Tretower Genealogy Research

Well, thanks to Paul, who has let me post a Blog here. I hope to do a more informative Blog in a day or so, but for now, I’d like to briefly discuss Y-Chromosome DNA. This science has really revolutionized Genealogical research. For we Vaughan researchers, it has shown some interesting things. First, it has shown that there are more divergent Vaughan lines then many of us imagined. Most Vaughans claim decent from Sir Walter Vychan or Vaughan, and yet the Vaughan lines represented in the Vaughan DNA Project results page show such a level of mutation of markers that I don’t think you can honestly say that most came from this common ancestor. Unless mutation rates are much higher than scientists think.

One solution to this problem is that perhaps many men took the surname Vaughan — which means “Little” in Welsh– independently of their ancestry. It would be very interesting to learn which DNA line represents the line of the knight.

I also should briefly mention that the idea behind this Blog is to document questions that our group has about it’s Vaughan research. I hope to post comments here that will enable “long lost” relatives and descendants of suspected related Vaughans to contact us. My first goal is to try to find all known descendants of William and Fereby Vaughan and /or John and Nancy Vaughan. Fereby’s maiden name was Benton and Nancy’s maiden name was Callicott. William and Fereby especially had several sons who seemed to simply disappear, and our group would love to find out just what happened to them. The majority of William and Fereby’s children went to Northwest Arkansas with William and Fereby. But there are some that we can find no trace of. Thomas Vaughan, William and Fereby’s oldest child, moved to West Virginia and did not go west to Arkansas.

William and Fereby also had several daughters that are a mystery to us. One mystery is Martha’s son, Benjamin Franklin Vaughan. He claimed to be a grandson of William and Fereby and went west with them and his uncles Daniel and Samuel Vaughan. Yet his Y-DNA does NOT match the “known” DNA samples from other descendants of both William Vaughan and John Vaughan, who we know were related to him. We always thought John was Ben’s grandfather, through James Vaughan, John and Nancy’s oldest child. James Vaughan, we thought, had married his first cousin, Martha Vaughan. As John Vaughan and William Vaughan’s Y-DNA matched perfectly, we were very confident that a descendant of Ben Vaughan would have the same Y-DNA. But he didn’t, and we have conducted more than one test on different branches of Ben’s tree to verify the findings.

So that tells us that James Vaughan, son of John and Nancy (Callicott) Vaughan was not his father. Assuming that Martha still was his mother (and how can we be sure she was?) this would mean that Martha had Ben with another man. As Ben had several brothers, we want to try to find a suitable Y-DNA test subject from one of their descendants. But locating one has not been possible yet. Ben’s brothers were Maborne (spelled several different ways), Elijah, David, William and John. So far, we have been tracking Maborne’s line forward in time to find a suitable descendant. Maborne married Lucinda _____ and their sons included: William, Frances, John Henry, Hezehion, Zimri, another Henry and Jobe. They were born between about 1839 and about 1861. I’ll post more about them soon, but if you know of a descendant of these men, especially if you are a direct male descendant (in other words, a son of a son of a son of a son of a son (and so on) of Maborne), then please contact me at ec21davis@gmail.com

Eddie Davis