We compared a sample of 37 DNA markers from two men in our family tree who have never met each other. Tom lives in Colorado, Gary in Ohio. Both men are believed to have descended from Richard Hezekiah Jeannette, sometimes spelled Jeanette, who lived most of his life near Thompson's Station in Williamson County, Tennessee. All 37 markers were exactly the same, so science has now confirmed that Tom and Gary are indeed second cousins, great grandsons of Richard Hezekiah Jeannette. Actually, they are "half" second cousins, since Gary descended from Richard's first marriage and Tom from the third. This verifies that the Ohio branch of the Jeanette family is definitively linked to the Jeanettes from the Nashville area. So, hello cousins! It seems we can move forward with that family reunion we've been discussing for a few years.
Family Tree DNA, the company we selected for this project, offers several types of DNA testing for genealogy purposes. We chose the Y-DNA test because it's the test being used in an established project tracking a Jennett family from Cape Hattaras and other areas of Eastern North Carolina. The paper trail indicates that our Richard Hezekiah Jeannette's father, believed to be Joseph W. Jennett, was born in North Carolina. Some researchers, myself included, have suspected that our Tennessee-Ohio branch is connected to that North Carolina Jennett family, even though a common ancestor has never been identified through paper records.
The Y chromosome is found only in males; it's what makes us males. This makes Y-DNA analysis a powerful tool in researching one's paternal line. The Y is passed down from father to son, so its make-up remains the same through the generations, with the exception of slight mutations that can rarely happen from one generation to the next. The frequency of these mutations when comparing Y-DNA allows us to see not only who we might be related to, but how deeply into history we might need to research in order to identify the common ancestor.
In a perfect scenario, that Jeanette Y-chromosome would follow the paternal line of the family tree for hunderds of years to the days when surnames first came into use. That leads us into the bad news.
DNA markers from two Jennette men on Hatteras Island, cousins to each other, did not match the markers for Gary and Tom. For that matter, the Hatteras men did not match any of the other seven participants in the Jennett DNA project; nor did Gary and Tom. Initially, this would suggest that there was something called a Non-Paternity Event, perhaps an undocumented adoption or an illegitimate birth, sometime in the 1800's or earlier that makes our family tree not match our DNA tree. These events, while not always openly discussed, are not uncommon. Family Tree DNA estimates that somewhere between 3.5% and 10% of us were not fathered by the man we called Dad. Compound this over 6 or 8 generations and you can see why many researchers run into problems when attempting to verify genealogy research with DNA testing.
When Tom tested, it was at the 37-marker level. So we took it a step further when we tested Gary. We compared 67 markers just to see what would happen. Because of this, we discovered a new match, someone named William F. Cole, Jr. Gary and Mr. Cole had a small variation in five of the 67 markers, but that's close enough to predict a common ancestor somewhere in time. There is 60% chance that this common ancestor can be found about 12 generations back, or approximately 300 years ago. It increases to 90% at 18 generations, about 450 years ago to just after the time when surnames in Europe first came into widespread use.
Cole's family tree traces back to his earliest known paternal ancestor, Robert Cole, who lived in Duplin County, North Carolina in the late 1700's. Ironically, that's not far from an area where a pocket of Jennetts lived. This is not to say a Cole was adopted into a Jennett family, or vice versa, or that some form of hanky-panky went on. It's just something that warrants further research and investigation if we're to solve some of these mysteries.
At the 25-marker and 12-marker levels, there are lots of matches, either exact or with a difference in one or two markers. This adds several new surnames to our research list, including multiple appearances of Austin, Boswell, Calloway, Frisbee/Frisby, Irby/Erbe/Yerby, Laidlaw/Ludlow, May, Mustard, Patterson, and Wyatt/Wiatt. There are lots of explanations how someone with a different surname could show up on our match list. I'm not going to get into all of that, but here is a nice article that lays it all out.
Y-DNA Testing - Why Do I Match Different Surnames?
As more men in the Jennett/Jeanette line participate in the DNA study, things will become more clear. The next step is to identify and test someone who descended from a brother of Richard Hezekiah Jeannette, or perhaps from an uncle. Keep digging!
A special "thanks" to everyone who contributed toward the cost of the testing! Follow this link for a recent post about the Jeanette family from Williamson County, Tennessee.
Update: We've had two more matches to our DNA tree, and we can now confirm our most distant common ancestor, Hezekiah Jennett born about 1772 in North Carolina! Here's our family tree... and more volunteers are needed to move the project further...
