson ancestors more open rather than closing it up. I'm R1b-U106 which is pretty popular anywhere around the North and Baltic Seas. My closest Y DNA matches at Ancestry.com are from Denmark and England. YHRD has Denmark and Germany, SMGF has Anglo-americans, Swedes, Germans and Russians. That's a lot of ground to cover and these people have been mixing and matching for centuries.

In looking for some information on the Corson family (higher matches at Ysearch) I got embroiled in New Amsterdam and associated colonies. Since any of these places is reasonable, I did a search for Thompson and Sweden and found an interesting article on Thomas Jacobsson the Finn and  his Thompson descendants. The article follows several generations of Thomassons/Thompsons in the New Sweden Colony: http://www.colonialswedes.org/forefathers/Jacobsson.html

These are Finns who lived in Sweden and moved to the (eventually) Dutch colony of New Sweden at the junction of White Clay and Red Clay Creeks. The article was interesting in that these Thompsons sort of melt into the fabric of Pennsylvania, Delaware and the Carolinas, blending in with other Thompson families and becoming "lost".

It was an interesting possibility but really any "Thomas" who had sons from Ireland to Prussia would be a good candidate. So I put the article away.

Then I had my tests done at 23 and me. A friend who is also doing family research told me I should load my results into Gedmatch.com which is a free gedcom and genome comparison tool. All free things cost somebody something and I'm sure this is no different as the person developing it is donating all their time and effort, let alone the costs of hosting.

Anyway I did load my results and (as with 23 and me) there were no really close matches. Gedmatch.com will return results you wouldn't normally see at 23 and me. These would be the smaller and older matches that many people disregard. Among my matches, was one email address with a .SE extension and given that Danes are at the top of my Y DNA list and Sweden is not too far away, I decided to contact her.

She didn't have a whole lot to go on, because Swedes switched last names every generation, but she did have a large "Forest Finn" family that she could give me last names for. I had to look up Forest Finns. That got me thinking again about that article I had read so many months before. So I shared the Thomas Jacobbson article with her to see what she thought.  She immediately recognized a name from the article as a relative of hers, a Mulikka or Moulica. She told me that the Forest Finns often intermarried.

That led me to do a quick study of my smaller matches at Gedmatch.com and I noticed quite a few .FI email addresses.

So here's where all this could make total sense. The Forest Finns had a kind of diaspora leaving the Swedish empire and were on the move within the empire in the 1500s. My Y DNA matches are no closer than the 1500s and are "sons" appearing in Denmark and England. It's possible that a common Forest Finn ancestral family left the Baltic and headed for points west depositing DNA along the way. Also since my Thompsons may have been from Pennsylvania and these Finns disappear into Pennsylvania there is a good case for matching proximity. I also seem to be related to at least four other people with ties to the same New Sweden colony.

Here's where it all falls apart. I don't know which side of my family these Finns fall into. It is most likely a grand coincidence that my genetic matches with Swedes and Finns would turn up a Thompson. After all I am completely missing my German Schultz family after my great grandmother. There are hundreds of possibilities there for intermingling with Swedes and Finns. I also don't know the last names of many of the mothers in my tree, any one of which could provide me with Baltic DNA.

Without a clear paper trail, this is just more conjecture. It's worth following up on as one more possibility in a sea of possibilities.