Chasing rabbits

I finished a "DNA finds" session at our local Genie group the other week with this image:

and, as always, ignored my own advice.
I should be methodically finishing off analysing, and publishing, what we've learnt from newly in  known-family tests on each of my Andrews, Rowe, and Dawe * lines.
* including finally, after 10 years, confirming the yDNA signature for the line of Isaac DAWE of Lamerton, Devon.

Instead I was having a look at the posts in the FaceBook group Genetic Genealogy Tips & Techniques and couldn't resist trying out one on how to visualise your Ancestry match lists (this link to my DNASurnames blog where I post general DNA type posts as opposed to those more related to my own genealogy work).
I ended up with a filtered set of groups that actually do interact - or have a match of particular interest in them:

My Henderson/Millar brickwall will some year find an answer amongst the dark blue group on the left.
My Jane Gibson brickwall amongst those in the light blue cluster top right.
That on the bottom right reminded me I'd not finished chasing the rabbit that led to a small cluster of more extended Fairbairn family matches ....

Maternal side Chromosome Map update

I see that my Paternal side chromosome map was last published Dec 2016.
The intention was for the companion Maternal side map to follow shortly thereafter, but 2017 had other plans.

Click to enlarge

A quick reminder for myself of the maternal brickwall ancestors that I hope DNA will one day aid in cracking (see embedded WikiTree Widgets below for each of my maternal grandparent's pedigrees):

• Jane GIBSON: supposedly born Martock, Somerset in 1812, married Simon ANDREWS in Martock, 1840 and emigrates to New Zealand on the "Timandra", arriving 1842.
• William AUSTIN: husband of Emma Parker CLINTON - disappears after arrival in Australia;  Emma remarries as a spinster with no children!
• William CLINTON: married Jemima PARKER in London, 1810 - and had the above daughter Emma Parker CLINTON

Way too many unknown grandparent segments as yet - but I hope that visual phasing* of my 3 first cousins' DNA will reduce that.
*Visual phasing links:

• https://isogg.org/wiki/Visual_phasing
• http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2016/11/21/visual-phasing-an-example-part-1-of-5/
• https://genealogylady.net/2017/05/02/down-the-dna-rabbit-hole-visual-phasing-with-two-siblings/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neB4oFlwJHA
  a hint: to mark who owns each crossover instead of the technique shown I used the owner's letter in a simple right justified cell which positioned the owner right next to the line.

My maternal grandfather's pedigree (WikiTree) - if you are a descendant of any of these PLEASE upload your autosomal DNA file (eg FamilyFinder from FamilyTreeDNA, Ancestry, MyHeritage, 23andme) to GEDMatch.com and contact me.
Every little clue helps.

embeddable family tree updated live from WikiTree

 My maternal grandmother's pedigree (WikiTree)

embeddable family tree updated live from WikiTree

When is an update not an update?

When it's the 20th April and shown as such on my Recent Changes index.
All of those listed as "updated", with the exception of James ROWE and Jessie SUTHERLAND, are behind the scenes tidy ups with no information added.
James is there as his baptism and burial information have been checked, found wanting, and updated.
Jessie because her death in Victoria, Australia has now been found.

Visitation of God, with Milwaukee for a bit of variety

Still flip-flopping between Devon and Australia on the extended DAWE families of South West Devon.
Had to shift one Henry DAWE from one family to the other on a bit of digging. I'd assumed he was an undocumented  brother of the Sampson and William at Willunga, but it looks rather more like he was a "cousin" instead. Not yet fully proven. His headstone shown on the Australian Cemetery Index shows him as "of Tamerton", which is indeed where the family that provided the other Willunga brothers, sons of Sampson & Jenny (MADDOCK) DAWE, lived, but so did that of John & Elizabeth (RUNDELL) DAWE, moving there from Coomb Hill, Sampford Spiney. The latter have a documented Henry of the right age. Some published family trees show him belonging to one, some to the other.
Did love the Coroner's verdict for Henry's unexpected death, as reported on Trove in the South Australian -  " Died by the Visitation of God".
The Milwaukee connection above is for yet another Samspon, married Mary Ann FUGE. A couple of trees confuse him with the Stoke Fleming Sampson (who married Catherine Henwood ROWE). Exactly how the Milwaukee one connects to the grandparents he is with in 1861 and 1871, William & Mary Ann (?HORN?, ?CONWAY?) DAWE at Hecklake in Whitchurch has yet to be found, but regardless, he emigrated to Milwaukee in 1893, wife and children following in 1897.
The trees on my DAWE page have been tidied up still futher, as several more linkages between families have now been confirmed.

