As told in the Introduction, we knew almost nothing about Huldah Jacobs - only the approximate year she was born, her date of death and the names of her children. What was her maiden name? We eventually found that out via the paper-trail and guess what? It was a name that appeared in the pedigree of Josiah Proctor, a person that we found to be the common ancestor of several shared matches that our Jacobs line, descended from John Jacobs, Jr., born in 1761 to John and Huldah, had with descendants of his brother, Daniel Jacobs, b.1765. Our first indication of success with DNA genealogy was finding Josiah Proctor to be a common ancestor and the second was the maiden name discovery in Josiah's tree. This gave us confidence that our efforts were on track and not wasted.
Josiah was born in 1742 in Littleton, Middlesex, Massachusetts. Let that soak in. We've been able to trace a segment of DNA to nearly 200 years before the birth of our oldest test subject (my father, born in 1918). From what I have read, 200 years is around the limit of the capability of autosomal DNA to reveal ancestors. Of course any such limit is subject to the bell curve. While the average segment cM value for that time is quite small, the high end of the distribution will include some higher cM segments that have managed to avoid significant size reduction during meiosis (sex cell division) and retain the potential to yield success. We had some luck and found such a segment.
Those successes were not the end of the story. We knew the maiden name, but we had no birth record so still didn't know who her parents were. Just today, as I'm writing this in retrospect, data from a new match has somewhat solidified a theory as to who Huldah's grandparents were. Hopefully I can get the blog entries up-to-date soon so that you can share, real-time, the progress we make as we gather more data to firm-up that theory and narrow the answer down to her Huldah's parents likely were. Is it possible? I really don't know, but it will be fun finding out.
It wasn't totally luck to find that "lucky segment". We improved our odds by testing cousins that took other possibilities out of the mix. Below is a diagram of my Jacobs family tree that describes the various lines of descent we have test data from John and Huldah Jacobs.
In red are the initials of our test subjects under their line of descent. As you can see, we have data from two of the four lines of descent of John and Huldah Jacobs. This allows us to compare DB's test results (a Daniel Jacobs descendant) to those of all of the John Jacobs Jr. descendants. For segments of reasonable size (above the noise) we would expect those DNA segments that match to have belonged to either John or Huldah.
To this day, DB's data is only on Ancestry.com, so we have never been able to see the details of the segment he matches on. What we can see are his matches to our lines (which included both LJ, KJ and two CWJ descendants) and the shared matches listed.
The segment details (Chromosome # and segment location data) we were able to see were for the few shared matches that had transferred their data to the other test services where we could compare to the available data for CWJ and LJ. A segment on Chromosome #14 was found that triangulated (matched all three through a significant cM value).
From those matches there were several that had available pedigrees that could be further researched. Lorraine and I traced these trees back to the point where common ancestors were found, but they fell into three groups: 1) Descendants of Josiah Proctor, 4ea 2) Descendants of Caleb Sawyer, 1ea, and 3) Descendants of James Minot, 2ea.
At this point, we felt pretty sure that this segment was from Huldah. First: The matching between the two lines starting at John and Huldah took other possibilities out of the picture, and Second: John was first generation in America and started in Pennsylvania, so he didn't have a deep New England pedigree. There was still a chance that DB matched on a different segment to the listed shared matches, not on Chr#14 - we couldn't see his chromosome details on Ancestry.com. We forged ahead with the assumption that it was Huldah's segment, hoping it would work out.
The common ancestors we found did not take us far enough back in time to identify Huldah's parents, since she was born before all of them, so we knew that we had to keep searching the pedigrees of each group to see if they converged again to a common ancestor. That convergence happened, but not for all. The Minot and Sawyer trees (2 & 3) converged on Thomas Sawyer and Mary Prescott. The Proctor and Sawyer trees (1 & 2) converged on Isaac Learned and Mary Stearns through two different daughters.
Now we had two trees (Proctor and Sawyer/Minot) but, lacking a maiden name for Huldah, our hope was to find one set of ancestors that united them; we would then trace forward and find a Huldah in the off-spring of one of these common ancestors. We still had some hope that a birth record could be found if it were in New Hampshire where there could still be unindexed births. All Huldah's born in 1733 were in play. A long period of frustration ensued.
Next entry: A close look at the Chr#14 segment matching
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