Jeanette DNA Project

The good news is that we have a match. A perfect match!

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...

A Study In "Jennettics"

I'm from an Ohio branch of this family, and we spell it "Jeanette," like the girls name. My maternal grandfather was Joseph Benjamin Jeanette, Jr. Joe was the first of seven children born to Joseph Benjamin Jeanette, Sr. and Sally Ida Booker Jeanette. Joe was born in Tennessee, but the other siblings were all born in Ohio.

Brothers Joe, Richard, Donald, and Robert Jeanette with their
mother Sally (Booker) Jeanette ca. 1927 near Woodville, Ohio

For some reason, they dropped an "n" from the name in the 1930's or so. Joe graduated from Bettsville High School in Seneca County, Ohio in 1933. Here's his senior yearbook picture with the "Jeannette" spelling.

Bettsville yearbook photo from 1933

Joe's parents, who were known as Ben and Sally Jeanette, came from a small town south of Nashville, Tennessee called Thompson's Station in Williamson County. Ben worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad there. A friend taught him Morse code and a bit about how a telegraph works, and these skills launched Ben's career with the railroad. They moved to Ohio, and over the next couple decades, they alternated between several small towns along the railroad between Columbus and Toledo.

From Joe Jeanett's memoirs. Click photo
to read about his dad, Ben Jeanette.

Ben's father, Richard Hezekiah Jeannette, lived his entire life in middle Tennessee. He was known as Dick Jeannette, and he was from a family of blacksmiths there. Dick Jeannette was married three times; the first wife was Ophelia Hargrove. Ben was born of this union in 1890, and he had six sisters. After Ophelia died in 1895, Dick married her sister, Sallie Belle Hargrove, but she also died. Dick married Nettie Angeline Johnson in 1897, and they had six children together.

About the time our Ohio Jeannettes were becoming Jeanettes, the same phenomenon was happening with the Tennessee branches of the family, seemingly by sheer coincidence. Again, none of those descendants can say for sure why it changed, but it did. The name change seems to affect all the Jeanette lines who descended from Richard Hezekiah Jeannette, whose name also changed from Jeannette to Jeanette.

Dick and Nettie Jeanette with grandson George Atkinson

Not far north of Williamson County, in the counties surrounding Bowling Green, Kentucky, we discover another branch of this family. But that branch and the generations to follow spell the name "Jennett."

The Tennessee cousins of present day, a few of them anyway, have gotten their hands on the original birth records of their parents and grandparents to find the original spelling, "Jennett." That's right! The name was actually Jennett, and we kept changing it to get it how we wanted it over all those decades.

Richard Hezekiah Jeanette's given name was actually Joseph Hezekiah Jennett. He was the son of Joseph W. Jennett and Elizabeth Nickens Jennett. Over the course of his life, sometime before 1900, Joseph Hezekiah Jennett became Richard Hezekiah Jeanette, but not consistently. What a nightmare for genealogy researchers!

We know that Joseph W. Jennett was born in North Carolina about 1818, and we know this from studying the Census for Williamson County, Tennessee in the years when everyone's place of birth is recorded. In my line of the Jeanette/Jennett surname, Joseph W. Jennett is our earliest known forefather. Prior to this person, everything is speculative and not supported by records with any degree of certainty. My hope is to connect this family to a large "Jennette" family located on Hatteras Island in North Carolina's Outer Banks. I wrote about this family in a previous blog, Jennette Family of Lightkeeper Lore.

I believe that Joseph W. Jennett's father was Hezekiah Jennett, born in North Carolina about 1772. It seems that Hezekiah relocated to Kentucky around or just before 1820. Prior to 1850, the Federal Census did not include everyone's name, just the head of each household. But close inspection of the 1820 and 1830 Census for Simpson County, Kentucky shows Hezekiah near the town of Franklin, just 75 miles north of the town of Thompson's Station where my Grandpa Joe Jeanette was born.