3 months of updates

Quite an impressively long list of recent changes - but don't be fooled.
Many are minor changes to citations, or the last edit date changed because a scanned certificate has been added (which wont be visible on the family tree pages, but may be if included on the Originals subsite - not yet updated).
Another reason for inclusion in the recent change index is the addition of links to a hopefully relevant dna page for those belonging to dna tested lines (some of which links may still not yet work).
 
At least two new people now have pages, probably others:
Grace MEIKLE nee ROBERTSON, mentioned recently
Elizabeth HAMLEY nee ROWE, although the impetus for her publication eludes me at the moment.

Now that more of the FAIRBAIRN trees are included on the One Name Study pages, the FAIRBAIRN page has been cut back to only include trees for the more closely related FAIRBAIRNs.

Many updates probably don't feature in the recent changes index but only in the updated descendancy charts.

1st: Ignore "recent changes"

Any "recent change" index showing changes to great great grannie Honor ROWE nee DAWE can be ignored, I was tweaking data to work better with the new version of Second Site (my web page generator from my TMG database) when it groups the events shown for each person.

10th: Millers and publicans

A welcome email arrived this morning enclosing a photo of William Matthias ROWE, found by his great grandson in his mother's photos - and Howard thought I might like it, given he'd found my web pages.

Spurred me into a few updates on that branch of the ROWE/DAWE tree (William Matthias - Matt - is related twice over as his parents Joseph King ROWE and Thirza DAWE are brother and sister to my 2* great grandparents William ROWE and Honor DAWE respectively.

Checking what I had I was reminded that in the ROWE/DAWE letters he is mentioned as having given up being a miller and had moved to Teignmouth to be a publican - for which occupation the family thought he was not well suited.
He obviously came to the same conclusion as the photo was annotated that he moved from Nymet Mill to the Valletort mills, Millbay, (Plymouth) with no mention of his soujourn as a publican at the date they have him as shifting.
Matt is now included in the Originals subsite of my main web pages and I look forward to further updates.

13th: FamilyTree pages updated

Over the last few days several contacts have spurred me into action on further updates to my own tree (as opposed to dna and one name study projects, the former mostly currently awaiting results from the latest sale).
Marion rang to see whether or not I'd made any progress on tracking down living descendants of Thomas Storror HULL and Ada Trimble DAVEY, one of our ROWE descendants.
Checking on where I'd got to (the last lead was a possible son for their daughter Ada Nora HULL and Leonard RAY - but that came to naught), I noticed that since then, the 1911 census is more readily available.
That resulted in a couple more children for Thomas and Ada, and a marriage for one of them, Donovan Sydney HULL, but no children immediately obvious in the English indexes, so yet another dead end.
That led me to checking a few more of Ada's siblings in 1911. None of them look like they've any living descendants, although we would love to be proven wrong.

Then Linda popped up with another researcher of one of our Margaret HENDERSON's descendants, Susan JONES nee HUTTON. Bit hard tracking JONES in Wales without help.
This led me to having another go at identifying and tracing more of (one of) the William Meikle WATTs.
Good to confirm from the 1911 census that I'd got two of this one's sons correct - and have now added a daughter Margaret into the mix, and identified which of the two brides on the same Prestwich marriage register page in 1903 was his - Eliza HALL, obligingly living at home with her father and her three children (as the expected widow, William Meikle WATT having died 1910). They now show up on the HENDERSON chart.

End result: updated family tree pages, and it must be about time I put some time into re-publishing my WorldConnect database, LornaHenderson.

But in the meantime I've been having fun linking up my tree on the NZGDB to several of the other Taranaki families represented there.
Check out the combined chart that results - registration is free.
Site may be subject to some teething problems, eg the charts I refer to are under development, work fine on my laptop but have a few problems on my desktop. Robert is investigating.
The principal is similar to One Great Family, a combined tree, but for the latter, the combination is automatic, but on NZGDB reloads of updates of your own data automatically update your data, but you have to manually link to other's trees - eg several of the "marry-ins" in my Taranaki data appear in several trees, one of which is considered an authority, so I consciously did not upload the parents with my data, and have now started checking for duplications and linking the people concerned to the other tree.
NZGDB also allows you to grant update permission to fellow researchers or relations so that you are all working on the one set of data.

