Revisiting my John Davidson Brickwall.
The descendant list of my 2* great grandfather, John Davidson has grown rather unexpectedly lately and this growth prompted this renewed attention on John's mysterious parents.
Despite the best efforts of transcribers of records planting confusion, I believe I have finally found the origins of his mother, the mysterious Ann Collins.
And as a result am highly likely to have found how a set of interlinked, DNA matches connect to myself and several cousins.
Any time I reviewed John's origins over the many years he has been in my tree, I could not usually even chip at this brickwall.
But thanks to the above, a bit of lateral thinking and some quick research to overcome the transcription errors and confusions thrown in the way, there in plain sight, sits the family of "Ann Collins", mother of my 2* great grandfather, John Davidson.
Moral of the story: follow the DNA, review past info in light of current knowledge and think outside the square - a bit further - with surnames!
On this page:
What did we know of John's origins?
Census and other data consistently places him as born about 1817 at Chirnside, Berwickshire.
His 1901 death certificate clearly states that his mother was an Ann Collins, deceased. Which surname always seemed un-Scottish to me.
A friend, distant relative and one of my longest genealogy correspondents responded to that comment by advising that Collin was common in the fishing village of Eyemouth.
(George F. Black's "The SURNAMES Of Scotland" does not list it at all.)
Father's name was blank on the death cert., but he is assumed to be a Davidson, and no Davidson/Collins marriage was obvious.
He and Agnes Fairbairn's marriage is recorded in the Chirnside OPR, Agnes being "of Edrom parish".
As John was a hind, they moved around a lot, children popping up in assorted parish registers, some such parishes including earlier children already baptized in other parishes, in their own registers when the next was baptized. Which latter habit seems to have upset the FamilySearch indexers somewhat as I cannot currently verify their indexes of the Edrom OPR which index shows an 1838 Adam in the family.
All I can find in Edrom is a mention of Adam and Agnes and a couple of other children, with their birth places but no dates, tagged on after an obvious catch up entry in the Edrom register for both Mary and Walter, which page contains a range of dates from 1827 to 1852 in no particular order.
I became rather excited about the possibility of an earlier Adam as a good hint to John's father's name but all in all, have concluded, for now at least, that the 1838 Adam is a indexer's phantom.
What were the DNA matches telling me?
My Davidson ancestry is a blank slate ending at this 1817 John. It's not a prolific line. I (thought I) was the only living descendant of John's son Adam Davidson. So no 1st cousins, no 2nd cousins, living or dead and very few tested 3rd cousins down from those few of Adam's siblings who had children, and no known 4th cousins at all to positively assign matches to.
A new close-ish match on Ancestry back in March 2022 drew my attention back to a set of mystery matches I've had since 2017, all around the 2nd-3rd cousin-ish range, and only one with a tree and who had responded to contact, but we were both puzzled, as there was no obvious connection.
The only possibility, by coincidence of place, was a Cooper lass born in Dunedin in 1879.
In that time frame my great grandfather Adam Davidson was the only one of the whole extended Fairbairn family even in the frame, having arrived in Dunedin a couple of years previously.
Shared matches had definitely indicated connections to my 3*great Walter Fairbairn & Agnes Robison line cousins along with a fair clutch of yet more distant cousins from back up the Fairbairn ancestry (Robison is another more or less closed book, one that I've not spent time on, and such cousins would be at closest in the 5th and more cousins range of shared DNA).
Along with closer connections to my few tested 3rd cousins, sharing my 2* great grandparents John Davidson & Agnes Fairbairn and the strongest connections being to myself.
Plus a small cluster of more distant matches that didn't appear to share any of the Fairbairn DNA.
The new 2022 match had a tree - with the same 1879 lass born in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand, and yes they were cousins, along with my strongest mystery match (103cMs) who had never answered messages from Ancestry but is now confirmed as another of their cousins.
From my side of this my great grandfather Adam was still the only candidate in the whole worldwide Fairbairn / Davidson tree that fitted the DNA match strengths and was the only candidate even in New Zealand, let alone in Dunedin, where he had arrived a year or so prior to the birth of this lass.
