My Old Ohio Home - DNA

Even the Snails Came from Spain

2019-07-20T00:00:00-04:00

Cepaea nemoralis snail

The legend among the Irish for the longest time was that they "came from Spain." You could say it was the mother of all family stories. Everyone in the family knew it was true, but everyone outside the family thought it was a lot of malarkey. It turns out that the Irish were right.

Scientists have even found DNA evidence linking snails in County Kerry, Ireland, to snails in the Pyrenees mountains in Northern Spain. This article came out a while ago, but I was between websites and didn't have anywhere to post a link to it: Scientists Use Snails to Trace Stone Age Trade Routes in Europe.

I'm supposed to say "Amazing! Awesome! You just have to read this!" but I grew up in the twentieth century, not the twenty-first, and you really don't have to read it anyway.

If you are interested in more of the recent evidence for the Irish having arrived there by way of Spain and Northern Africa, look for the following:

Facing the ocean : the Atlantic and its peoples, 8000 BC-AD 1500, by Barry Cunliffe, published by Oxford University Press, 2001. If I remember right, it is a coffee table size book, but it is worth lugging home from the library.

[September 2021: edited to remove a few dead links]

The scientific study referred to in the first article is at, I think, The Longue Durée of Genetic Ancestry: Multiple Genetic Marker Systems and Celtic Origins on the Atlantic Facade of Europe.

In Barry Cunliffe's book, or in some other book I read, there is a reference to an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, A typological evaluation of Celtic/Hamito-Semitic syntactic parallels by Orin David Gensler at University of California, Berkeley, which identifies something like thirty peculiarities found only in "Gaelic" and some North African languages.

Edited September 2021: The dissertation by Orin David Gensler is now available on line at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8p00g5sd.

That sets up these next two articles which were really interesting. Or awesome and amazing:

OUR ANCIENT COUSINS THE BERBERS by J. M. McGill, F.S.A. Scot. and Berbers and Irish Language: Historical accounts.

Note, as of September 2021 this second article is now behind a paywall. I have a copy of the information if you are interested. Or find it now at https://marokko.nl/forums/showthread.php?t=4816326&p=119542215&viewfull=1#post119542215.

This time I'll quote a bit of the first article, or you'll never click on an article about linguistics:

"Sometime at the end of the fourteenth, or it may have been in the early fifteenth century, a ship was wrecked on a spit of sand jutting out from the Moroccan Atlantic coast. The sole survivor scrambled ashore and fell into the hands of the Berbers whose clan name was the Beni M'Touga, and who inhabited that part of the country. The Berbers spared his life, which was unusual clemency on their part as they had a hatred for all strangers. What was the reason for the unusual friendliness of these wild Berber tribesmen towards a shipwrecked sailor? One of the first steps towards amity between strangers is a knowledge of each other's languages and that is what most probably saved MacDowall."

So next time you doubt some family story that's been passed down for generations, just remember that even the snails came from Spain.

Credits

Image of snail from Wikimedia Commons/Mad_Max

A Positive View of Our Hamilton DNA Research

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

Continued from Some Conclusions on the Hamilton DNA Research.

In the last two articles, I looked at the shortcomings of the DNA research into our Hamilton line. In this article, I will take a look at the positive side. What have we gained?

Regarding Preston Fields

• Our family's y-DNA matches on 37 markers with that of a descendant of Preston Fields, of Pike County, Kentucky. For the background see the series of articles starting with Preston Fields, of Pike County, Kentucky.

FamilyTreeDNA estimates that for a 37 out of 37 match, there is a 90% chance of having a common ancestor within 5 generations, and a 95% chance within 7 generations.¹

There are 5 steps back to our earliest known Hamilton ancestor, born in 1818, and at least that many steps back to Preston Fields (1795). Both were born in the United States. So it is ~~very likely~~ possible that we have a common ancestor on the American side of the Atlantic.

• Looking at the Fields family and a few Hamilton families of the mid-Atlantic and Appalachia has taught me to study migration routes. Although Preston Fields lived most of his adult life in Kentucky, his family and the Hamiltons arrived there from Virginia, by way of North Carolina and Tennessee. Before that, two of the Hamilton families were known to be in Maryland.

Since my earliest known ancestor is James D. Hamilton, who was born in Cape May, New Jersey, the migration paths might intersect in Baltimore as a port of entry, or possibly Philadelphia. I haven't got that far back yet, but that looks like where we are headed, if the lines merge in America. On the other hand, Cape May was a port of entry at the time. James D's parents could have arrived and settled there, or James could have been born while they were just passing through. And his 1880 census (informant unknown) said both of his parents were born in Ireland.

