Tretower Genealogy Research

This previous June I began selling copies of my Vaughan book on CD and did fairly well.  One interesting development was the formation of a new group based on matching genetic signatures to our William and John Vaughan descendants.  After one Vaughan descendant noticed that his Vaughan Y-DNA matched several Stephens and Hoopers, he contacted them and soon the idea of a group to look at the genetic profile emerged.  Rusty Vaughan, Ed Martin and myself formed two groups actually.

The Stephens/Vaughan Yahoo group set up like Vaughan Pioneers, and Ed Martin’s Wales and Southwest England Y-DNA group.   This second group is a Family Tree DNA group to compare the matching DNA.  We’ve formulated a Modal Haplotype of the matching men and suspect that there is some sort of a common ancestor either in the Breckon region around Tretower and/or in the Bristol Channel region of England.  We have some demographics to hint at this.  The group is rather new, and we would like to get all matching Vaughans, Hoopers and Stephens (and others who match) to join this FTDNA group.  I’ll try to post a hyperlink to the Links column on this page.

Also this month, I began tabulating results for 67 marker and 37 marker Phylogenetic Trees, which are very helpful in Genetic Genealogical research.  Results have been posted to both the Vaughan Pioneer and Stephens/Vaughan research groups.

Eddie Davis

This May I have been busy writing a new book on the Vaughan family — William and Fereby Vaughan and John and Nancy Vaughan.  I’ve been pleased with the response, especially since the book has been available only on CD.  I also found this month some new information on the John Vaughan that sailed to America on the Bona Nova back in 1619.  One record found on-line stated that he was from Devonshire, England.  This could be a big break for us, and I’ve began researching Devonshire Vaughans, but have not had much time to do deep research as I’ve been busy preparing my book for sale.  We also had several 67 marker tests come in this month and several are very close matches to our William and John.  So it is looking promising this summer for Vaughan researchers.

Eddie Davis

Well, it looks like we are back in business again.  I want to again thank Paul Vaughan for letting me use this page for my Vaughan family blog.  April and early May has been a rather busy period of time for research.  We have had a few matches to our William and John Vaughan in the Y-DNA study and I’m trying to figure out how all the matches connect.  I get the distinct feeling there is indeed a fairly recent connection to the other Vaughans who match our two guy’s Y-DNA.  There seems to be an underlining theme of places that tie the lines together.  Virginia, South Carolina and then Hawkins County, Tennessee.  Of course as far as I can tell, our William and John did not go to South Carolina, but several of the Y-DNA matches have South Carolina connections, so I have been looking at the area.  I’ve been looking at the family of one match — the descendants of Barney Vaughan, son of ____ Vaughan and his wife Nancy ______.  I have been looking at Sullivan and Sullivant families, as it just may be that Nancy was either a Sullivan or Sullivant.  I’m still researching this.  The Bolling/Bolden/Boulden name keeps popping up in Vaughan families connected genetically to our guys.  Wilson Vaughan’s wife was a Nancy Bowlen or Bowling and I wondered briefly if Barney Vaughan could have been a son of Wilson and Nancy, but Wilson was too young, as he was born about 1800 and Barney was born about 1812.  As Barney’s Y-DNA perfectly matches Wilson’s, there probably was a match.  Both lived in Hawkins County, TN and of course our William and John lived there too, at about the same time as Barney and Wilson.  So I’m trying to connect the dots and hopefully a picture of the Vaughan family will emerge.

Eddie Davis

This webpage has had something happen to it that I am unable to fix.  There is an error statement that appears multiple times on most pages and can’t be removed.  This page disappeared from the Internet for several weeks and has only just recently “reappeared”.  Rather than post new things, I plan to wait until these problems are fixed.  If you are a Vaughan researcher, please e-mail me at ec21davis@gmail.com and I will be glad to discuss Vaughan Genealogy with you.