9th: FUGE to Illinois

A FUGE of Cornwall researcher popped out of the woodwork this week with a post in my Guestbook re two of my lot she had found in Illinois.
This does rather explain my abortive attempts at finding them in England beyond 1871.
I'd obviously not tried very hard, although my notes do say I'd tried Australia.
Samuel, and his brother John Edwin both pop up in Chicago.
As a result, given I appear not to have looked at this extended Bere Ferrers family (descendants of Hugh HAMLEY and Elizabeth, daughter of Matthias ROWE and Sarah DUNKIN, via their dtr Mary Elizabeth HAMLEY who married William FUGE) since before the 1911 became more readily available, next update my WorldConnect db LornaHenderson will have rather more details on the CORROCK family.

Update time

Thought it time to publish some of the updates from the last few weeks.

WorldConnect Database LornaHenderson has been updated.
Main changes are in the Devon families mentioned over the last few postings:

• Honor DAW and Nicholas COMBELLACK
• Joseph King ROWE's dtr Gladys
who married Norbert WILMERING - who now has her own web page so that I can publish the clippings sent to me by Bart.
• the CREBER/HELSON/PEARCE families mentioned a while ago
and
• the ALGARs
  

In addition I've incorporated all recent changes into OneGreatFamily , as usual. I was interested to note the results of an informal survey that Dick Eastman carried out recently that question 12 about usage of on-line genealogy programs showed that of those answering this question (admittedly not a large number of responses), most used OneGreatFamily, so it can't just be me that finds it useful.

Definitely time for Devon families

Must be something in the air at the moment, with all this activity on the Devon branches of my tree.
Next WorldConnect update will include several more of the COMBELLACK family of Honor DAWE as several certificates have arrived to confirm my suspicions as to who married whom apart from Emily Jane where I drew a blank. The Emily Jane who married Hugh NICHOLLS was the dtr of Richard Toll COMBELLACK instead of Nicholas as I was hoping she would be. So her fate remains unknown beyond 1881 when she was in Bristol with brother Richard.
And while all this activity was going on, yet another wonderful email arrived asking if I had any interest in a box of WILMERING memorabilia that included several photos letters and newspaper clippings relating to the family of Gladys ROWE and Norbert WILMERING. Thank you so much Bart, for sharing this little treasure trove.
Norbert is a relation of Bart's wife, and they had contacted a relation who had saved these boxes of memorabilia from an elderly WILMERING relation. The newspaper cuttings are in a grocery store's ledger book which begins in 1868, but was later used by Norbert's grandmother for the family clippings.
I feel yet more updates coming on!

18th: Back to Devon

Slight digression from the 1861 Ontario census.
Brenda drew my attention to a ROWE tree on GenesReunited that had Bickleigh connections.
The family (that of John ROWE and Mary WALTERS) has been sitting in my LornaPotential database for a while, to no particular conclusion as to whether or not their proximity to Matthias and Ann (KING) ROWE at Hele in Bickleigh was coincidence.

Jury still out, but next update, more of the names and dates will have been checked off and included. Unlike my ROWEs, who travelled one way to New Zealand, this family came back to England, after a soujourn in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

16th: Big brother updated

Probably time I updated Big Brother again, seem to have got sidetracked from keeping my main pages updated.

The main changes of late have been on the GRAY front, with the family of Margaret GRAY, newly confirmed as a dtr of William GRAY and Margaret SUTHERLAND.
A fair few of her descendants have been tracked and included in the GRAY chart, and I've also given Margaret a page of her own, purely to show I've identified Tormsdale, where her 1855 death cert said she was born.
This exercise did result in many updates to the MORGAN families of Thurso and Halkirk, but most of those aren't in my published data, and haven't resulted in any connection to Kathrin MORGAN being discovered.

Also a few tweaks in the HAMLEY tree thanks to Vikki who sent me a copy of Elizabeth HAMLEY nee ROWE's 1865 death cert. Given the informant was Charles HAMLEY, assumed to be her son Charles Baskerville HAMLEY, I checked where I'd got too in documenting his family too. Still cannot find dtr Selina Mary in 1901 at all, but did find her in Plymouth with husband, piano dealer Charles Frederick HOCKING in 1911 (no children with them). Earlier census identifications are complicated somewhat by there being another Charles & Selina HOCKING couple (in Cornwall) who married earlier. Will show up on the ROWE chart as a few added twigs.