• It is reassuring to know that you are who you say you are, although I think I could have dealt with the alternatives. None of the Hamilton wives were fooling around with the mailman unless he was her brother-in-law. If so, we might never know.

Joseph Hamilton of Ayrshire, Scotland

His descendant submitted a 25 marker test of his y-DNA and it matches ours on all 25.

• If the research stands up to examination, then a match with Joseph Hamilton confirms our Hamilton tradition that the family is Scots-Irish. If we can learn where Joseph Hamilton was born, it could tell us what part of Ulster we are from.

• If Joseph moved back to and died in Ayrshire because that is where his family's roots were, that might point us to our Hamilton family's origins in Scotland.

The Haplogroup

Our DNA falls into Haplogroup R1b1a2 or R-M269. FamilyTreeDNA calls it Celtic-Iberian. So our "way back" Hamiltons apparently came up the Atlantic coast on their way to Scotland. A lot of native Irish are in this group also, so just remember the story that "the Irish came from Spain."

Some of the Hamiltons in the Hamilton Surname DNA study are of a Haplogroup that is Scandinavian. I believe their migration route ran through Central Europe into Scandinavia, before turning southwest into Scotland. As in the Vikings.

The Hamilton Surname DNA Project has the results of the DNA samples covered in this series of articles. The matches discussed in this series are all in the same group, which that site calls R1b-9. Look for our participant code number, H-255, in the R-Groups spreadsheet. Earliest ancestors for each code number are at Earliest Ancestors. The site coordinator's comments on the matches are here. Scroll down a bit to where he discusses Group R1b-9.

Footnote

1.Understanding Your Y-DNA37 Results, at FamilyTreeDna.com.

Credits

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.

First Thoughts on the O'Rourke Autosomal DNA

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

See also the series of articles beginning with The O'Rourke y-DNA Results.

My sister recently tested the autosomal DNA of a cousin on our mother's side. A person inherits autosomal DNA from both their mother and father, unlike y-DNA which comes only from their father. Autosomal DNA is useful for finding reasonably close relatives, up to third and fourth cousins.

Why would you want to do this? Well, your third cousin is descended from the same great-great grandfather as you are. This isn't as far back as it sounds, as you will see from the examples.

Also, maybe that is as far back as you have been able to trace your family, but the third cousin that you locate has been able to work back farther. This could help an American family locate the place their ancestor emigrated from, say in Ireland or England.

Here are a few of the top matches from the DNA we submitted. FamilytreeDNA estimates that they are third cousins to my cousin:

One person who submitted DNA has an email address in Canada. One of the "ancestral names" he included was Carson. One of our cousin's great-great grandfathers on his mother's side was Joseph Carson. He was born in 1818 in Canada, and died in Waterdown, part of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Another submitter is named Purcell, but one of his ancestral names is Colgan. My cousin and I have a great-great grandmother named Ann Colgan, who married James Rourke. James lived from about 1779 to 1857 in Ballintur Townland, Co. Down, Ireland.

Two of the top matches listed Cunningham as an ancestral name. One of our great-grandmothers was Ann Cunningham from Ballymadeerfy Townland, also in County Down. There was also a submitter named Brian Cunningham who ranked a bit lower on the matches, but said his Cunningham family was from Northern Ireland.

Among the other matches was a man named Magee, another person whose ancestor was born in Newry in 1829, and quite a few Fitzgeralds, including some in Canada and Buffalo.

So you get the idea.

What I didn't find anywhere near the top of the list was anyone named O'Rourke or Rodgers. There were a few, but they were ranked pretty low when sorted by likely matches, how much DNA you shared, etc. Likewise for people who said their family was from Leitrim. That is where the large O'Rourke clan in Ireland was based at one time.

If you need any help understanding all this, maybe this formula will help you. It comes from the Wikipedia article on centimorgans, which have something to do with it all:

Pr[recombination|linkage of d cM] = sum_k=0^infty Pr[2k + 1 crossovers|linkage of d cM] = sum_k=0^infty e^-d/100 frac(d/100)^2,k+1(2,k+1)! = e^-d/100 sinh(d/100) = 1 - e^-2d/100/2

Didn't help you? Me neither.

