Winnie Watson

I'm trying to sort out our Winnie Watsons. First, a background review.

The Covingtons were raised in eastern Tennessee, in Rhea county, in the early to mid 1800s. After their parents passed away in the 1840s, most of the family moved west, to eastern Arkansas. One of these was "Mat", sixth of the fourteen children. His first marriage was to Martha, with whom he had five children: Betsy, Sarah, Nancy, John and James Madison. Soon after Martha's death in the 1860s, Mat married Winnie and they, too, had five children: Mary, Richard, William, Bell Lona and Thomas, though there may have been an adoption or two in there. Many years later, Richard's death certificate (in 1946) and Bell Lona's (in 1959) both stated their mother's name was Winnie Watson.

I recently discovered that Mat's youngest son with Martha, his first wife, James Madison, married three times. His first wife was Cora Belle Autry, whom he married in 1882 in Texas, and with whom he had seven children. It turns out that Cora Belle's mother's name was Winny Watson. My first reaction was that it's very unlikely that both James Madison Covington's stepmother and his mother-in-law had the same name. But the sources of these names are pretty solid documents. So for now I'm going to assume that they did have the same name, possibly because they are related.

James Madison, Jr., was only about six when his father remarried in about 1866, so he was mostly raised by Winnie. "Step-Winnie" was born in about 1845 in Tennessee. She was probably living in Arkansas when they married. The family moved to Texas in the 1870s where James, Jr. married Cora Belle in 1882. Her mother, whom I'll call "Winny-in-Law", was born in 1824 in Tennessee. So the two Winnies/Winnys are a generation apart. Perhaps an aunt and a niece? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find much of Winny-in-Law's family.

Winny Watson Autry was living in Carrol county, Tennessee in 1850. From that record, I know that Winny's mother was Cyntha Watson, born about 1799 in North Carolina, and that she probably had a younger brother name Samuel, born about 1831 in Tennessee. Cyntha is named in the 1840 census in Carroll county, so was probably a widow by then, with two more sons and a daughter, in addition to Cora Belle and Samuel. And that's pretty much all I know. There were two Watson families in Carroll county in the 1830 census: Samuel and John. It's likely that one of these is Winny-in-Law's family.

My goal is to identify Winny-in-Law's brothers and sisters and to see if any of her brothers had a daughter named Winnie born in about 1845. Since Samuel was a single 19 year old in 1850, it was not he.

My DNA Genealogy: Genetic Origin Prediction

Just My Observations

A few months ago I began researching genealogy through three DNA analysis services. There is information all over the Internet about these services, so I don't intend to make a thorough comparison or recommendation. Just some thoughts, observations and experiences from someone who read some, has good technical and Internet skills, and has done some serious genealogy. But I still did not know what I was getting into, so maybe my observations can help give a realistic idea of what to expect if you sign up for one of these services.

I'm currently using Ancestry, MyHeritage and 23andMe: Ancestry as an invited guest, the others as paid test customers. One person's DNA was tested on both MyHeritage and 23andMe, so I'm seeing a lot of different aspects of these services. I'd like to stay away from detailed comparison, so although 23andMe provides significant health-related analysis, I'm just going to concern myself with "genetic origin prediction" (just a mention) and "genetic matching" (my main interest).

"Genetic Origin Prediction"

Just a brief mention of genetic origin prediction. All of these services attempt to tell you what country your not-too-distance ancestors came from. If you're me, this is boring. Through my genealogy research, I already know where my not-too-distant (to, the last few hundred years) ancestors came from. Lessons learned: 1) genealogy (if you can do the research) is more accurate than current DNA testing, 2) there's a trade off between precision and confidence, and 3) don't expect the testing service to be upfront about the limitations of their predictions.

Just a few words about each of those points. Predicting genetic origins is very difficult. They are trying to distinguish between sets of genes that look very much the same but that if you perform a statistical analysis on genes from very large numbers of people from "small" geographic areas you might find subtle differences.

1) So if you're like me, where most of my ancestors come from the British Isles, and their genes look very much alike, it is unlikely that a service will accurately tell you the difference between your Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, and maybe even northern European origins. So for me, my genealogy is much more precise about my European origins. Having said that, not everyone has such a homogeneous ancestry. One of my DNA subjects was thought to have, through genealogy research, Italian ancestors, in addition to predominantly British Isles origins. I suspected, however, because one of the Italian ancestors had a typically Portuguese name, that a Portuguese ancestor had emigrated to Italy, before one of their descendants emigrated to the United States. The DNA results predicted an ancestor from the Iberian peninsula. And if you understand the math of percent shared DNA and how it changes with each generation, the amount of "shared DNA" was consistent with a full-blooded Portuguese ancestor who emigrated, from Italy to the United States. So in that case, the DNA test results provided confidence in what had been a guess at a portion of the ancestry.

And not everyone has thoroughly researched their DNA, whether because they haven't taken the time or because records are not available for their ancestors. So if you don't know where your ancestors are from, testing will give you a broad region. And if your origins are from distantly separated areas (Native American, East Asian, Eastern European, South African, etc.), the results will show you distinctly different regions. I believe that some test services can produce more precise predictions for different regions of the world, so if you have non-European ancestry, you may want to look for recommendations for best testing for your region of interest.

2) In one of the pages showing estimated origins on the 23andMe service, you are able to also choose a "confidence level". My memory is that choices are 50%, 70% and 90% confidence. It's interesting to see that the "best" predictions of DNA origin, meaning a list of several distinct countries or regions with the percent of the DNA that came from those countries, corresponded to a 50% confidence level. 50% confidence means that the prediction is just as likely to be wrong as it is to be right! By increasing the confidence level to 90% the countries (Ireland, France, Italy, etc.) disappeared to be replaced by larger generic regions (British Isles, northern Europe, etc.) So they're certain I'm from broad areas, but not so sure about the more specific countries. I have not seen any way to make this adjustment on the other services, nor could I figure out what confidence level they use. My guess is that the default predictions, that look the most interesting to clients, are nearer a 50% confidence level.

3) In fairness to the genealogy services, talk about confidence levels and precisions and statistics and reference groups would not attract customers, and many wouldn't understand even if it were presented more openly. And if you read the test agreement and reference pages, much of this is explained in some way. But I think it should be more apparent that, for now, origin estimates should be taken as broad indications. Ancestry has been claiming lately that they can predict far more origins than any of the others. I don't have numbers handy, but I believe Ancestry has tested far more people than any of the other services. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that they have invested far more money in identifying more origin reference groups or in leveraging some of their members' uploaded genealogy information to improve the accuracy of their analysis.