Hawes Family History

A DNA link led to some genealogy research and a connection to the well-researched Hawes family history book, The Edward Hawes Heirs: Edward Hawes, ca. 1616-1687, of Dedham, Massachusetts, and his wife, Eliony Lumber, and some of their descendants through eleven generations, compiled by Raymond Gordon Hawes and published in 1996, and a supplement published in 2002. An excellent genealogy work. I've posted a family history of our Hawes family on my web site: go to http://cushings.com/roots/ , and select Hawes from the list on the left.

My Genetic Genealogy: Is It Working?

The short answer is "that depends". Lots of work. Some important progress. So far, I'll give it a "thumbs up": yes, it's working.

It's been about a year and a half, now, that I've been chasing family genealogy through DNA. Here's what I've learned so far.

1. The power of DNA matching is that it identifies for us persons who share identical segments of DNA, and so are likely related. It also estimates what that relationship is, based on how much DNA is identical and other proprietary tweeks.
2. The DNA match information is a starting point, but we still must search for our common ancestors, the couple from whom we are both descended. Most of the matches shown are fourth cousins and more distant. Our common ancestors must be five generations or more back. I'll come back to this.
3. Since less than half of DNA matches reply to requests for information, it is often necessary to research several generations of their ancestors, i.e., to do all the research unassisted. Among those who do reply, most have little information beyond their own grandparents, so a lot of work is still required to build their family trees.
4. Different people undoubtedly have different goals in providing DNA samples for study. I've been researching family genealogy for 25 years and am not interested in finding more distant cousins. My goal is to extend my families back further in time than I have been able to uncover so far. Some have been adopted and are looking for birth families. Some are confirming or refuting rumored infidelities. I don't know what others are doing because they don't reply to my queries.
5. Even though I'm not interested in fitting more cousins in my family tree, I need to do it anyway. An important clue when trying to extend and connect my ancestry is to at least identify which branch of my ancestry I'm trying to connect with. Second and third cousins allow me to identify which DNA segments come from which already known ancestors. When I find one of these segments in a more distant cousin, it at least helps me to focus my efforts on connecting to a particular ancestor couple.
6. Genealogy DNA testing services differ. I have been using AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, and 23andMe.
   • AncestryDNA has the largest collection of clients, so may provide the best opportunity to find connections. Also, since Ancestry.com has been a genealogy research service, providing access to lots of indexed historical records and to customers' family trees, the matches are often more knowledgeable about their family history and have well-developed trees. Surprisingly, though, I still get replies to less than half of my queries. Ancestry will allow you to download your DNA analysis results, basically a map of your chromosomes, but it will not allow you to download DNA matches information to use with third party services or software. Since I'm not an Ancestry.com subscriber, I did find it frustrating, until recently, that I can't view family trees of matches. Ancestry is currently testing a beta version of their service, though. I can now view up to five generations of a tree attached to a DNA match. This has been very helpful. I've been able to see family tree connections now to dozens of DNA matches. (That's about a dozen per DNA kit. I'm working with DNA results for two relatives. Five generation trees have helped me find connections to about a dozen DNA matches for each of them.) After the initial excitement, I've come to three realizations: (1) most AncestryDNA subscribers don't have well-developed trees; (2) five generations allows me to connect with cousins withing my known ancestry, but does not allow me to see connections beyond my current known ancestry; (3) (not really a new realization, but commonly found in family trees) information in a tree is not necessarily true: some is contradicted by my records, and some is often copied from some other tree with no knowledge of where the original information came from; (4) AncestryDNA members seem to be very happy to provide access to their private trees when I explain how were related and what I hope to see in their tree and send them a link to my own online family tree.
   • MyHeritage is my preferred service because they allowed me to load raw DNA files downloaded from other services so that I can get matches to all four of my dna files (two parents, two in-laws). While they still allow you to upload DNA files, there are now limits on what information you may access. MyHeritage also allows access to customers' family trees. Most of these trees are either private or contain only a few individuals, but some are quite large which can make it much easier to find a connection. MyHeritage has a new feature that goes through their subscriber trees, through FamilySearch trees, and other available trees, and proposes connections with matches. It hasn't shown me an "important" connections, yet - and by important I mean one that I don't already know and that helped extend my tree back in time - but it might. It does not propose a lot of connections, yet, but it might be very useful especially for those whose trees are not yet very well developed.
   • 23andMe is not a genealogy records company. So unlike the above two companies, I never click on a button and get a message that I have to be a subscriber to use that function. They have a variety of interesting gene related reports, some regarding health predispositions, some regarding physical traits. While they do not have a family trees as part of their service, they do permit self-reporting of family surnames and locations, which is often helpful.
   • Note: I've read that the testing services may differ quite a bit in their accuracy with different ethnic groups or geographic origins. My ancestry is white European. I have noticed some inaccuracies that I don't understand. AncestryDNA often predicts a significantly more distant relationship than the true relationship and than I expect from the amount of shared DNA (where I assume a simplistic single path between matches). On the other hand, I'm finding many cousins estimated to be fairly close (third and fourth) are actually quite distant (6th and 7th). This latter only after lots of work tracing back so many generations. These cases seem to be for very old American families when there are multiple paths of relationship over many generations that must accumulate to as much shared DNA as a closer relative.
   • Note 2:
     

