Skip to content

Taylor DNA — toward a historical haplotype

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Well, apparently I don’t know how to scrape the inside of my cheeks properly, since the lab took extra long to culture my Y-chromosome DNA. But I finally have a complete 37-marker Y-chromosome DNA test back, so now our Taylor family has three datapoints from which to triangulate a historical haplotype for our common ancestor, John3 Taylor (d. 1741). Here is the data from three test subjects, including me, in the tabular form published by familytreedna.com:

There are three boxes highlighted in blue, in which one value does not match the value for the others. 100194 differs from the others in the last locus, and 157892 differs from the others in two other loci (nos. 34 and 35 out of 37). Each disagreement between values represents a mutation somewhere in the family tree, but where? (Continued)

Filed in Taylor DNA, US genealogy | Comments (1)

a genealogist’s Hallowe’en

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Just an odd bit culled from the website of the Times —  Robertson Davies, writing in 1990, reminded us that Hallowe’en should be a good time to “revive the custom of giving some respectful heed to our forbears:”

[O]ur forbears are deserving of tribute for one indisputable reason, if for no other: without them we should not be here. Let us recognize that we are not the ultimate triumph but rather we are beads on a string. Let us behave with decency to the beads that were strung before us, and hope modestly that the beads that come after us will not hold us of no account merely because we are dead.”

He didn’t mention All Souls’ Day at all — he was haranguing those whose holidays are marked at the drugstore, not a church; read the whole piece here.

Filed in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Taylor family DNA — preliminary results

Monday, September 28, 2009

I’d been meaning to get into this for a while but had put it off. I’ve tracked my extended male family — on paper — for 17 years now (see my book). But what if DNA testing showed I didn’t belong? Not that I fear skeletons in my closet (or my ancestors’ closets), but I didn’t want the quandary of questioning the value or applicability of something I’d spent so much time on, if it were to turn out I wasn’t actually biologically related. At any rate, others got feet wet first and, following a fifth cousin’s lead (and the persistent prompting of another possible distant kinsman), I signed up for a 37-marker Y-DNA test at familytreedna.com. Results are now in (for me, only partial results at this time), but they prove we are related, and show another Taylor, a seventh cousin, is also (we all share a precise 25-marker profile, and the other two subjects differ in 3 loci in the panel 26 to 37). Depending on what my last 12 markers (not yet back from the lab) show about these three divergent loci, we will hopefully be able to deduce a 37-marker Y-DNA haplotype of our common ancestor, John3 Taylor of Richmond County, Virginia (1703-41). Once other Taylors, descended from John’s brothers, are tested too, we can hopefully then confirm the Y-DNA haplotype for Simon2 Taylor, who must be considered the genetic founder of the family since there is no way to triangulate a non-mutated haplotype for his father, the apparent immigrant, Richard1 Taylor (Richard1 had another son, also named Richard, but the son Richard cannot be shown to have had a family). Here is a chart showing the the early generations of this family which left extant male issue, with lines down to the three subjects already tested (I’m the one in the middle):

John3 Taylor had twelve male-line grandsons who left further male issue. But for John’s brothers Septimus3 and George3, we do not know whether some of their sons left male descendants of their own (hence the question marks): other Taylors show up who may be their sons, but the documentation is too sparse to show it. This is precisely the area in which Y-DNA testing can aid this genealogy, once the haplotype is fully established.

Back to ‘paper genealogy’, the first of a two-part article of mine on the possible English origins of this Taylor family is slated to appear in the next number of The American Genealogist.

Filed in Taylor DNA, US genealogy | Comments (3)

Samuel Matlack grave — Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

A propos the last post. A fine obelisk with leaves and flowers in deep relief. Photo from late fall of 2000.

Filed in US genealogy | Comments (0)

The mystery of the Samuel Matlacks

Monday, September 21, 2009

Browsing somewhere online the other day, my eye jumped to a newly-published regimental history of the 10th Kentucky Infantry in the Civil War. This was the regiment of my great-great-grandfather Samuel Matlack (1815-1881), regimental quartermaster, then lieutenant and aide-de-camp on the staff of Brig. General Speed S. Fry, at Camp Nelson, Kentucky.


Samuel and Mildred Ann (Gregory) Matlack, in my grandfather’s photo album.

Beyond his own Civil War record Matlack has long held my interest for the unknowns of his family history. According to his obituary in a Louisville newspaper, Samuel Matlack was born in Fairfield County, Ohio, in 1815, son of another Samuel Matlack and his wife Elizabeth Lynch. But there the issue gets complicated, as there were two adult Samuel Matlacks in Fairfield County, Ohio in the early nineteenth century. Over the years I’ve drafted a study of these Matlacks, trying to reconcile various (unreconcilable) statements in sources which appear to mix them up, and trying to discover their relation to the Quaker Matlack family of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to which they apparently belonged. In the process I’ve discovered various weird anomalies about (as is often the case) the other Samuel Matlack’s family. I just realized I never got around to putting this unfinished work online. In the hopes that (as has happened before) search engines might attract others with insights, I’m doing so here:

Click to read (pdf) “The Two (or Three) Samuel Matlacks of Fairfield County, Ohio.”


