Saturday, September 1, 2018

DNA: Case Study: William Sorrance Covington

Background


So far, the typical meeting between me and a DNA match consists of my choosing someone not too distantly related - a 3rd or 4th cousin - and sending them note, suggesting a related family based on common matches I've already identified, and asking if they know how we might be related. In this case, my match knew only her mother's name, having had no contact with family that had been in Oklahoma. Not a lot to go on.

Start by finding an obituary


In this case I was able to find a recent obituary naming my match. In the obituary were also birth dates and places, maiden names, and the names of both parents - Earl Shotwell and Bell Covington. This lead to locating the family in Fresno, California in 1940 and in Oklahoma in 1930. Earl and Bell must have married in the late 1920s. Their first three children were born there, then the family moved to California in about 1936. Belle's mother, Lucinda, died in Texas in 1936 and I've wondered if this had anything to do with the departure of the Shotwells. More likely, they were just part of the large migration from economically depressed Oklahoma to the opportunities in California. (See this article on the migration from the Oklahoma Historical Society: http://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=OK008 .) (On a personal note: in the late 1970s, while working for a PG&E road crew, I was amazed to hear a colleague's southern accent, which he explained as him being from Modesto, in California's Central Valley. He had no idea what accent I was talking about. I later learned about the large migrations from Oklahoma and other southern states to the Central Valley.) Chasing Bell back even further in the census records, she was the second of seventeen children born to William Sorrance Covington and Lucinda Titsworth, a family that seemed to move back and forth between Oklahoma and Texas. William and Lucinda were married in the Indian Territory, in or near the Kiowa nation.

Who is William Sorrance Covington?


I still haven't completely figured out William Sorrance Covington. The DNA match seemed to indicate a Covington connection, so my focus was on just this family line. Later census records say William was born in Oklahoma or Texas circa 1873. Earlier records (1900 and 1910 censuses) say he was born in Arkansas. Finding William prior to his marriage in the Indian Territory in 1899 has been difficult. There is a 20 year census gap between 1880 and 1900. Still, I should be able to find him in the 1880 census. But haven't been able to.

Ancestry.com estimates that the two DNA matches are fourth cousins, or back five generations. This should be in my known family tree. Taking another look at my tree, there is a William Covington born in 1870 in Arkansas to our ancestor, James Mattis Covington, and his second wife, Winnie Watson. This William would be a 1/2 brother to our ancestor, James. If William Sorrance Covington is, indeed, our William, son of James, the relationship between the two DNA matches is 1/2 second cousin twice removed. The amount of shared DNA expected for this relationship is about midway between a third and a fourth cousin. I'm a DNA novice, and don't know the proprietary criteria that Ancestry.com use to estimate relationship, but midway between 3rd and 4th is at least close to the predicted 4th cousin, indicating that it is at least plausible that William Sorrance is a son of James. I have not yet attached William Sorrance to my tree, but likely will soon.

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