Her mother's legal husband was ruled out of contention, being held at Her Majesty's dis-pleasure for a considerable time during and either side of the whole conception/birth process.
With the set of unexpected half 2nd cousins and half 2C1R, in the mix there was a lot more data on shared matches, which most definitely helped this review.
But only on Ancestry.
Rather more of my assorted cousins tested at FTDNA, way before Ancestry offered their autosomal test, many no longer around to re-test.
Happenstance to the rescue.
A cousin of these matches, on their Cooper side, sent me extracts of a family book on the Coopers.
I was looking for a descendant of the legitimate branch of the family to test to help convince them of my hypothesis. Any Cooper descendants should not be a match to me or my cousins and their matches to the Cooper should be half the expected full cousin strength.
I used the data I wanted, went to file the scans and source the data, thinking it was time I checked who actually compiled the extensive family tree for my sourcing - and nearly fell out of my chair.
The author was one of my longer term, but very intermittent, correspondents about some common interests on the Scottish Borders! No known connection to the Davidson / Fairbairn lines, at least not close ones.
As I knew he was interested in DNA, why hadn't he shown up in matches?
It didn't take me long to remember that a couple of years ago I'd tried to convince him that he should venture into autosomal testing as well, as he had only been exploring yDNA, running a surname project for his surname at FTDNA.
To say he was sceptical of my theory would be an understatement, but with the arrival of his results a few short 3 weeks later he was beginning to see it just possibly could have merit, with myself as his closest match on his FamilyFinder upgrade.
The time had come to sort out Ann Collins.
What else changed the situation?
Back to checking where the non-Fairbairn shared matches might fit with more data in the mix.
I'd previously identified from these latter matches that there was a mystery DNA connection to several Colvin family members whose trees intersected back at a James Colvin and Ann Kerr (or Carr) who married at Dunse in 1820, with the matches coming from at least two lines down from James and Ann.
But how did we connect to them?
Reviewing what point I'd reached last time round on John Davidson's matches, I asked the ever helpful
ScottishIndexes FaceBook Group for their thoughts about the "phantom" 1838 Adam mentioned above.
And got to thinking further about John's mysterious mother, "Ann Collins".
A recheck of the death certificate did show it was clearly written as Collins and could not, by any stretch of imagination, be interpreted any other way, however much I now wanted it to be Colvin or Colvine.
Then I then went off to do some more research on the Colvin(e) families and get more of them documented on WikiTree to see what additional connections and DNA potential cousins might pop out as a result. (If interested in what WikiTree can do to help you, check out Roberta Estes' recent
blog post on WikiTree)
This time round on the FamilySearch tree I was presented with a potential duplicate set of parents for the James Colvin who married Ann Kerr.
James' 1799 baptism in Dunse shows him as the son of a James Colvin and Ann Porteus.
The suggested duplicate family were that of a James Collan and Ann Portes, baptizing a daughter Ann in Dunse in 1792.
How old had I'd estimated John's mother might be? Born around 1795 give or take.
Collins? Colvin? Collan? Seems like a good possibility to me.
Was this wishful thinking on my part?
Working my way down several lines of descendants I found that it was not at all uncommon to find assorted family members recorded as any of these, indiscriminately over several different points in time.
These suggested duplicates have now been merged into the one family on FamilySearch, and WikiTree updated with
more of the family basics.
Of course, any problem solved raises more.
Can we figure out who John's father was?
The Colvin family do seem to have a habit of marrying assorted Davidsons, over in Roxburghshire rather than Berwickshire.
With a bit more digging I might find yet another clue or two hiding in plain sight.
One of the interesting potholes along the way:
Surname, parents, and residence of James & Ann when son James baptized
I think I'll go with the a combination of the two from my own transcription of the original shown above from ScotlandsPeople.
The two OPR references on FindMyPast refer to both the original entry and to what looks like a index of an index from the parish register, so at any point in those two indexes the errors could have crept in.
I cannot validate that a place called Dunsdarels exists but assume it was someone's attempt at the original shown here of "Dunse and Ann" - the curly looking e of Dunse that looks out of character with the others on the page having been determined by the helpful & knowledgeable people on the ScottishIndexes Facebook page as bleed through from the back of the page,.
Moral:
Always find and check an original
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