A chapter officer’s pin from Matlack’s G.A.R. insignia.
Filed in militaria, US genealogy | Comments (1)

Sancha de Ayala’s prayer book? (and her sister’s tomb)

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Last fall I got a message from Sor María Jesús, of the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo el Real in Toledo, noting an error in one of my earlier webpages on Sancha de Ayala, where I had confused the two convents, the convent of Poor Clares, “Santa Isabel de los Reyes,” which is constructed in the palace of Sancha’s father Diego Gómez, and Santo Domingo el Real, which is where Sancha’s sister, Doña Teresa de Ayala, was prioress. Sor María Jesús gently corrected my caption identifying the wrong convent, for the beautiful carved tomb slab of Doña Teresa, when I included a photograph (from a 1980 book) in my little essay on Sancha de Ayala’s literary heritage. Now Sor María Jesús has sent me another, much sharper photograph of the tomb of Doña Teresa, which I include here (click for larger image):

Sor María Jesús has also let me know about an interesting artifact, a fourteenth-century prayer book (Continued)

Filed in artifacts, medievalia | Comments (0)

looking for Mr. Wright (& knocking down a brick wall)

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Here is the successful breach of a brick wall, with some unusual documentary evidence, leading to a goose-chase for a ‘Mr Wright’. The starting point is my wife’s XY line, which, as I noted in the last post, went back to Whiting B. Dudley (1823-1882) and then stopped. Here is what I knew:

A family bible entry stated that Whiting Dudley was born 14 August 1823 in North Haven, Connecticut, but named no parents. No birth was found in the Barbour collection, etc. Our only testimony about his parentage comes obliquely from his daughter, Rosa Whiting Dudley (Mrs. John Milton Harmon), 1857-1940. Here is Rosa — a handsome woman:

Sometime in the late 1930s I think, Rosa was reminiscing to her daughter-in-law, Beth (Battles) Harmon, about the provenance of various family heirlooms, telling stories to explain objects. Beth took notes on small note paper, of which a few leaves survived among odd papers (but without any attribution—I had to deduce who wrote them and when). Some notes concern other ancestral lines, but the passage relevant to Whiting Dudley read as follows:

That lead doll my grandfather Dudley bought in New York for oldest daughter. Also the pewter tea set. He went often to N.Y. He was taken ill there with yellow fever & grandmother went after him & brought him home in the stage. Father was 5 or so. Says he remembered his father calling him into the room. & talking to him. Told him to be a good boy. … (Continued)

Filed in US genealogy | Comments (0)

my medieval XY line

Monday, June 1, 2009

Besides our agnate (male-line) ancestry, and our matrilineal ancestry (also called the umbilical or mitochondrial line, to indicate the uterine mother-child bond or the exclusively maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA), what specific lines have any distinction, in an abstract sense, in the vast swath of the pedigree chart that lies between these two bookends? The ‘xy’ or gender-alternating line has, as Todd Farmerie explained, a theoretically heightened role in the transmission of some genetic material. But it is also the simplest ‘unique’ path to follow among ancestors after the all-male and all-female lines. There is the interesting oddity that siblings of different genders have wholly different XY lines, since a man’s line starts with his mother while a woman’s line starts with her father. As it turns out, my ‘XY’ line is pretty long, leading back through a Great-Migration colonist into late medieval England. Today the ever-vigilant John Brandon of Charleston, South Carolina, noticed some generations of ancestors of Dorothy (Nicholl) Stratton in the 1563 Visitation of Suffolk. So my line now stretches 19 generations from my daughters back to Avelyn Pelham, who probably lived in the mid to later 15th century:

1. Avelyn Pelham = John Colbye, Gent., of Banham, Norfolk (Continued)

Filed in medievalia, US genealogy | Comments (1)

John Morgan Stanwood of Dogtown: finding ancestors in a novel

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Quite by accident I found it. I was scanning my local branch library for editions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when I saw The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant (Simon & Schuster, 2006). Pulling it off the shelf doubtfully (there are many Dogtowns) I was surprised to see that it was indeed about my Dogtown, the upland village in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where some of my grandfather’s ancestors had lived in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Dogtown was wholly abandoned by about 1840, and by the end of the nineteenth century was subjected to nostalgic tale-spinning, notably by Charles E. Mann in In the Heart of Cape Ann, or the Story of Dogtown (1896) [on archive.org]. Mann depicted the last inhabitants as curmudgeons and simpletons—and his printer seemed to have some extra engravings of witches lying around —

— which somewhat distorted Mann’s bucolic elegy but may have got it a few more readers. (Continued)

Filed in US genealogy | Comments (2)

a royal descent for the American Stirlings of Glorat

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Following yesterday’s post on the romantic Stirling of Glorat story, I put together a royal descent (probably the closest one) for the American branch of the Stirlings of Glorat, as follows:

1. James V, King of Scots (d. 1542).

2. (illegitimate by Catherine, daughter of Sir John Carmichael) John Stewart, Commendator of Coldingham, Lord Darnley (d. 1563), m. Jane Hepburn.

3. Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell (attainted; d. 1612), m. Margaret Douglas.

4. John Stewart, Commendator of Coldingham (noticed in 1606), m. Margaret Home.

5. Margaret Stewart, m. Sir John Home of Renton (d. 1671).

6. Sir Alexander Home of Renton, 1st Bart. (d. 1698), m. Margaret Scott.

7. Elizabeth Home, m. John Stirling of Glorat (3d son of 1st Bart.).

8. Sir Alexander Stirling of Glorat, 4th Bart. (d. 1791), m. Mary Willis (of Strood, Kent).

9. Sir John Stirling of Glorat, 5th Bart. (d. 1818), sojourned in America, where he m. at Stratford, Connecticut, about 1770, Ann (Gloriana) Folsom.

10. Robert Stirling (8th son), bapt. at Campsie, Stirlingshire, 19 October 1792; settled in North America by 1820; m. at Eastport, Maine, 2 November 1820, Mary Ann Pine (she d. at Ottawa in 1832); he d. at Batavia, Ohio, 9 December 1860. His male-line descendants are now the presumed heirs of the baronetcy since the extinction of senior lines in 1949.

Filed in medievalia, US genealogy | Comments (4)