Category: Shepard

More DNA testing

On By jenbumannIn cain, dna, Genealogy, ireland, ShepardLeave a comment

FamilyTreeDNA, the company that has done all of our genetic testing in the past, had a holiday sale at the end of 2011. So I decided to upgrade a few of our samples that they have in their freezers.

Firstly, I upgraded Robert Cain’s sample to 67 markers. It had previously only been tested at 37 markers along with a specialized SNP test that is being used to help sort out the CAIN lines. That is probably all I will be able to do with his sample for a while, and I am crossing my fingers that we won’t need many more tests with his DNA, samples can go bad and with Robert having passed away, I am left without a source for this genetic line.

Secondly, I upgraded grandfather’s (William Shepard) sample. Grandfather’s maternal DNA was never tested, so I remedied that situation, and I added the FamilyFinder test. This is the one I had done, sometime in early 2011, to my DNA. The results help you to find cousins in their database (male or female, it doesn’t matter) and your ethnicity. Grandfather’s maternal DNA will give us genetic information on g-grandmother Dick’s maternal line back to Sarah Asher who married Thomas Headlee in Pennsylvania in the very early 1800s.

Results are expected sometime around February 20th. If we are lucky it might be a little earlier. But I imagine with the sale that they had, lots of folks have decided to jump on the upgrade bandwagon.

I will keep folks updated.

On the same note, I periodically receive updates from surname group administrators on the progress of the testing, the sorting out of the lines, and other news related to that surname. The most active group so far has been the CAIN line, and it has come to our attention that there is a particular marker that is showing up with our CAINs, that will be confirmed with the upcoming upgrade results, indicating a Briefne connection. Part of what this means is that our CAINs are descendants of original Irish/Celts, not one of the invaders who later integrated into the population. It also points to Martin Cain possibly coming from the Northern Ireland area, as I was beginning to speculate.

The future is looking very interesting.

NOTE: The Kingdom of Breifne or Bréifne (anglicized Breffny, Brefnie or Brenny) was the traditional territory for an early Irish tribal group known as the Uí Briúin Bréifne. The Bréifne territory included the modern Irish counties of Leitrim and Cavan, along with parts of County Sligo. [from Wikipedia]

I’mmmm baaack…

On By jenbumannIn Genealogy, hartley, ShepardLeave a comment

I guess I misspoke in my earlier post. I didn’t really have a speck to time to keep folks updated on my progress during my research trip. The hours flew by, then exhaustion set in, then sleep. Next day do it all over again.

But now I am home and all I can say is, the trip was a bust. But only in the sense that I didn’t find a speck of evidence that Hartley Shepard is the child of Henry and Huldah Shepard. I checked court records, probate records, land deeds, tax rolls, pretty much every index I could find that they had at the Family History Library. So far, no joy.

So my next stop is going directly to the sources in Morgan and Washington counties of Ohio. I am sure there are records out there I haven’t even heard of yet.

I did find some interesting bits on our Massachusetts and Ohio relatives. Lots of local and county history books add to the tales about these people. And it is not just our Shepard line, we have Dewey, Noble, Warriner, and Ashley connections too, and they each have their own stories to tell.

I am looking forward to getting this all put together for everyone to read. Meanwhile the search for those elusive Hartley records goes on…now where did I put that magnifying glass…

Here I am again…

On By jenbumannIn colonel william shepard, ShepardLeave a comment

…at home during another snow storm. It’s the middle of March already, you would think the gods would be bored with torturing us by now.

I have good news though. A friend of mine recently moved to Massachusetts. In fact he moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, which is 20 minutes away from Westfield. Westfield…the town where the Shepards came from. The town that has the library that has 4 archival boxes of Gen. William Shepard papers. But that is not the good news. The good news is he has agreed to help us out by going to said library and making copies from said collection for me.

Several months later…oops, sorry, too busy. So no copies for me.

Merry Christmas to the Shepard Clan…

On By jenbumannIn Genealogy, ShepardLeave a comment

The test results have come in and the news is good. Here is a clarification of our results with Wayne Shepard, results which have a genetic marker mismatch of -5:

Distance: 5-6 – Related
61-62/67 You share the same surname (or a variant) with another male and you mismatch by five or six ‘points’. Because of the volatility within some of the markers this is slightly tighter than being 11/12, 23/25, or 33/37, and it’s most likely that you matched closely on previous Y-DNA tests. It’s most likely that you matched 24/25, 36/37 or 37/37 on previous Y-DNA tests and your mismatch will be found within the second panel at DYS #’s 458, 459 a, 459b, 449, or within 464 a-d, or at DYS 576, 570, CDYa or CDYb in our third panel of markers. Your common ancestor is not very recent, but your mismatch is likely within the range of most well established surname lineages in Western Europe.

