Tretower Genealogy Research

As Independence Day nears, I thought I’d write, this month, on the Patriotism of the Vaughans.  When I began looking at my Vaughan ancestors, I was rather surprised to find that many of them did not participate in the wars that made our country.  My family left Northwest Arkansas during the Civil War to live during the duration of the war in Kansas.  As for the Revolutionary War, it was a mixed bag.  John Vaughan served on the Continental line in the Maryland Artillery, reaching the rank of Sergeant.  Later, his widow, Nancy (Callicott) Vaughan received a pension for his service.  But his (suspected) brother, William Vaughan, has no clear indication of service in the Patriot cause during the Revolutionary War.  Many descendants have whispered the word ‘Tory’, though I don’t think he was that either.  From the best evidence that I have seen, he probably just went about his buisiness without taking sides during the war.

What is interesting is that traditionally, the Vaughans of Wales were loyal British subjects for most of their history.  One author wondered if this history of loyality to the British crown was such a strong tradition that it influenced William’s decission regarding the war.  I don’t really know if he had any deep thoughts about the issue, as he always seemed to be more interested in living in the wilderness than in politics.  That being said, it is true that he served in Captain Looney’s company in Lord Dunmore’s War, a few years before the Revolutionary War.  During that war he was a British colonist, so maybe there was some loyality that died hard in him.  Or maybe the war was enough for him.  At any rate, the Vaughans transfered their citizenship from Great Britian to the United States, and in more modern times, William and John’s descenants have served their county in the military.

I’ve been thinking about doing a book on William and Fereby, as well as John and Nancy, but not just a simple retelling of the genealogy.  I’d like it to explore the whole “feel” of the Vaughans, their quirks and charms, as well as showing the latest findings and exploring theories.  It still is in the “think about it” stage, but I think a book needs to be done for the current generation of Vaughan researchers.  As crazy as it may sound, the books done on William and Fereby seem to have been done from the perspective of the generations before the Internet.  Research on-line, plus the new science of Genetic Genealogy has advanced the research and now the average researcher has new tools to use.  So I’m thinking about doing a book.

Eddie Davis

If you look at some of the markers tested for descendants of William Vaughan and John Vaughan — or the handful of seemingly unrelated Vaughans that match them closely– you will find several DYS values that are rare for R1b Haplogroup men.

I found, earlier this year, a study done that looked at over 3,000 men of Haplogroup R1b (which would include the subgroups).  The chart looked at the percentage of each that had a certain value for each DYS marker.  So if Marker 442 had 1500 men with the value of 12, then 50% would have that value at marker 442.  What the study shows is what the most common marker values for the R1b Haplogroup are.  There are very little variety in the numbers — most values are no further then 4 numbers away from those at the other end of the spectrum for that value.  Since there is such a tight set of values for most markers — and some markers have higher mutation rates than others, so they have more variety– you can calculate how a person’s markers compare with the ‘average’ for R1b.  I looked at the values for our William and John Vaughan, and then compared the “rare” values to the other Vaughans tested in the Vaughan study.  Here are the results:

List of DYS markers that less than 20% of R1b men have:
CDYb =39     20% of R1b
464a =14     15.1% of R1b
CDYa=35     19.9% of R1b
442=11         12.3% of R1b
385b=16         2.5% of R1b
392=15         .3% of R1b

Note in particular, the last two, that is 2 POINT 5 percent: 2.5% and even rarer, POINT 3 percent .3%  That is an extremely rare value for R1b.  All of our Vaughans that match close (including those other Vaughans that match DNA but are not of William or John’s line) share these values, all have the 392 value of 15, so it is NOT a recent mutation.  And all of these values are NOT shared with the other Vaughans.  In other words, only our Vaughans and those who match close to them have these values, no other Vaughan line has 392 as 15 at all, only our guys and the ones who are close genetic links.  What this means is that the 11 Vaughans in the study that share these values obviously share a common ancestor.  It looks very likely that the rest of those in the study don’t share a common ancestor, or at least not one for over 1,000 years.  The above values can be thought of as the defining values for our block of Vaughans — William and John descendants, Thomas H. Vaughan’s line, James Vaughan of Laurens Co. SC, Wilson Vaughan of Hawkins Co. TN, Ben Vaughan of Calboun Co. MS and Matthew Vaughan, the probable son of William and Elizabeth Shields Vaughan.  These men all come from a common line, and the rare marker values confirm this.  If our Vaughans all had the ‘common’ values for R1b like most of the other 3,299 men in the R1b study, it could be a coincidence.  But William and John’s DNA has a few places that is rare enough that less than one in 500 R1b men have this value.

I hope someday that these rare markers will help us identify who William and John’s ancestors were.