     DNA Matches by Service

     Company	Relative	New matches	Matches to Gr-parents
     23andMe
     	Mother
     		37	D & L: 3 C & H: 10 * H & M:1.5 L & D: 17.5 [closer: 5]
     	Father
     		13	C & C: 3 * P & D: 1 W & A:  2 W & M: 0 [closer: 7]
     AncestryDNA
     	Mother-in-law
     		18	P & C: 7 H & C: 1 * C & K: 0 K & R: 0 [closer: 10]
     	Father-in-law
     		19	M & W: 0 C & McL: 17 M & P: 0 S & B: 0 [closer: 2]
     MyHeritage
     	Mother
     		8	D & L: 3 C & H: 0 H & M: 0 L & D:4 [closer: 1]
     	Father
     		31	C & C: 2 P & D: 27 W & A:  0 W & M: 0 [closer: 2]
     	Mother-in-law
     		4	P & C: 2 H & C: 0 C & K: 0 K & R: 0 [closer: 2]
     	Father-in-law
     		3	M & W: 0 C & McL: 3 * M & P: 0 S & B: 0 [closer: 0]

   
   
7. Probably the reason that I have been most successful finding connections for my mom is that all of her ancestors immigrated to the US in the early to mid 1800s. So her family history is not that long, at least not in this country. For my dad, it's more complicated. Because most of his ancestral lines go back centuries in the US, it can be much more difficult to research all the way back to our common ancestor. Also, after so many generation, many of them in the northeastern US (or colonies), there has been a lot of mixing of ancestral lines, so there are multiple paths of relationship and, because each path adds inherited DNA, the estimated relationships implied by the amount of shared DNA may be in error by multiple generations.

The numbers in that table show that in the past year and a half I've made about 130 connections to relatives, with (only) one major find in each of our four parental lines (wife's parents and my parents). So, I'm certainly working hard. But I'm not sure I can sustain this level of effort to advance our tree. For now, I'm continuing with an emphasis on finding certain missing family members and specific pre-emigration families in Europe.

DNA: Case Study: Margaret Connery Lardner

Beginning

One of my first ventures into DNA genealogy  began by simply selecting a name from the list of DNA matches that was the same as one of our ancestors, in this case McLaughlin. In reply to my query, I was told that McLaughlin was a married name and that the DNA match had no genetic connection to that name. Oops! Note that this is not like picking a name off the Internet somewhere and searching for a connection. Because this individual was on a list of DNA matches, a relationship was certain. I was just looking in the wrong direction.

Redirect

Taking a closer look at a list of DNA matches that we had in common, it seemed our connection was in a cluster of Irish immigrant families in Ontario, Canada in the mid-1800s. So I proposed those names - Connery, Pyne, Miller, Roche, Hawes, Chappel. I also noticed from our matches-in-common list, that some of the others were more closely related to my counterpart than she was to us - 3rd cousins instead of 4th cousins. Thinking she might have already had contact with some of these relatives, I sent her some of those names or Ancestry "handles". (Handle, screen name, member id, ... The designation clients choose to show as their identity. To guard privacy, many are cryptic.)

Two heads are better

No luck on the names in my family tree. But she did know that one of the "handles" I mentioned was related through a Lardner family. No Lardners in my tree, but this turned out to be the clue that led to finding all the pieces of the puzzle.

At this point I just started trying combinations of information in search engines to see what might pop up. Lardner and born in Ontario, Canada, or Ireland, or New York. Google, FamilySearch, and Rootsweb's WorldConnect family tree. (I don't have a paid subscription to any genealogy research companies, like Ancestry.com, so only use publicly available resources. Occasionally, I'll use paid services available through my library.) Lots of useless results. Knowing that some of our Ontario ancestors migrated across the border to the Buffalo, New York area, I tried that as well. WorldConnect gave a list of Lardners, one of whom had married a Conroy. Recognizing that Conroy is not far from Connery, I started gathering information on that family.