Continued in The Carsons and the O'Rourke DNA.

Credits

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.

Hiram Lansford Fields of Hawkins County, Tennessee

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

Continued from Preston Fields, of Pike County, Kentucky.

I ask Fields family members and experts in early North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky genealogy to be patient with me and this article.

There are not enough hours in the day, miles left on my car, or years left in my life to begin borrowing films of land records, wills, etc., scrolling through rolls of microfilm, or sending for copies of original records from the dozen or so counties through which these Fields passed on their way from, evidently, Bedford County, Virginia, to eventually Pike County, Kentucky, and beyond.

I have relied on the online work of others when it seemed reliable, and have listed those sources in the footnotes. If my conclusions are in error, please correct me.

In the last article we briefly covered the family of Preston Fields and mentioned the tradition--now confirmed by DNA--that Preston was born a Hamilton but raised by Hiram Fields.

I worked backward along the main migration route leading into Pike County, Kentucky, looking for Fields families, and concluded that if Preston was actually born in 1795 in Tennessee, as he stated in 1850, then it was likely in the very northeast section of the state.

Hiram Lansford Fields

The following timeline for Hiram Lansford Fields was copied from a post at GenForum.(footnote)Lansford, Stephen, and Davis Fields-message posted by Teresa Conley, October 16, 2006, at the GenForum Fields Family Genealogy Forum. It puts him in "the right place at the right time" namely in Hawkins County, Tennessee, in 1796. He is far and away the most likely candidate to be the adopted father of Preston Fields.

[edited March 2024 to add the question about whether these next two references are for Preston's adoptive father or an earlier man.]

1762 and 1763 Bedford County, Virginia. Lansford Fields on the tax rolls. These are online at ancestry.com. But are these for Preston's adoptive father or an earlier man by that name?

1765. the year in which Lansford's son John moved, with his father, to Rowan County, North Carolina. This according to John Fields' Revolutionary War Pension Application. But is this referring to Preston's adoptive father or an earlier man by that name?

1772 to 1786 Surry County, NC. Lansford Fields on tax records of (formed from Rowan in 1771).

1790 Stokes County, NC. Lansford Fields on tax list (formed from Surry in 1789)

1796 Hawkins Co. TN. Lansford Fields entered land on the south side of Holston River, Bays Mountain (Hawkins county formed in 1786 from Sullivan county)

There are no extant census records for Hawkins County from 1790 to 1820. I didn't find Hiram Lansford Fields on any other records. However rootsweb.com trees show children being born between 1800 and 1805 in Hawkins County to Obediah and William Fields, who are said to be Hiram Lansford's sons.(footnote)A global search on for "Fields", born in "Hawkins", in 1800 +/- 5 years at rootsweb.com And Obediah is still in Hawkins County on the 1830 census.

Continued in Some Hamiltons in Hawkins and Sullivan Counties, Tennessee, 1784 to 1796.

Credits

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.

John and Jane (Hazlett) Hamilton

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

Continued from Joseph and Agnes (Rennie), Hamilton of Ayrshire, Scotland.

In the last article we learned that the parents of Joseph Hamilton of Kilbirnie, Ayrshire, Scotland, were John Hamilton and Jane Hazlett. What can we say about this couple?

The records say very little about them. Jane Hazlett was born about 1795 in Ireland. In 1841 she was living in Kilbirnie with her son Joseph (born 1818 in Ireland) and with a Mary Hamilton (born 1826 in Ireland).¹ And John Hamilton was a gardener by trade.²

I didn't find a death record for either John or Jane (Hazlett) Hamilton. From what I read at ScotlandsPpeople.gov.uk, the chances of finding one before 1855 are few and far between. The chances of learning anything except the person's name and place of death from the record, even if you do find it, are even less.

Some Guesses and Speculation

John Hamilton and Jane Hazlett probably met and married in Ireland. On Griffith's Valuation, taken in the 1860's, the surnames Hamilton and Hazlett occur together almost everywhere in Ulster, so that doesn't narrow things down much.

In 1851 there is a Jane Hamilton living with a James and Sarah Bain family in Kilbirnie. Jane, James, Sarah (age 43), and the three Bain children were all born in Ireland, the youngest in 1846. If this is the right Jane, and if Sarah is her daughter, then Jane Hazlett was born about 1790 instead of 1795.³ But Jane Hamilton is a common name, and the Bain couple have four other lodgers, so this Jane Hamilton easily could be someone else.