An interesting new development in our Vaughan Pioneer research occurred yesterday as Phylis Deutsch was looking at an entry at Ancestry.com for the marriage record of John Vaughan to Nancy Callicott.  The record listed John’s place of birth as Ireland.  This made me look at the possibility that our Vaughans could have been Irish.  My mother always claimed that the Vaughans were “Scot-Irish” and others in the Vaughan Pioneer group had similiar stories.  So trying to think outside of the box, I began some research yesterday and today to see if there were any Vaughans who came to the US from Ireland in Colonial times.

I was rather surprised to find that there were some records.  The most interesting one was found on a web page dealing with the Genealogy of a Thomas Green Vaughan.  It seems that this Thomas’ ancestors were a Vaughan family that apparently settled in  Offaly County and Laois County, Ireland, part of English and Scottish settlers that the English brought in as part of the Irish Plantations when they controlled Ireland in the 1600s and 1700s.  This Vaughan family apparently was from Wales (then part of England) and very possibly of the Golden Grove Vaughans.  The founder of this branch was a Hector Vaughan who received land forfeited from Terence Coghlan who had rebelled against the English overlords.  Hector had over 1,000 acres of land and was the High Sheriff of the county.  What is interesting is that he had a descendant named William Vaughan, of about the same age as our William Vaughan.  This William was born in Ireland but is said to have immigrated to Norfolk, Virginia.  Obviously, this is very interesting to me, and I’m trying to find out if anything can be found out about this William Vaugahan.  I was hoping he had a descendant that had had his Y-DNA tested, but I don’t think he has.  This line of Vaughans is of great interest to me and while it might be that our line does not connect at all to them, at least it is a new and refreshing lead.

Eddie Davis

This past month, due to fewer hours at work, I have had more time to research the Chowanoke connection to William Vaughan’s wife, Fereby.  There were two Benton families in North Carolina and southern Virginia at the time that Fereby was born, one was the ancestors of Thomas Hart Benton, and the other was the Epaphroditus Benton line.  As research has eliminated the Thomas Hart Benton line, I have concluded that Fereby comes from some branch of this family.

I won’t go into all the “proof” as I’ve covered that here before, but having found a series of three volumes of North Carolina court records at Ancestry, I decided to look at the families around the Bentons in the late 1600s and 1700s.

I found a fairly tight knit group of neighbors who sometimes intermarried.  The given name of “Fereby” (in various spellings) was not rare in the region of Chowan/Bertie/Gates Counties in NC and Nansemond County in VA.  Most stem from respect for Pheribee Savage, wife of Francis Pugh.  Even when there was not a blood tie to her, there were families which named their daughter Fereby.  I think this probably explains where Fereby Benton’s name comes from.

If you look at land grants and court records from this time frame, you first see that the mix-up over the Virginia and North Carolina boundary line can throw off a researcher, as what was once part of Virginia could be now part of North Carolina, or vice versa.  Epahroditus Benton owned land on Bennett’s Creek, which was next to land set up for the remainders of the Chowanoke tribe.  The Freeman family, which intermarried with the Chowanoke Hoyter family, lived close by.  Some Pughs, all descendants of Francis and Pheribee, also show up in records.   There is a large Parker family which left a large number of records, and they are all in the mix.

There was a Vaughan family there too, descendants of either a John or Thomas Vaughan.  There are several land transfers between John and Thomas to vairous members of the Holland family.  The Holland family seems to be one that was very close to this Vaughan line.  A William Speight also was a buddy of the Hollands and Vaughans, from what the records relate.  As several of the deeds of these Vaughans mention that the land they are either buying or selling borders land owned by Epaphroditus Benton, these Vaughans are very interesting to me.  Of course there is very little on them, they managed to sneak away in history before leaving any clues of a tie to my William Vaughan and Fereby Benton.  But I guess that what makes the hobby fun — pouring through information, learning more and more about history, and drawing educated conclusions.  I think now that William Vaughan was possibly born in the disputed area between VA and NC and may have grown up next door to the Chowanoke Indians.  I think one of the Benton men married a Chowanoke girl and this was the source for the stories of Fereby Benton’s “Cherokee Princess” stories.  I suspect her father, a Benton, may have been the mixed blood instead of her mother.  If this is so, then this would explain why Fereby’s MtDNA was white.