Searching my family tree

The couple that I had found were Thomas Lardner, born 1852 in New York, and Margaret Conroy, born 1852 in Canada. In my family tree was a Margaret Connery, born to Michael Connery and Ellen Roche in Ontario in about 1855. But I had found no information on our Margaret after the 1861 census in Ontario.

Armed with names and dates and birthplaces, FamilySearch provided many more records. The family lived mostly in Lockport, Niagara county, New York. The earliest record I found was in Ridgeway, Orleans co., adjacent to Niagara county. This also happens to be where our Pyne ancestors moved after leaving Ontario. In 1870, the Pynes had a Conroy couple living with them - Richard and Ann, born 1851 and 1852, respectively, in New York. It was time to go back and look at my Connery family and try to make all of this fit together.

The story

After reviewing the research I had on our Pyne and Connery ancestors, now viewing this Richard Conroy guest as a possible Connery relative, I concluded that this is their story:

Michael and Ellen Roche Connery immigrated to Lindsay, Victoria county, Ontario, Canada in about 1840 with their two young daughters, 4 year old Nora and 2 year old Mary. They had at least four more children in Canada, born between 1845 and 1859: James (1845), Michael (born 1848 and probably died before 1861), Richard (1849), and Margaret (1852). Nora married John Pyne, son of James and Catherine Miller Pyne, who had immigrated to Lindsay in the 1830s. I couldn't find Michael and Ellen Connery after the 1861 census, and believe they passed away in the 1860s.

Possibly after the death of her parents, in about 1870 Nora Connery Pyne emigrated with her husband and three children, to Orleans county, New York. Two of her younger siblings, Richard and Margaret Ann, came with them. (I had originally thought that Richard and Ann Conroy were a married couple, and had not realized they were family.) Two years later, Margaret married Thomas Lardner. Thomas was a mason, as was John Pyne, so perhaps they met through John's work. They had six children born between 1874 and 1896: Martin (aka Mark), Aggie, Thomas, Carrie, Roswell and Marie.

Connecting us

When I collaborate with someone or have contact with a relative, I try to place them in my family. So now I set about he work of connecting Margaret Connery/Conroy Lardner circa 1875 to one of descendants in 2018. Not wanting to find all of Margaret's descendants (too much work), I went back to searching for obituaries naming our new cousin, then following leads back to census records, marriage records, grave sites, etc. In this case, we (she and an in-law, actually) are 4th cousins, correctly estimated by Ancestry.com .

Daniel Hawes & Charlotte Chappell, Monroe co., NY 1840-1912

Daniel Hawes was born in Westchester county, just north of New York City, in about 1815. Charlotte Chappel was born in "Rochesterville" (now Rochester) in about 1816. They married, probably in the Rochester area, probably in the mid 1830s. They had nine children: one unknown daughter (b. late '30s), Mary, George, Jennie, Frank, Mattie, Nettie, William, and Hattie (b. 1863). Prior to the Civil War, Daniel was a day laborer. Afterward, he was a farmer and a cooper. I know that he served in Company D of the 89th Volunteer Regiment beginning in 1861, but not how long he served or where he may have fought. He suffered an injury for which he, then Charlotte after his death, received a pension. He died in 1885 and is buried in Bushman cemetery in Henrietta. Only 19 year old William was still living at home in 1880, so the kids were pretty much grown and living elsewhere by time of Daniel's death.

I have not found much information on Daniel's Hawes family or Charlotte's Chapell family. I've tracked down some of the kids. (1) George was an out-of-work carpenter living at mom's in 1900. He may have been in the county "Alms Home" in 1910. (2) Jennie married William Weeks, a farmer, in about 1880 and raised two step-children. After William's death in 1892, she lived with Edith, who married in 1901, probably until her death in the 1930s. (3) Frank began waiting tables, then acquired or opened a series of hotels that he operated with his wife, Elizabeth. They married in about 1879, lived and worked in Rochester until the 1890s, then moved to nearby Buffalo, where Frank worked as a real estate dealer in 1900. By 1910, he was retired, and by 1920 he and Elizabeth had moved to Los Angeles. She passed away there in 1926. I lost track of Frank. (4) Mattie married Charlie Hinman, a carpenter, in 1873 in Michigan. (5) Nettie married John Pyne, a mason from adjacent Orleans county, in about 1885. John (Jack?) went to San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake where there was plenty of work for a mason. Nettie followed with the kids a few years later and opened a boarding house. She passed away in there 1937. Nettie is our ancestor (6) Hattie stayed with her mom until Charlotte's death in 1912, then allegedly moved to San Francisco. She passed away there in 1939 and is buried next to Nettie.