When we add the name Bain into the search on Griffith's Valuation, we find that the three names only occur together in County Armagh and in Belfast. I guess there weren't too many Bains in Ireland.

If all these guesses are true, then the timeline would look like this:

John Hamilton and Jane Hazlett may have been born in Ireland by at least 1790. They marry in Ireland by 1807 and raise at least three children, Sarah, Joseph, and Mary. Their oldest daughter Sarah marries James Bain by 1836 in Ireland and has three children of her own from 1836 to 1846. After Sarah Hamilton leaves the household, John, Jane, and their two other children move to Ayrshire. John dies there before 1841. Sometime after 1846, Sarah and James Bain and family also move to Ayrshire and Jane moves into their home.

I can see all this showing up on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org as gospel truth. It isn't, we're just guessing.

Conclusion

If you have read this article and the one preceding it, Joseph and Agnes (Rennie), Hamilton of Ayrshire, Scotland, you might also want to read the series of articles beginning with Preston Fields, of Pike County, Kentucky. Our Hamilton DNA matched a descendant of his on 37 of 37 markers. And see also the two articles beginning with Some Conclusions on the Hamilton DNA Research.

Footnotes

1841 Census of Jane Hamilton household, Kilbirnie, Scotland, transcription only at ancestry.com
Joseph's death record, see preceding article for source details.
1851 Census of James Bain household, Kilbirnie, Scotland, transcription only at ancestry.com:

James Bain 44, head, Ireland, labourer
Sarah Bain 43, wife, Ireland
Mary Bain 15, dau, Ireland
Joseph Bain 13, son, Ireland
John Bain 5, son, Ireland
Cathrine Cullen 46, lodger, Ireland
John Cullen 43, lodger, Ireland
Jane Hamilton 61, lodger, Ireland
Jane Berry 44, lodger, Ireland
William Berry 9, lodger, born Glasgow, Lanarkshire

Credits

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.

Joseph and Agnes (Rennie) Hamilton, Ayrshire, Scotland

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

In 1841 Joseph Hamilton, age 20, was living in his mother Jean (Hazlett) Hamilton's household on Donny Holm Street in Kilbirnie. He had been born in Ireland and was working as a coal miner. Jean was 45 and had also been born in Ireland. Also in the household was a Mary Hamilton, age 15, born in Ireland, working as a flax spinner. If Mary is Joseph's sister, then the family was in Ireland until at least 1826.¹

Soon thereafter Joseph married Agnes Rennie, since their first known child, Franny, was 9 years old on the 1851 Census. Franny was born in Lochwinnoch, Renfrew, but the next three children in the household-- Ellen, William, and John--were born in Kilbirnie. The youngest, Joseph, was born in Kilmarnock.¹ All these locations are close to each other.

Other children in the family were Jane, Janet, David, and a daughter whose name was recorded just as "Wm" on the 1861 Census.²

Joseph Hamilton died in Kilbirnie on June 20,1863, of chronic bronchitis. The informant was his son William. The record includes the information that Joseph was married to Ann Rainey. Joseph's father was John Hamilton, a gardener, and his mother was Jane Hamilton, maiden name Hazlet.³

a DNA Match

My cousin recently submitted our Hamilton y-DNA for testing and the results showed that we matched on 25 markers of 25 with a descendant of Joseph Hamilton. According to familyTreeDNA.com, this means that we have a 95% probability of sharing a common ancestor in the last 13 generations with that family.

Our "paper trail" only goes back to 1818 and the documentation for Joseph's family goes back to about 1795, if his father was the same age as his mother. So it isn't possible at present to locate our common ancestor. But it does confirm our family's story that they were Scots-Irish, and it does put our family's roots most likely in the Ayrshire area of Scotland.

Perhaps someone in the Joseph Hamilton–Agnes Rennie line knows more about the preceding Hamilton generations and will post the information. If my cousin or I locate any earlier ancestors on our side, they will likely be posted here or on a tree at ancestry.com.

Continued in John and Jane (Hazlett) Hamilton.

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.

Footnotes

1. 1841 and 1851 Scotland Census. Transcriptions only. at ancestry.com
2. 1861 Scotland Census, images at https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/
3. 1863 Deaths in the Parish of Kilbirnie in the District of Ayr, page 15 #43. From Images of the National Records of Scotland at https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/.

Our y-DNA Mutation Rates

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

Introduction

Continued from The O'Rourke y-DNA -- an update, November 2015.