More on this later…

Shepard update…

On By jenbumannIn dewey, Genealogy, massachusetts, ShepardLeave a comment

Just a short note to let you know that I have been working very diligently this weekend sorting out all the lines on this Shepard connection. In fact in using my separately created genealogy file for this problem I created a chart you can view at my flickr site. It has been a real hoot trying to untangle all the cousins that married each other in several of the generations. [Until I feel very confident of the connection, I won’t be adding this data to my regular family file.]

In a nutshell, assuming this connection correct, the Shepard line starts with an immigrant, William, from England arriving in the 1600s, the second generation settling in Westfield, Massachusetts and pretty much staying there until Henry and Huldah Shepard moved with their respective families, along with other relations, to Ohio.

Dont ignore your cousins…

On By jenbumannIn Genealogy, hartley, massachusetts, ohio, Shepard, susannah smithLeave a comment

One of the cardinal rules in genealogical research, is “Don’t ignore your cousins”. Too often family history researchers, especially newbies, tend to focus too much on their direct line during their research. Doing so can greatly decrease their chances of finding useful information that might help: knock down brick walls, find those missing pictures, get details on family they might otherwise never know.

Case in point.

It is very possible that I have found our mysterious Shepard progenitor. “How is this possible?”, you ask. Well I thank modern science and good old fashioned cousin searching.

Thanks to DNA we recently had a match between another Shepherd gentleman who is not a descendant of Hartley. This means that this Dr. John Shepherd and Grandfather are related very closely, genealogically speaking. But the question is, who is their common ancestor? Dr. John had in his research one generation further back than we did, to a John Shepherd born in New Jersey about 1783. Who was he in relation to Hartley? We didn’t know and further research hadn’t really turned up anything of use.

Cut to a different line. The Deem surname married into our Shepard line in West Virginia, there is a Deem Family site that I found last year, where I also found a picture purported to be of Susannah Smith Shepard, Hartley’s wife. On this site, Hartley and Susannah’s daughter, Sevilla, is listed because she married a gentleman by the name of Hiram Deem. Sevilla’s parents are listed, Hartley and Susannah, as are all four of her grandparents Henry Shepard and Huldah, and Joseph Smith and Catherine. I was curious how this person who put the information up on the Deem site knew who Hartley’s parents were, no one in our family had ever heard the names. When I tried to ask the poster where he got the information I received no response. So I gave up for a while.

Yesterday I had some time at work and decided to do a little Shepard research, as I do every couple of months. This time I decided to try the Henry and Huldah angle. Imagine my surprise when I got a hit. I had found a whole site uploaded by a Shepard descendant whose immigrant ancestor had started in Massachusetts. But in that data was a listing for Henry and Huldah Shepard along with his ancestors all the way back to merry old England. Not a mention of good ol’ Scotland.

Two items peaked my cautious interest in this site, after all this connection could be bogus. 1. There was mention of one generation where the children were split up due to the death of their father when they were very young. One child was sent to New Jersey – [hmmm – isn’t that where Dr. John’s ancestor was born?], the other was sent to Westfield, Massachusetts [our possible relations]. 2. Henry, while being born in Massachusetts, is said to have died in Ohio. I do know he was married in Ohio, I found a marriage notice for him and Huldah that was culled from the Marietta, Washington County, Ohio paper. Washington County is just below Monroe County, where Hartley is said to have been born.

So all in all very intriguing bits of information, that makes me smile in hopeful anticipation.

Of great interest, if true, is a link to the following site on Wikipedia: Gen. William Shepard this General, if a true connection, would be Hartley Shepard’s grandfather.

I have also found archival collections for this General Shepard at the Westfield Athenaeum Library. Unfortunately, we can’t get them to sent the collection here as we can with our Wisconsin Historical Society materials.

Yesterday I also finally made contact with Nick Deem, the gentleman who had the picture of Susannah Smith on his site along with the information on Hartley’s parents. According to Nick “The information and picture was handed down in my family. I am not sure which of my Mothers sisters or brothers had the picture. They have all passed on now.” But it seems that the information could very likely be correct, because there are no records in Ohio that can confirm this data and very little on Henry and Huldah to speak of, which makes it hard to imagine someone making the connection on a guess, or a whim.

So thanks to the help of cousins, we just might have found the break we were waiting for.

Now where is another Shepard cousin I can get some DNA from? More later…

DNA news…

On By jenbumannIn Genealogy, Shepard, ShepherdLeave a comment

I finally heard back from Dr. Shepherd, the gentleman who matches Grandfathers yDNA. He sent me a small packet of the research that had been done on his family, all of it by paid researchers. I sent him a couple of questions that he has done his best to answer, now I can start digging deeper into my own research on this line.

All we know right now, is that his ancestor John Shepherd was born in New Jersey about 1783ish. No parents are known and no idea where in New Jersey. We might just have to wait for a few years for more Shepards to have their DNA tested before we can continue the quest. At this time we still don’t know where in Europe the surname originated for this line. It could very well be English. Only time will tell.