I also have began looking through the archives of the Saponitown Forum.  They have a lot of information on extinct and unknown tribes in the area and it could be some clues could be found here.  If I find anything, I’ll post my findings next month.

Eddie Davis

I’m very fortunate to have access to Ancestry.com’s wonderful databases.  As I have had my hours at work cut back some, I have used this additional time to check the Ancestry databases for Vaughans and Bentons.  I have been trying to locate Fereby Benton’s family, or more accurately, prove that she is a descendant of Epaphroditus Benton, who lived in eastern Virginia and then in northeastern North Carolina.  There were several Vaughans that lived near Epa. Benton in NC and I have wondered if one of these Vaughans could have been William and John Vaughan’s father or grandfather.  I also have looked closely at the Pugh family which descends from Francis Pugh and his wife Pheribee Savage.  Obviously, the name Pheribee is the attraction, and it is only deepened by the appearance of Lazarus Benton, a grandson of Epaphroditus Benton, who appears in the will of Francis, as one who either owed him money or was owed by the late Pugh.  As Lazarus, I feel was either Fereby Benton’s father or grandfather, (probably grandfather) this family, as well as families related to the Pughs by marriage, such as the Parkers, are very interesting to me.

I was able to find a large volume of material at Ancestry — 3 volumes of NC records, fully indexed, and as I type this, I have probably 30 pages from these volumes copied to my computer, awaiting me to study their contents.  I have always felt like there was a connection out there, somewhere, lost in volumes of dusty county records and state documents, that, if they were all put together, would point squarely at Fereby’s family, as well as possibly William Vaughan’s line.

My thoughts this month are over the possiblity that William Vaughan was not born in Virginia like I had thought, but was born in North Carolina.  Or else he was born in VA and his family moved to NC while he was still a child.  I’ve spent many hours looking at VA records, and there were many Vaughan families in Colonial Virginia, but I haven’t really looked deeply at the possibility that William (and John) could have been from North Carolina.

Maybe it was the abundance of Vaughans in VA that led me to this conclusion.  Or maybe it was because the first records we have of William were in VA.  But Fereby’s entry on the 1850 Madison County, Arkansas Death Schedule lists her place of birth as North Carolina, and I believe this is indeed correct.  It could be that she was born in eastern Tennessee when it was considered part of NC, but either way, she was from NC.  If William met her sometime around 1770, it is very likely that he met her in NC.  So maybe he was living there.  I’m afraid, however, that finding proof of this might be impossible.  The northern part of NC and the mid-south and southwestern parts of VA were very thinly populated in colonial times, and both Fereby’s suspected family and William himself, were “Wilderness people”.  Not city dwellers, they roamed around.

Lazarus Benton, for example, jumped back and forth from VA to NC, over the course of his life.  The moves were not far — back and forth over the state lines– but this, plus the frontier-like setting of the areas where they lived seems to ensure that there will not be much out there to find.

At any rate, I’m going to try to find clues.

Eddie Davis

Over the last month, I have been made aware of just how bad stress in a person’s life can taint the joy they have for the things they enjoy to do.  Sadly, stress from finances, jobs, personal family problems and other things can keep a person so tied up, they have no time or even desire to do what they normally enjoy, such as genealogy.

That has been my case this past month.  Job stress at Christmas time and continuing into the new year has forced me to focus my time and energies on survival instead of hobbies.  It is a sad, sad commentary of the world that in spite of our advanced civilization, in spite of all the proud, boastful scientific discoveries that have been made, as well as the claims of spiritual and philosophical enlightenment, our world is simply getting more and more chaotic and troublesome.  People are hurting and are stressed out.  You can see the result of the stress of the world even in areas connected with Genealogy.  Genealogical societies are dwindling in membership.  People who begin their genealogical research are doing so without a lot of information on their family, as either families are broken apart mulitple times, or else the stressed out members of the family have no time to recount stories of their family history to the younger generations.