20th: Devon, Middlesex and NZ

Brenda has turned up an unexpected connection between her ancestors that makes some of the Taranaki families even more inter-related than before, albeit distantly.
On her RIDDLE forebears she turned up a family of MATTENLY (or MATTINGLYs) whose descendants married into one of her husband's, and my ROWE family, that of Frank COLLINGS' daughter Joyce who married George F GIBBONS. The same MATTENLY family also track down to Brenda.
The linkages, but not full trees, will be included in my WorldConnect database LornaHenderson in due course.

28th: Just like the buses

Nothing in the guestbook for a while, then 2 postings come along at once.
One from Karen drawing my attention to a book of memoirs of David Stephenson, '50 years on the London and North Western Railway' (McCorquodale & Co. Limited, Cardington St, Euston, N.W. 1891, ed Leopold Turner), which she had found on-line. Included in it are several letters to the Rev. Robert TURNBULL from David Stephenson, and also some mention of "Bob" the lodger with the Stephenson family in Nuneaton. That takes some family knowledge to translate!
"Bob" is the Rev. Robert TURNBULL's son Robert, later Sir Robert TURNBULL, Superintendent of the Line for the LNWR.
In the 1871 census he was indeed shown as a visitor (19 yr old railway clerk) in the household of David STEVENSON (49 yr old railway manager). David's family included a 6mth old daughter Edith, Karen's great grandmother. Small, inter-connected, world.
Thank you for bringing that to my attention Karen, look forward to hearing if there are more unpublished letters that may have survived between the STEPHENSONs and the TURNBULLs.
The other was from Karina in Winnipeg letting me know what had happened to a twig of the inter-connected ROWE/DAWE tree. Updates to the charts will appear next time I publish.

15th: Gathering of the (ROWE) clan

Remember how I claimed to be related to the Hound of the Baskervilles ?
(Hounding ROWEs, Baskerville Connection, and
Elementary my dear ROWE)

Here's the hotel, and a story about the recent family reunion:
Duchy Hotel ROWE family reunion

16th: How remote can you go?

This comment being prompted by publishing the ROW data for a new member of the ROW(E) DNA project. As he had roots in Devon, I've incorporated him into the ROWE related pages of the DNA Projects Portal. There's absolutely no way we'll ever find a paper trail to prove any connection, which connection is most likely pre-genealogical timeframes, but nonetheless, on the markers so far, there is indication of a (very distant) connection.

Have been re-examining info I have on the family of Ralph Archibald & Helen (CROW) FAIRBAIRN, and the WIGHTs of Longformacus, both families being forbears of David RICHARDSON (no relation). In due course his data will be included on their respective dna projects (FAIRBAIRN, WIGHT) in the hope of finding participants, but again, I keep getting sidetracked.

Real mixture today

Seem to have covered a fair breadth of the forest today: McADIEs from Caithness *2, one lot the potential London descendants, the other the Australian connection, including a link (I think) to a separate FAIRBAIRN family, that of George FAIRBAIRN and Virignia ARMYTAGE, yet to be explored; a newfound twig of my FAIRBAIRNs in Pennsylvania; more of the NY FAIRBAIRNs;

I can feel some updates coming on, but there's a few loose ends to tie up before it is worth republishing both WorldConnect databases: LornaPotential and LornaHenderson

In addition a pedigree was received, and posted, for the ROWE dna project, yet another family originating in Devon, and although only some of his results are in, there does appear to be a (very) distant match to my Devon ROWE family.

Great grannie's web page didn't get a look in.

11th: Prison warders galore

Another ROWE descendant found me via Genes Reunited and enabled me to bring another of the Hounds of the Baskerville connection down to present day, well at least a couple of living people down the bottom of the chain. Sarah Elizabeth dtr of James ROWE of the Railway Hotel, Princetown fame married a George MOORE. Looks like they alone provided almost the entire population of Dartmoor Prison warders, plus a few further afield in Nottingham, Middlesex & Surrey - thank you Rowena.
ROWE chart updated.

Made it - at last

Check out the new SINTON page, and the recent changes.

In addition my main online BDM only database LornaHenderson has also been updated with the last month+ changes, including claiming a few more of the SINTON tribes, moving them in from LornaPotential.

The ROWE chart also now includes a few of the newfound Australian branch of James & Mary Anne (JESSOP) HAMLEY.