Viking FGC23343

[benowicz]

. . . So maybe I should update my FTDNA documented ancestor to colonial Virginia????? It seems to be the only thing all my genealogies agree. My book still says scotland but scotland county or country I cannot be sure. . .

That seems like an appropriately conservative approach.

It's kind of frustrating that there isn't anything much on point. My own searches only showed a handful of isolated records in Virginia that didn't seem to add up to any cohesive picture that suggested any specific immigrant scenario. Just a couple names, dates and places without any idea how they got there or how they related to any of their neighbors. Not much to go on.

Maybe an intense, laser-like focus on specific atDNA segments attributable to your earliest Vincent ancestors might be helpful. If you map them out by specific base pair coordinates, and look at the pedigrees of people sharing them, you might get lucky and notice a few foreign-born people in the mix.

atDNA is painfully difficult to work with in my opinion, if you're trying to research anything before the mid-19th century. Almost everybody is brickwalled on some branch of their pedigree, so usually conclusions can only be tentative. But sometimes you get lucky. I've seen a handful of segments that can convincingly be attributed to specific ancestors born in the early 17th century. That's probably the best-case scenario timeframe to make significant progress on your Vincents.

[benowicz]

A few lines of inquiry for you that may eventually prove fruitful:

1. atDNA. There are tons of descendants of the Vincent family who are on the free atDNA analytical site Gedmatch.com. It's a long-term project that will require patience and careful documentation, but you could identify specific shared segments and eventually discover a foreign-born match who can confidently lead you to your immigrant ancestor.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Vincent-41

2. The earliest generations of Vincents in Greenbrier seem particularly closely associated with the Jarrett family. Two marriages before 1800. Some claim the Jarretts were French Huguenots who temporarily settled in Berks Co., PA before heading south. There doesn't appear any clear contemporary documentation on that point, but members of the family have performed Y STR testing that can be tested versus this idea. There were definitely some small number of Huguenots in early Berks, but I don't think they could be considered a coherent "community". One such family I know were from Normandy, but all the others of whom I am aware were Walloons, not really where I would expect a subclade of Z209 to originate.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Jarrett-1404#Ancestors

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/57641648/james-madison-jarrett

3. There are some pedigrees online that show a supposedly Huguenot family named Vincent settling in New Jersey--fairly close to Berks, PA--before heading to the counties straddling the northern border between modern VA and WV. Their ultimate origin is supposed to be the Ile de Re, near La Rochelle, which I believe is highly consistent with the distribution of Z209's descendant clades. Maybe not every branch of this pedigree is supported with the kind of detail I'd like, but they have some very interesting discussion of their immigrant ancestor.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Vincent-9458

[benowicz]

A few lines of inquiry for you that may eventually prove fruitful . . . 3. There are some pedigrees online that show a supposedly Huguenot family named Vincent settling in New Jersey--fairly close to Berks, PA--before heading to the counties straddling the northern border between modern VA and WV. Their ultimate origin is supposed to be the Ile de Re, near La Rochelle, which I believe is highly consistent with the distribution of Z209's descendant clades. Maybe not every branch of this pedigree is supported with the kind of detail I'd like, but they have some very interesting discussion of their immigrant ancestor.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Vincent-9458

Also close by to your family was this Revolutionary War veteran, Lieutenant John Vincent, of Hampshire Co., [W]VA. He was born at Kensington, near London in 1750.

http://revwarapps.org/s16566.pdf

Your ancestor, Joseph Vincent, held a Captain's commission in the company from Dunmore/Shenandoah County. He lived in Shenandoah until the end of the War and rented property in Frederick Co., VA through about 1808. These counties are all adjacent to Hampshire.

https://revwarapps.org/w22951.pdf

https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:Joseph_Vincent_(4)


On the other hand, they're not too far from Washington Co., MD, either, where the family of John [Conrad?] Vincent of the NJ Huguenot family apparently lived between at least 1780 and 1788.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Vincent-3773

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Vincent-3943

These critical generations of the Huguenot family are not super thoroughly documented--at least on the pedigree I've seen. It may be open to question as whether these Maryland Vincents really do connect to the New Jersey Huguenots, although I have seen some well documented families named Johnson and Vannoy that followed a similar migration route.

Having been a Captain in the Revolution, it seems like your ancestor Joseph should have had a bit more documentation surrounding his immediate family. Lt. John Vincent doesn't specifically mention any family in Shenandoah, so there's not much to project from. It's too bad Joseph didn't have a pension application.

[benowicz]

Tweaked my TMRCA estimation algorithm in order to more accurately accommodate weird topologies and provide meaningful MoE, CI and Alpha statistics. I think the results are largely consistent with prior methods, but I feel a bit better about FGC28371 and Y74676.

FG23343 dated phylogeny as of 6 December 2022.png

Encouraged by the success using this method for an important benchmark clade.

https://forums.familytreedna.com/forum/general-interest/scientific-papers/331435-how-does-this-paper-meet-the-minimum-standard-for-reperformance?p=333551#post333551

There seems to be a new guy in the block tree within the 'undifferentiated' section of FGC23343. I have enough information from public projects, etc. to infer the relevant product platforms, and therefore approximate variant counts and resolution. So updating my TMRCA estimates, cascading down from FGC23351, dates changed by less than 10 years all across the board. So no point in uploading a whole new chart.

I did, however, take the opportunity to review the comparisons between STR-derived dates to the SNP-derived data for FGC28370 and descendants, and noticed my dates were literally hundreds of years closer than Discover's all across the board. Discover really don't seem to care how transparently obvious it is that their dates are wrong. Which is not news, but whatever.

[benowicz]

Looks like they changed their mind about the position of the new guy. They split him off on a new branch outside of FGC23343. Minimal impact on age estimates, although it does reinforce suspicions I have about FTNDA's reporting for undifferentiated donors under FT238266 and FGC23349. I'm not sure their reported unshared variant counts are reasonable, but I'll note that the entire point of my overtly probabilistic approach is designed to avoid contamination by such outliers. The VC reported for undifferentiated guy under FGC23353 seems on the high end of the reasonable spectrum derived from the much better represented FGC23343; high, but reasonable.




TMRCA estimates as of 18 February 2023.png