Why the name Tretower.com? Well, Tretower is the name of a very old castle in Breconshire, Wales, which is in ruins now. It was featured last year on the Travel Channel’s “Haunted Places”. The Castle and the newer Manor House next to it was owned by Sir Roger Vychan, which was the old way of spelling “Vaughan”. Sir Roger was a knight loyal to Henry V and died defending him at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. His son, also Sir Roger, was born at Tretower. The area around the old castle was the area where many Vaughan families originated. In William Vaughan’s family, we have a family tradition of loyalty to the British Crown in Colonial times and of a “castle in Wales” where our ancestors came from. It is believed that this was Tretower.
The problem, of course, is proving this. I suspect that some day, Y-DNA testing might be able to get an idea of the Y-Chromosome DNA values for Sir Roger’s line. Of course there would be mutations — nearly 600 years would mean maybe 10 to 12 mutations, I’d estimate, from the original values. Most tested Vaughan DNA is of type R1b, which is Northern European. It could very well be that many of the 56 tests ran so far are from descendants of Sir Roger. But which one?
Our test group has matched 5 Vaughans that are not (as far as we can tell) descendants of William and John, yet they match our guy’s Y-DNA very closely if not perfectly. It is very likely that these Vaughans connect to our family up to several hundred years back in time from the time from of William and John. I suspect more and more close matches will pop up from seemingly “unrelated” Vaughan lines. It could be that our branch is the one from Sir Roger and that William and John’s Y-DNA is very much like the Medieval Knight’s Y-DNA. Or we could be totally unrelated. I have not yet found a connection on any of the 5 “non-related” matches to our guys, but that does not mean they are not there. I’d really like to find out more on these lines. Several seem to descend from William and Elizabeth (Shields) Vaughan of New Kent, Virginia. This William was a Quaker and it may be that William and John were related to him several generations before his time. By comparing the differences (mutations) of the closely connected Vaughans, I think I can calculate the DNA code for our Vaughan’s ancestor. There are several of the close matches which have the exact values of this code as their code.
Anyway, Tretower in Wales is where most of the Vaughans came from. Anyone wanting to look up the early history of their Vaughans need to look up Tretower Castle in Wales.
Eddie Davis