Many modern genealogists are cold, “just the facts” sort of researchers, focused in the modern way of doing things.  They miss out on the warmth of family stories and the joy of a connection with history.  It is a sad statement of what our world has become.  I imagine if you looked at Genealogists in the 1960s and 1970s and compare them to today’s bunch, you’d find a lot less depth to their research.  Sure, the Internet and computers have revolutionized the hobby, but sadly, they have done so in a world where people are becoming more and more robot-like and more and more stressed out.  You used to hear in the mid 20th century how by the year 2000 we would all work about 3 days a week and the rest of the time would be one big weekend.  Now, 9 years after 2000, we are working more hours and are more stressed then ever.  The folly of man.  How much of our lives are we missing by worrying and stressing.  How little we will be able to share with our children and grandchildren, as we have sacrificed our lives for “The American dream.”

–Eddie Davis

I have noticed that more and more information about our ancestors is lost every generation.  I’ve heard time and time again the variations of the story about how William Vaughan was a a Welsh trader with the Cherokee Indians and how he married Fereby, a Cherokee Princess.  But even this much told story is becoming more and more diluted.  Newer Genealogists simply remember a story about a trader with the Indians who took a wife from the tribe.  Some don’t even claim Cherokee.  In a way, it is somewhat sad that we fail to interest the next generation with our distant ancestry.  I’ve often wondered what the original stories about William and Fereby really were, when they told their children.  Did they embellish the tales, did they just flat-out lie, or did they tell the honest truth, but the tales were warped with time?  I don’t know if we will really ever know.

I spent several days last week going through Chowanoke Indian information, and it still seems the most probable lead for finding Fereby’s Indian connection, but the lack of records for the early colonial period means that there is very scant evidence of any of the tribe.  Apparently several of the Chowanoke remained on the land and intermarried with both black and white families.  I had several ancestors (unconnected to each other at the time) that lived on land that either once belonged to the tribe, or that bordered the last members of the tribe.  Often there was rocky relations between the whites and the Chowanokes, who dwindled fast in number — if you go by cold, neutral records.

From bits and pieces, found on the Internet, I have theorized that many of the Chowanoke and other tiny tribes that seemed to disappear, simply intermarried into white families and “became” white — or in some cases, intermarried into black families with the same result.  I think this is why so many people have those “Indian princess” stories in their family legends.  I suspect this was some way of simply stating that grandma was of some unknown tribe somewhere back in her history, to the point that the effects of time had dimmed the exact tribe.

I think Cherokee was selected as the tribe that “granny’s people” were part of, simply because (at least in SW Missouri where I live) it is the largest, best known tribe.  In reality, there are probably thousands of descendants of Chowokes and related tribes of colonial VA and NC that are trying with great frustration and no success to find their ancestor on Cherokee rolls.  The Chowanoke never really disappeared at all, I suspect, they simply became diluted into the white communities (and black communities), and the effects of time did the rest.

Eddie Davis

On this eve of the election, I thought I’d post about yet another DNA match to our Vaughans.

The Vaughan DNA site is posting a new match to our Vaughans — 35 out of 37 and the two mismatches are only one point away each.  Kit #131081 Jesse Lee Vaughan Jr. tested, he descends from a Edmund Vaughan, who lived in Goochland, Cumberland and Powhatten Counties in VA from 1771 to 1783.  He died June 1796 in Scott County, KY and was married to Sally Neville.

This is a seemingly unrelated line, and more and more we are getting close, non-related matches.  In fact our ‘group’ of matches is tied with another ‘group’ of Vaughan matches for the most — each 13 matches.  It looks like our Vaughans and this other set of Vaughans are the two main branches of Vaughans.  That means simply that William and John descended from one of two major families of Vaughans that came to the USA.  Now if we can only find out how they connect to British and Welsh Vaughans.

I suspect that we may be able, one day, to tie our Vaughans in to a Welsh or British line of Vaughans.  Each seemingly unrelated find is like a piece of a puzzle and it will lead us one day to our Vaughan ancestors.

Eddie Davis