Eddie Davis

We are preparing to test the 2nd of 2 Mitochondrial DNA descendants of Fereby (Benton) Vaughan, wife of William Vaughan.  This newest test is on a descendant of Fereby through her daughter Lucy.  Sadly, all three MtDNA tests will have been done through this same daughter’s line.  I’m still looking for a MtDNA descendant through one of Fereby’s other daughters, but there has been no luck finding one yet.  MtDNA has to be passed down from mother to child, and male children do not pass their mother’s MtDNA down to their children.  So an MtDNA descendant has a new surname each generation.  It makes tracing them forward in time a bit more difficult.  Still, these two latest tests should verify the test we did several years ago on Kim, who gave us Fereby’s Haplotype as “H”, the most common MtDNA type, from Northern Europe.

I’m typing this on St. Patrick’s Day.  I always love St. Paddy’s Day, and even more after finding some Irish roots.  I was thinking today about ancestors — I think today is a time when many people think of Genealogy and Ancestry– and I began remembering what my Mom used to tell me when I would ask her about her ancestry.  My Mom was the daughter of a Vaughan woman, but  she didn’t know much about her father’s family, which was Myers.  She thought they were French and came from New Orleans (they were actually German and came from Indiana).  The Vaughans, she used to claim, were “Scot-Irish” she thought.  I always thought that was an interesting group to belong to — not just Irish but Scot Irish.  Of course I’m pretty sure she was wrong here too, as the Vaughans were Welsh instead of Irish or Scot-Irish.  If you go to Winkipedia.org, you can find a lot of stuff about the Irish and even Scot-Irish.  It explains who they actually were (Ulster Scots, or Scottish and English people settled in Northern Ireland by the English to help subdue the Irish after the English had taken over the Island).  Today the area they came from makes up Northern Ireland.  It is an interesting article at Winkipedia.  Until I saw William Vaughan’s Y-DNA match other unrelated Vaughans, I had wondered if maybe he was actually not Welsh but maybe was Irish or Scot-Irish.  Some said his middle name was Patrick, remember.  Thankfully, Y-DNA testing has lead me away from that, as his DNA matches other Vaughans with a Welsh tradition of ancestry.  Still, I’ve always been interested if there were any Irish connections.  A book on the early Dark Ages I was reading mentioned that Irish tribes raided what is now Wales quite a few times after the Romans left Britain.  Some may have stayed there and intermarried with the population.  So our Vaughans could have distant Irish roots.

I’ve spent most of this month on seemingly fruitless quests for relatives to my Vaughan family. First, I’ve tried to locate another MtDNA descendant of Fereby (Benton) Vaughan by searching through census records. I zeroed in on Margaret and Charity Titsworth, both descendants in a direct female line from Fereby. After many, many hours of searching, I finally had to admit that I could not find any more about these two sisters. Complicating the search was the fact that Charity had a cousin by the same name that married a Calvin Fine, and for a time I thought she was the same person as Margaret’s sister. It turned out she wasn’t, and I still don’t know who Charity married (or if she married).

Giving up, I began looking at Margaret Hinds, who was also a MtDNA descendant. I was more fortunate with her, but sadly, two out of her three daughters did not apparently marry, and the third daughter, Clara B. Handley, simply disappears, and I can’t find if she died or simply married. The joys of genealogical research!

Then, this week, another mystery. While at the local library, I was looking through a book entitled “Obituaries of Washington County, Arkansas Volume 3″ and found an entry for a Dalley Vaughan. He died in March of 1906 and was said to have lived in Madison County, Arkansas, near Clifty (which is where Sheriff Ben Vaughan’s family lived). He was said to have been a brother of “Sheriff Vaughan”. Amazingly, there were two separate Ben Vaughans that were Sheriff in Madison. The first is my ancestor, who married Cherubia Harp and who’s Y-DNA does not match William and John’s. The second one was Sheriff from 1904 to 1906, after the older Ben Vaughan died. Ben’s grandson, also named Ben Vaughan (a son of Pleasant Michael Vaughan) was this man, who was Sheriff in 1904 to 1906.  Yet neither young Ben  nor Old Ben had a brother named Dalley. I could not find Dalley on any census. And it is not Old Ben’s son James Polk Dallas Vaughan, as he died in 1909 and never went by Dalley. I’m totally at a loss over who Dalley Vaughan is. The whole month has been very frustrating — lots of clues and leads, but no conclusions to mention.

If any of the names in this Blog sound familiar to you, please e-mail me and make my day.

Eddie Davis

Well, after Bill Willard’s 67 marker test came in and then we received Phillip Ray Vaughan’s test, we were delighted to see that both men match 67 out of 67 markers.  Phillip Ray was a descendant of Ben Vaughan who married Cherubia Harp.  Now it is looking like either Ben Vaughan’s father was a Willard, or else his father, James Vaughan, was not the son of John Vaughan but himself a Willard.  We know it could not be James’s father, John, that was the Willard, as John’s other sons’ Y-DNA matches descendants of William Vaughan.  So we have a two generation possibility.  As Bill’s line came from Prince Edward County, Virginia, where James Vaughan’s mother, Nancy Callicott was born and spent much of her childhood, I’m suspecting that it was Nancy who had a relationship with a Willard and produced James.  I’m not sure John Vaughan even know that James was not his son.  Of course they could have adopted an orphan from the area where they lived, who took their name, but I don’t think this was what happened.