Reading Kerry Scott's article, Why Your DNA Test Results Are Wrong, got me to put down in writing what I had been thinking about for a while. When you put my family's paternal Hamilton y-DNA results and our maternal O'Rourke y-DNA results side by side, something doesn't really make much sense.

By Googling "y-dna average mutation rate" I found a few articles, which I don't pretend to have read thoroughly, let alone understand. However after skimming them I think our family's results seem to bear out the conclusions these people reached.

The articles are:

An Overview and Discussion of Various DNA Mutation Rates and DNA Haplotype Mutation Rates. Do the YSTR Haplotypes in some Y Chromosome Male Lines Mutate Faster Than in Other Male Lines?, By: Charles F. Kerchner, Jr., P.E. (Retired), Written: 7 Jan 2005, Last Edit/Upauthor: Ed Hamilton

[Y-DNA-projects] True Mutation Rates, by Tom Crago, in the Y-DNA-PROJECTS-L Archives,

a PDF file, Mutation Rates -- Who's Got the Right Values?, by Whit Athey, in Journal of Genetic Genealogy 3(2)i-iii, 2007,

Re: [Y-DNA-projects] True Mutation Rates, Clovis LaFleur, also in the Y-DNA-PROJECTS-L Archives,

and a post by Mr Kerchner in the Y-DNA-PROJECTS-L Archives, Male Line Specific Y-STR Average Mutation Rates -- the one size shoe/(haplotypemutation rate) fits all approach is not valid.

The Hamiltons

On my father's side our y-DNA matches on 37 of 37 markers with a descendant of Preston Fields, who was born about 1795 in the northeast corner of Tennessee. Preston's descendants were always told that either Preston or a male ancestor of his was actually a Hamilton, but had been brought up by a Fields family. For some background see the article Preston Fields of Pike County, Kentucky.

Our most distant paternal ancestor is James D Hamilton, who was born in 1818 in Cape May, New Jersey, a generation after Preston.

Let's assume a generation of father to son is 30 years. It was about that on my father's side, down to my cousin's son whose DNA was submitted. However on my mother's side, the generations were longer.

Remembering that Baltimore was a port of entry for the Scots-Irish, let's say that Preston Fields' father ___ Hamilton, was born about 1765 in Baltimore and migrated to western North Carolina/Eastern Tennessee by 1795, where he met Preston's mother.

Now suppose our James D Hamilton's family was also from Baltimore, with his father being born there about 1788 and his grandfather about 1758. Now we are back to the same generation as Preston Fields' father.

But it is very unlikely that James' grandfather and Preston's father are the same person. He would have to have fathered a child and almost immediately left for the frontier leaving a family behind. Of course the Hamilton track record might actually suggest this as a probability, come to think of it.

Dismisisng that possibility for now though, the common Hamilton-Fields ancestor might not have been for yet another generation, born in about 1728-1735. We would have to go back at least eight generations to find our common ancestor with the Fields family, thusly:

his grandfather
..his father
....James D Hamilton
......Joseph
........James M
..........Lou
............George
..............his son.

Add to that this interesting fact that I just had to throw in: There is a distance of about 600 miles between Knoxville TN and Baltimore MD, according to the "As The Crow Flies" Distance Calculator at http://tjpeiffer.com/crowflies.html.

The O'Rourkes

For some background, see The O'Rourke y-DNA -- an update, November 2015.

On our O'Rourke side, we match on 35 of 37 markers, generally accepted as a pretty close match, with a family who share the same surname, used many of the same given names as our family from one generation to the next, and is known to have lived within 200 yards of our family in Ballintur Townland, County Down, for 150 years.

On only 35 of 37 markers? If their DNA mutated at the same rate as the Hamilton's did, we should match on 38 of 37 markers. I mean the families lived side by side for probably 200 years or so. Can we possibly be less closely related to them than to the Fields?

We know that our O'Rourke family goes back 5 generations without being related to the other O'Rourkes:

James O'Rourke
..John
....William
......William
........my cousin,

and I think there were the same number of generations involved in the other O'Rourke family tested.

Comparing the two

The Hamilton DNA did not change at all in 7 generations. If the rate were the same for the O'Rourke DNA, how far back would we have to go to get 2 mutations? Actually, an infinite number of generations, correct?