Michael & Ellen Connery, Lindsay, Ontario, Canada

Ellen Roche and Michael Connery were born in the early 1800s in Ireland. They married in about 1830, had at least two children then emigrated, sometime around 1840, to Lindsay, Canada, where at least four more Connerys were born. The oldest, Nora, married John Pyne in Lindsay in 1856, then moved to the Buffalo area where they raised their family. One account states that other Connerys moved from Lindsay to Iowa.

Ellen and Michael's children were:

• Nora (b. 1834-42, Ireland)
  married John Pyne in 1856,last found in Buffalo, NY in 1900
• Mary (b. 1838, Ireland)
• James (b. 1845, Ontario)
• Michael (b. 1848, Lindsay - d. bef 1861)
• Richard (b. 1849)
• Margaret Ann (b. 1852)

Garrett & Bridget Kiernan (1st), Ann Gilchrist (2nd), Cranston, Rhode Island

Bridget Dunlavey & Garrett Kiernan were Irish immigrants, born in about 1821 and 1815, respectively. I don't know whether they married there or after coming to the United States. They settled in Cranston, Rhode Island (near Providence) where they had at least 5 children, beginning with Thomas in 1839, before Bridget passed away in the late 1840s. Garrett had 6 more children with his second wife, Ann Gilchrist, in the 1850s. (Ann was also born about 1815 in Ireland.) Garrett was a laborer. He served briefly as a private in Company D of the 2nd Regiment Rhode Island Volunteers (Oct 1864 to July 1865). They may have had a daughter born in the early 1830s. Garrett's mother, also Bridget, was living with them in 1850. Garrett and Ann passed away in the 1870s. Garrett's oldest son, Thomas, our branch of the family, was a musician in the Civil War, after which he came out to northern California with his daughter, Sarah.

Children of Garrett & Bridget were:

• A daughter born in the early 1830s
• Thomas (b. 1839)
  married Mary Ann Rogers in 1860, served as a musician in the Rhode Island 12th Infantry, then moved to northern California with his oldest daughter, Sarah. Died about 1912.
• Bridget (b. 1841)
  married Thomas Russell in 1860, died 1927
• Bernard Burns (b. 1844>
  married Emma Irons 1867, died 1922
• Ann (1845-1913)
• and Peter (b. 1847)
  married Mary Conerton 1863.

Children of Garrett & Ann were:

• John (1852-1932)
• James (1854-1911)
• Mary Elizabeth (b. 1855)
  married Edward Brennan 1878, died 1928
• Catherine (1857-1897)
• Julia (1858, died before 1860)
• and Ellen (b. 1859)
  married Charles Capron 1885, died 1902.

Thomas & Mary Cummings, Rhode Island

Mary Kane & Thomas Cummings were Irish immigrants, born in about 1838. Thomas immigrated in about 1853. They probably married near Blackstone, in western Massachusetts in about 1859. They soon moved to Cranston, Rhode Island where they started their family. Thomas was a stone mason. They had 8 children that I know of, though there may have been a few short-lived children that missed an accounting in the censuses. In the early 1880s, something happened that caused son Daniel to take charge of his remaining siblings. In 1890, Daniel married Sarah Kiernan and they came out to California to start their family. I could not track the remaining Cummings family. The last trace I found was Thomas and his youngest (surviving) son, William, living with a family in the Newport area in 1905. At least two of the kids passed away in the 1880s.

Their eight children were

• Patrick F. (b. 1861)
• Daniel Kane (b. 1864)
  married Sarah Kernan 1890, died near Oakland, Calif. in 1932
• Mary Ann (1865-1882)
• John (b. 1867)
• Katie (b. 1870)
• William (b. 1872)
• Bridget (b. 1874)
• and Joseph Henry (1878-1880).

The Other Irish

For the McClintock/Pyne branches of the family:  The McClintocks and Pynes came from Ireland, but how Irish are they now?  For the benefit of those who are first cousins you only share half this lineage, so pick your half.  Stan (and his brother and sister) is 1/2 Italian, 1/8 Irish, and the other 3/8 "old American" (which means the families have been here a while, and are probably predominantly of English descent.  Betty (and sibs) is 3/4 Irish and 1/4 "old American". You first cousins will have to add one of these (your side of the family) to the mix from your other parent and divide by 2 to get your own mix.  Their children are then 7/16 Irish, 1/4 Italian, and 5/16 "old American".