First, John and Nancy had only been married a year when James was born.  He was their oldest son, and I don’t think a young, newly married couple without children would adopt a child before they had produced one themselves.  Nancy was only 17 or 18 when James was born, and I really don’t think she was an adopted mother at that age.  Of course to verify or disprove this, we’d need to test the Y-DNA of some of James and Martha’s other son’s descendants.  If all of their sons’ DNA matched Ben’s, then it was James who was probably the Willard child.  If Ben’s was the only one of the sons with different DNA, then it was he who had been adopted or born out of wedlock.

Nancy and John tried in 1792 to marry, but they didn’t go through with it, though they filed the legal paperwork to get a license.  Nancy was only 15 then, and I now wonder if she was pregnant by a Willard boy and John Vaughan had just stepped in to save her, but maybe she changed her mind or her family didn’t disown her as she’d feared.  At either rate, they “ran away” in 1794 to neighboring Halifax county to wed.  Maybe James was not born  in 1795 as the records claim, but 1792 or 93. This is just speculation, of course, but certainly the Willard family of Bill Vaughan matches closely Ben Vaughan’s family.  The mystery continues….

Eddie Davis

As 2008 begins, it always seems appropriate to look forward to the upcoming year and figure out what goals to pursue.  Our Vaughan Pioneer group has steadily grown over the past 9 years and have launched many projects.  Our goals for the upcoming year have yet to be determined as a group, but personally, I’d like to see our group continue in it’s sponsoring of DNA testing.  We are still trying to locate a descendant of one of James and Martha Vaughan’s sons to compare their Y-DNA to the descendants of Ben Vaughan that we have already tested.

We may need to concentrate on looking at seemingly unrelated Vaughans in hopes of possibly determining a connection to William and John Vaughan.  As always, I’m trying to enter into my Vaughan database as many descendants of William and John that I can find.  Our group’s letter writing project had some results, but there are, I feel, many more descendants of William and John that have not been contacted.  I’ve mentioned to our group the idea of trying to contact some of the many descendants of Thomas and Nancy (Ford) Vaughan.  This oldest son of William and Fereby often is forgotten as research has focused mainly on the Arkansas branch of their family.  Many of Thomas’ descendants moved to Oregon in the 1800s.  I wonder how many family stories may still be unrecorded from this branch of the family.

My hope is that as DNA testing becomes more and more a part of Genealogical research, more Vaughans will have their DNA tested to help further the database of DNA that cane be used to determine ancestry.  I also hope that a close look at the DNA of Bill Willard, who’s Y-DNA matches descendants of Ben Vaughan very closely, will maybe help us solve the mystery of Ben’s Y-DNA mismatch to William and John’s Y-DNA.

As always, if you are reading this posting and are a descendant of William and Fereby Vaughan and/or John and Nancy Vaughan, contact me and I’d be glad to share information.

Eddie Davis

Deborah Burns, a member of our Vaughan Pioneer group, posted this to our group today, and the author is unknown, but it captures the heart of our hobby. Merry Christmas to everyone!

Ever wonder why we research our family history? The following write-up gives a reason to why we are so passionate about finding our ancestors. I am sorry I do not know the author. But I do feel they did a good job and I wanted to share it with you.

We Are the Chosen

In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again, to tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve.

Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who has gone before. We are the storytellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us, “Tell our story!”

So, we do.

In finding them, we find ourselves. How many graves have I stood before now and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors, “You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us.” How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say.

It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who I am and why I do the things I do. It goes to seeing a cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds and indifference and saying, “I can’t let this happen.” The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

It goes to doing something about it. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish, how they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family.

It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a Nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth. Without them we could not exist, and we love each one, as far back as we can reach.

That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So. We do.

With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers.

That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those whom we had never known before.

I really appreciate all the help you have given me in finding my ancestors.

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Eddie Davis

Our group, in early December, sent out 493 letters to Vaughans in Northwest Arkansas.  It was a large project and many in the group helped.  As of December 10th, we had 129 “responses”.  About 123 of these were returned letters where the address was no-longer valid (due probably to an unreliable database of names, found at Ancestry.com).  But about 6 people responded by mail or e-mail, including one by phone.  We found 2 descendants who did not know anything about us.  And every day we wait for more replies.  A costly project, but one we wanted to do, before all the older generation pass away.  One of our respondents was in his mid 80s.  So I’m glad I did it.  If you are reading this and are one of those who received a letter, please contact me at ec21davis@gmail.com.  We want to hear from you.

Eddie Davis