Update: New DNA results have now confirmed the link to Hezekiah Jennett.

I believe that Hezekiah brought several family members along, including no fewer than three sons. One son, John Jennett, was born in 1805. He married Mary Barr across the state line in neighboring Sumner County, Tennessee in 1825, and they were the progenitors of that Kentucky branch of the family that never changed the spelling from the original Jennett variation. John and Mary Jennett appear on the 1830 Census for Simpson County, Kentucky near the town of Franklin with two young daughters, and they had at least four sons during the 1830's.

The 1825 marriage of John and Mary Jennett, witnessed by Hezekiah Jennett

I believe Hezekiah Jennett also had two younger sons, Robinson (born about 1813) and Joseph W. (born about 1818). These two brothers moved to Nashville during the 1830's. They worked as blacksmiths there and married sisters Hester and Elizabeth Nickens. The Nickens sisters were of mixed race, having descended from an African slave known as Richard Nickens. Richard, his wife Chriss, and their three children were freed in the 1690 will of John Carter of Lancaster County, Virginia. The small bit of African DNA in my results, less than one percent, can be attributed to this branch. The Joseph and Elizabeth Jennett family moved 40 miles south to Thompson's Station. The Robinson and Hester Jennett family remained in Nashville. Here is a link to our freed slave ancestor, The Richard Nickens Story.

My grandfather always thought the Jeanette's immigrated to the United States from France and French Canada. He wrote that they went from Canada to New York to Kentucky and finally settled in Tennessee. He said that they worked in logging camps. However, my research tracks his forefathers to North Carolina, a family of blacksmiths, not loggers. Grandpa Joe's Tennessee cousins apparently shared this same tale of French ancestry with their descendants as well. I always wondered if there could possibly be some degree of truth behind these hand-me-down stories about French Canadian loggers.

Grandpa Joe Jeanette's inaccurate account of our heritage

Did I mention that I've been trying to connect our Tennessee Jennett/Jeanette line to that Jennette family on Hatteras Island? Well it turns out I'm not alone. In fact, the Jennett name has been associated with numerous research projects connected to Sir Walter Raleigh's so called "Lost Colony," dating back to the 1500's. If you don't know anything about that story, look into it. It's quite intriguing, and to think our bloodline could be a part of that story has excited me since I first stumbled upon the possibility. Here's a link to a quick review of the Lost Colony story: The Story of Roanoke, Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony

Researchers of the Lost Colony's families of interest have now turned to science for assistance in connecting the dots and to see if the forefathers became intertwined with the native tribes. In one such investigation, DNA samples have been collected from the male line of the Jennett surname. In other words, if you are a male Jennett/Jennette/Jeanette, then you could participate and potentially connect your lineage to the first Jennetts to settle in eastern North Carolina a dozen generations ago. The paper trail indicates that the Jennett line in the U.S. originated on the mainland along the waterways feeding the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds, well before the appearance of the Hatteras branch or the others who migrated further west. There are recorded wills and land grants in Tyrell and Hyde Counties from the early 1700's to support this notion.

John Jennett Land Grant 1773 as surveyed

Location of John Jennett's land in Hyde (now Dare) County, NC

At last check, only three Jennett males have participated in that study. Two have recorded their lineage to the Hatteras Jennettes, and one other is from our line of the Tennessee Jeanettes. The two Hatteras males turned out to be a DNA match to one another, confirming a common direct ancestor. Unfortunately, the sample of the Tennessee descendant did not match the Hatteras samples. It did however match up with two other Hatteras samples from other family surnames, Carawan and Calloway. There could be many explanations for this, perhaps an undocumented adoption or an illegitimate birth in the generations prior. As more participants join the study, our story should become more clear.

Update: We have joined the DNA project! Follow this link for the latest Jeanette DNA results.

All Jennett descendants are invited to join our Facebook group. Just follow this link: Jeanette Family Ancestry