But let's say the Hamilton DNA mutated at a rate of 1 every 8 generations. In our case the mutation would have occurred just before the Fields line split from ours. Apply that to the O'Rourkes. We would go back 3 more generations before the first mutation occurred, then 8 more to arrive at the second.

Were the O'Rourke families living side by side in Ballintur for 330 more years? Since 1450? I doubt it. And don't forget 30 years per generation is on the short side for the O'Rourkes. We could be talking about the year 1400 here.

Next, suppose we found out that one of the O'Rourke mutations occurred between my uncle and my cousin? Then my uncle's y-DNA would have matched on all but one marker with the other O'Rourke family. Is he suddenly more closely related to them than we thought? Obviously not.

Conclusions

The first conclusion is short and sweet: the Hamilton and O'Rourke DNA must have mutated at different rates. Or as one of the articles said, they mutated at the same rate, but the rate of repair for the Hamilton DNA is faster. Same difference as far as I, a humble layman, can see.

Secondary conclusion: take estimates of kinship based on y-DNA and autosomal DNA for what they are, estimates.

Finally, and most practially: we could be more closely related to the other O'Rourke families in Ballintur than the DNA results seem to indicate, and more like what the paper records themselves indicate.

Credits

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.

Preston Fields of Pike County, Kentucky

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

I have become interested in the family of Preston Fields who was born about 1795 probably in Tennessee, and if so, then likely in Hawkins County. According to a descendant, ‘Preston was raised by a couple, Hiram Fields and Fanny Mays but the oral tradition in the family is that Preston's biological father was a Hamilton, possibly James or William Hamilton.'¹

Recently my cousin's daughter submitted our Hamilton y-DNA from a family member and the results show that our Hamilton DNA matches that of a Preston Fields' descendant on 37 of 37 markers.

This series of articles will discuss 1) Preston Fields family, 2) his adoptive parents Hiram and Fanny (Mays) Fields, and 3) possible biological fathers for Preston. None of the research is original--I'm just putting it all in one place for my own benefit and that of my family.

Preston and Elizabeth (Rutherford) Fields

The earliest record I have found for Preston is a transcription of marriage consent papers for his marriage to Elizabeth Rutherford. The papers are dated December 15, 1817, in Floyd County.² They were married on December 24, 1817.³

Preston and his family are found on the 1820 Census of Floyd County, then on the 1840 and 1850 Censuses of Pike County, which was formed from Floyd on 19 Dec 1821. Then in 1860 they are living in Wise Court House, Wise County, Virginia.⁴ Preston and Elizabeth may have died in Wise County, Virginia. (Further research: Why did they go to Wise County?)

Based only on the census information, the children of Preston and Elizabeth Fields were:

Robert Fields, born about 1822
William Fields, born about 1822
Jason Fields, born about 1825
Joseph Fields, born about 1830
John Fields, born about 1834
Reuben Fields, born about 1836
Harrison Fields, born about 1840
Matilda Fields, born about 1841
Elijah Fields, born about 1842.

I was only trying to get an "outline" of Preston's family. There were daughters besides Matilda, based on other trees on rootsweb and ancestry.com, and which could be verified by marriage records, etc. Also the first two sons must have been born before 1820, since Preston's census for that year said he had two sons in the household.

Continued in Hiram Lansford Fields, of Hawkins County, Tennessee.

Footnotes

Message posted by Diana Fields, July 24, 2009 at the Genforum Fields Family Genealogy Forum.
Transcribed Floyd County Kentucky Marriages Consent Papers 1808 -- 1851
These are evidently transcribed from: Skeens, Joe R., Floyd County, Kentucky consent papers, 1808-1851, (Prestonsburg, KY, J.R. Skeens, c1993). According to J. Mark Lowe, "Using Kentucky Marriage Records," (October 10, 2013), at archives.com, consent papers meant that either the bride or groom was under 21.
Kentucky Marriages, 1802-1850, ancestry.com.
1820 Census, Prestonburg, Floyd, Kentucky. Series M33 Roll: 22 Page: 47
1840 household of Preston Fields found at familysearch.org.
1850 household of Preston Fields, Pike County, Kentucky, dwelling 459, NARA film M432, roll 217.
1860 household of Preston Fields, Wise Court House, Wise, Virginia; Roll: M653_1384; Page: 285.

Credits

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.

Some Conclusions on the Hamilton DNA Research

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

Continued from Thomas Hamilton of Bedford County, Virginia, and Some DNA Results.

