Searching for my surname

[paul_roe]

Carefully study all the Cagles who are not descended from sister Rowe!!! Are they close matches to you? Do all or most of them have ancestors in common? Are they related to the Cagles who ARE descended from Rowe?

3 of my 21 Cagle matches are descended from sister Rowe. Every Cagle I've looked at so far seems to be descended from Leonhart Kegel who imigrated to Pennsylvania from Rhenish Palatine, Germany around 1732. He and his family traveled south and settled in North Carolina. They spread mostly south and west from there.

[Germanica]

I have 21 matches in my AncestryDNA kit who have Cagle in their family tree, only 3 of them are directly descended from sister Rowe. So, I see what you're saying. Thank you very much for pointing that out.

It's looking more and more likely Cagle was the father then. It does make sense, given the story you were told about the uncle - it just sounds like someone thought it was Charles' mother's uncle instead of Charles' uncle by marriage.

I have 1 match at Ancestry with several generations of Durards in their family tree. They did live in the same area as the DuRard match in my Y-DNA kit. I'm not sure what to make of that.

That's interesting, but 1 autosomal match doesn't support the idea that DuRard was the father of Charles so I think we can rule that out. Have you contacted both the Y DuRard match and the autosomal DuRard match? Could they be the same person, or closely related to one another? Maybe a different Cagle (or the same Cagle?) caused a NPE on their DuRard line - that would mean their DuRard line "should be" (biologically) Cagle, and therefore the DuRard name has nothing to do with you.

[paul_roe]

It's looking more and more likely Cagle was the father then. It does make sense, given the story you were told about the uncle - it just sounds like someone thought it was Charles' mother's uncle instead of Charles' uncle by marriage.



That's interesting, but 1 autosomal match doesn't support the idea that DuRard was the father of Charles so I think we can rule that out. Have you contacted both the Y DuRard match and the autosomal DuRard match? Could they be the same person, or closely related to one another? Maybe a different Cagle (or the same Cagle?) caused a NPE on their DuRard line - that would mean their DuRard line "should be" (biologically) Cagle, and therefore the DuRard name has nothing to do with you.

Yes I sent an email to Mr. DuRard yesterday. I haven't received a response from him yet. I'm fairly confident that Cagle is correct since Charles has a son named after his Aunts husband. Same given name and Cagle as middle name. This makes me believe that whatever occurred between Charles mother Uncle Cagle was mutual.

[MoberlyDrake]

21 matches in itself is interesting but may not mean much. My mother has more than that at who claim descent from Morgan and Martha Strode, who married around 1720 in PA, but I am not at all ready to say they are her ancestors. She has about that many descended from William Claiborne too. I could just put the two statistics together and say that the unknown parents of Mom's 2nd great-grandfather, Enoch Hampton, had to be Oliver Hampton and Elizabeth Bryan. But I have no proof of that and Mom doesn't match any descendants of Oliver Hampton and Elizabeth Bryan.

The question is how much DNA do you share with all these Cagles? Are they very close matches? Do they share significant amounts of DNA with you? When you look at the shared matches tab for each of them are most of the others in the list of shared matches? Can you get a number of them to upload to Gedmatch to see if you triangulate?

[Germanica]

21 matches in itself is interesting but may not mean much. My mother has more than that at who claim descent from Morgan and Martha Strode, who married around 1720 in PA, but I am not at all ready to say they are her ancestors. She has about that many descended from William Claiborne too. I could just put the two statistics together and say that the unknown parents of Mom's 2nd great-grandfather, Enoch Hampton, had to be Oliver Hampton and Elizabeth Bryan. But I have no proof of that and Mom doesn't match any descendants of Oliver Hampton and Elizabeth Bryan.

But we are not basing this on autosomal DNA matches alone. There is also the Y-DNA matches with the Cagle surname, particularly the exact match, as well as the fact that Cagle was the uncle by marriage and there was a family story about an uncle being the father... granted, family stories should be taken with a grain of salt, but when both Y-DNA and autosomal DNA supports it, it all starts to add up. Sorry, but I don't think it's the same as simply having some autosomal DNA matches who have the same ancestor in their tree that you don't.

[MoberlyDrake]

I didn't make myself very clear and I left out Morgan's last name, which was "Bryan". I have more than enough Y-DNA matches to prove that Enoch Hampton was really a Hampton and that my mother's grandfather really wasn't a Mobley (his surname) but a Hampton. About 8 years ago, through atDNA testing of a descendant of one of the two brothers I thought was the most likely candidate for the father of Mom's grandfather (who was raised in an orphanage), I proved it was one of the two brothers anyway.

But it's the really close DNA matches Mom has recently amassed at Ancestry, together with the fact that most of them are on the shared matches lists of each of the others, that allows me to say which of the two brothers actually was the father. In fact, it's rather odd how few matches Mom has who are descended from the other brother, and although two of the matches she has who are descended from the other brother share significant amounts of DNA with her, they share little or no DNA with the many matches descended from the brother who was the father.

I'm wondering if this is an isolated phenomenon or if I can apply it to more distant ancestors? Is a person more likely to match descendants of an actual ancestor than to match siblings or cousins of that ancestor?

Going back to the Hampton case. Although finding my mother's true great-grandfather was a wonderful breakthrough, I quickly ran into a brick wall. I found this Hampton's parents without trouble and found out that they were married in Clark Co. KY in 1831. There were quite a few possible Hampton fathers there, but going through wills, deeds, bastardy suits, etc. has never revealed which one of them (if any) was the father of Mom's 2nd great-grandfather. Even worse, although about 7 different Hampton men migrated from Rowan Co., NC to Clark Co., KY between about 1790 and 1810, no one has a clue as to how any one of them was related to any other! But they probably were all related somehow and all descendants of a Scot who arrived in NJ in 1683.

Now here are Mom's DNA results at Ancestry and 23andMe:

Shared DNA segments with descendants of David Hampton m. Sarah Wilson:

Match A - 35 cM across 2 DNA segments
Match B - 31 cM across 1 DNA segment
Match C - 29 cM across 1 DNA segment
Match D - 27 cM across 1 DNA segment
Match E - 27 cM across 2 DNA segment
Match F - 26 cM across 2 DNA segments
Match G - 16 cM across 2 DNA segments

Shared DNA segments with descendants of Obediah Hampton:

Match H - 39 cM across 2 DNA segments
Match I - 30 cM across 3 DNA segments

Plus she has a couple of very distant matches to descendants of Jonathan Hampton.

Now, can I assert with any degree of confidence that Mom is a direct descendant of this particular David Hampton who migrated from Rowan, NC, or can I just say she may be descended from him or from one of his brothers or or one of his cousins, uncles, etc. (whoever they may have been)??? Essentially, can DNA prove anything at all beyond the generations that are closest to you?

And are Obediah and David Likely to be closely related to each other.

It's terrible that Ancestry doesn't give us a chromosome browser. I can't get anyone to answer my messages much less upload to Gedmatch. And I had to create trees myself for at least half of the matches above. That's time-consuming!!! And there are a lot more matches shared with the above people whom I can't even start a tree for, because they don't provide any clue that will give me a start.

[Germanica]

It still sounds like your situation is different from Paul's. In Paul's case, both Y-DNA and autosomal DNA support Cagle. In your case, only autosomal DNA supports Bryan and Claiborne. It is not the same.