You have probably arrived at this article by reading through the series of articles that began with Preston Fields, of Pike County, Kentucky, or the series that began with Joseph and Agnes (Rennie), Hamilton of Ayrshire, Scotland. If not, you might want to go back to the beginning of either or both of those series and read them as well.

While I was working on this DNA project, I realized two things:

If your DNA matches someone else, it means you are related to them. DNA doesn't lie.
If someone submits their DNA to a project and says that their earliest known ancestor is John Doe Hamilton, it doesn't mean a thing. Their statement is only as good as their research.

Now, I trust my own research because I knew I was looking for a great-great grandfather who had something to do with the theater in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. My father would have heard about him from his grandmother (my great-grandmother). She seems to have lived with her father-in-law's family for a while and would have told her grandchildren about him. So when the paper work led me to James D. Hamilton, born in 1818 in Cape May, New Jersey, who became the caretaker for the Union Hall in Johnstown, I knew I had my man.

And I trust the research of the descendants of Preston Fields for the same reason. They started with a family story that said Preston's father was a Hamilton. Now they have a 37-marker y-DNA match with our Hamilton DNA and a 25-marker match with a Hamilton who was born in 1818 in Ireland and who died in Ayrshire, Scotland.

But what about someone else's research? Should I trust it?

Applying the Principles

With this in mind, let's look back at the Hamiltons living in Hawkins and Sullivan counties, Tennessee, about 1795.

There were two men on the list about whom I know nothing else: Joseph Hamilton, the attorney, and James Hamilton, the cornet in the cavalry. Suppose someone submits their DNA and says that one of these men is their earliest known ancestor. Suppose the DNA doesn't match mine. Does that mean that Joseph or James Hamilton aren't close relatives to myself and Preston Fields' family?

No. It only means that the person whose DNA was submitted is not my close relative.

There must be thousands of family trees on line at various sites. Rootsweb alone once said they had 640 million names on file. By now, ancestry.com probably has many more. Add in Familysearch, wikitree, etc, and what do you have? Millions of erroneous conclusions which have been reached regarding whose ancestor is whose.

Why should I conclude that the research of John Doe Hamilton's descendant is any better?

Another problem

Next, let's look at the group of Hamilton men on the 1796 Tax List of Sullivan County, Tennessee.

All of those men–and others who didn't make it as far as Sullivan County–are said to be sons of Thomas Hamilton and Esther Sampson of Bedford County, Virginia. The only problem is that there are more males in the family than fit the time span in which they were born: Robert (b 1754), Richard (1756), James (1757), Thomas (1757), Joshua (1759), Benjamin (1761), Samuel (1765). And that doesn't include daughters.¹

In this case three descendants of Benjamin Hamilton, third and fourth cousins of each other, have had their DNA tested and they are not a match for Preston Fields or my own family. I'll trust that provisionally, since three people probably didn't make the same researching mistakes, unless they all relied on the same mistaken information.

Even so, does that mean that all the other men on the Sullivan County Tax List are eliminated? Not at all, since there is no way to be sure they are brothers. Or if there is, I didn't find it.

So where did we get?

Somewhere and nowhere.

Somewhere, because we have narrowed down the search to a small locality and a short time frame Hawkins County, Tennessee, and Stokes County, North Carolina, where the Fields lived before moving to Hawkins County.

Nowhere, because we really can't eliminate anyone, except maybe Benjamin Hamilton's descendants.

March 2024, edited to add: I think we can eliminate two men who were in Stokes County in the 1790's: Horatio Hamilton and Robert Sharp Hamilton. There are y-DNA samples from both those families on the hamiltonDNA.com project, and they don't match the descendant of Preston Fields or the my family.

So until:
1) someone else submits y-DNA that matches Preston Fields' and our Hamilton family, and
2) they name a Hamilton who lived near Preston's adoptive father, Hiram Lansford Fields, as their ancestor, and
3) their research leading back to that ancestor stands the test,

we can just wait and guess.

Continued in A Positive View of our Hamilton DNA Research.

Credits

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.

Footnotes

1. For an article that discussed the problems with the sons in Thomas Hamilton's family see Hamiltons of Bedford County, VA, posted by Larry Wood, June 19, 2001, in the Genforum Hamilton Family Genealogy Forum.

Some Hamiltons in Hawkins and Sullivan Counties, Tennessee, 1784 to 1796

2018-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

Continued from Hiram Lansford Fields, of Hawkins County, Tennessee.

In the first two articles we placed Preston Fields and Hiram Lansford Fields in Hawkins County, Tennessee, in 1796 and afterward. That was the easy part.

The next questions are: 1) Were there any Hamiltons in the area at the time? and 2) Which of them is the father of Preston? The short answers are 1) Yes, plenty, and 2) I have no idea.

The ones I found:

Joseph Hamilton, about whom Ancestry.com says: "A native of Virginia, where he was admitted to the bar; moved to Hawkins County, 1784, and subsequently became a prominent lawyer in Tennessee (Caldwell, Bench and Bar, Tennessee., pp. 77-82)." and "He was licensed to practise as [an Attorney] in the several courts of Law and Equity, 1 Nov 1790."¹ and: "He was appointed Attorney and County Solicitor for Hawkins County, 26 Feb 1791."²

James Hamilton, about whom Ancestry.com says: He was appointed a Cornet in the Cavalry for the District of Washington, 3 Nov 1790.³

I noticed that the family numbers in the sources are not the same for these two men. Maybe Joseph was mentioned with another family, that is understandable. But do the different family numbers mean that James was not related to Joseph? I don't know. You would probably have to find Ancestry.com's original source to learn the answer.

From the tax records for Sullivan County for 1796:⁴

Abram Hamilton, acres: 131
Joshua Hamilton, acres: 590
John Hamilton, acres: none

Thomas Hamilton, acres: none
Thomas Hamilton, acres: none

The two men above were bracketed together and with the same information

Rich'd Hamilton, acres: none
Benj'm Hamilton, acres: none

I grouped these men together if they were immediately after each other on the list. The list itself was grouped only by the first letter of the surname, but not strictly alphabetically after that. So are Abram, Joshua and John one family; Thomas and Thomas another; and Richard and Benjamin still another?

[edited March 2024 to add the following:]

I don't remember why I included Sullivan County, since Hawkins County was set off from it in 1786, years before Hiram Lansford Fields arrived. But since I did, here are some families with connections to Sullivan County that can be eliminated as possible candidates for the natural Hamilton father of Preston Fields.

All the information comes from the hamiltonDNA.com website. All three families are in Group A or I1-1. Preston's father is in Group R1b-9.

Participant number, followed by familytreedna kit number, followed by the information.

H-101 40320
Thomas Hamilton, b abt 1719 in Northern Ireland, emigrated to Baltimore, MD in 1738, served a 5 year indenture, d 1772 Bedford Co, VA, m 1753 in Hartford Co, MD Esther Sampson, b 1730 Baltimore Co, MD, d after 1772 Bedford Co, VA.
Son Benjamin S Hamilton, b 1761 Bedford Co, VA, d 1849 Morgan Co, KY, m 1792 in Sullivan Co, TN to Susannah Moonglow Hurst, b abt 1770, d 1846 in Moon, Morgan Co, KY. Descendants lived in Johnson Co, KY. H-101 is a gggg grandson of Benjamin, and a fourth cousin once removed of both H-083 and H-244.

H-278 121827
Isaac Hamilton, b about 1791 in TN, d before 1858 when his estate was sold in Washington Co, TN.
Son, Abraham Hamilton, b about 1827 probably in Washington Co, TN, d 1863 in Sullivan Co, TN. H-228, H-277 and H-278 are thus all related, being derived from 3 different sons of Isaac.

H-252 99315
James Hamilton, b 1720 in VA or PA, d 1786 in Sullivan Co, TN. His son William Hamilton, b 1750 in VA, d 1828 in Union Co, TN. His son Alexander Hamilton, b 1779 in Sullivan Co, TN (formerly Washington Co, VA & NC), d 1852 in Union Co, TN, m 1797 in Grainger Co, TN to Susannah Addamson, b 1791 in NC, d after 1860 in Union Co, TN.

Continued in Thomas Hamilton of Bedford County, Virginia, and Some DNA results.

Footnotes

Ancestry.com's source: Territorial Papers of the US; Volume Number: Vol 4; Page Number: 436; Family Number: 19
Ancestry.com's source: Territorial Papers of the US; Volume Number: Vol 4; Page Number: 443; Family Number: 1
Ancestry.com's source: Territorial Papers of the US; Volume Number: Vol 4; Page Number: 438; Family Number: 17.
Tennessee, Early Tax List Records, 1783-1895, at ancestry.com

Credits

The image of a DNA strand comes from Wikipedia:File:DNA orbit animated static thumb.png.