Friday, July 11, 2014

Welsh Quaker naming patterns

Vivian Markley sent me a link to her newest post:

http://quakerig.blogspot.com/2014/07/update-7112014.html

The post had such a great idea in it that I decided to copy the idea here in my own Blog.  Most of us who have been doing research for any amount of time are aware of the naming practices of the Scots who use Mc and the Welsh who use ap as in Thomas ap Thomas or William ap Thomas.....if you aren't familiar read about it on the above blog post.

But the new (to me) idea that Vivian suggests is that some of the random names that we find among our FF matches may have come from Welsh ancestors.  So it is possible that someone with last name Thomas may match someone with last name Evans.....and that the ancestor that they share may have been Welsh.  It is just a matter of what surname they took on these shores where the "ap" naming pattern was not used.

WOW!  This would be a huge project to take on.  But it would be similar to my idea of trying to find some sort of pattern for my matches who had ancestors from Nantucket....or for my matches who had ancestors from the Northern Neck of Virginia.  So

I recently sent the following to my Northern Neck Mail list (Virginia):

I just had a surprising match on my Family Finder.  A man who joined via the Moses surname project that I am co-administrator for came back as a match for me instead of one of the Moses participants.  I am  not Moses by blood.....just married to a Moses male.  That made me start thinking about who I am likely to match in general.  And I thought about one of the blog posts that I wrote a couple of years ago:

http://hawkinsdna.blogspot.com/search?q=autosomal  

My interpretation of a talk that I had heard at the Ohio genealogical society's annual event given by Diahan Southard: 

Her information included the suggestion that a match might be because you share many small segments of DNA.  That would indicate a geographic connection.  With another match you might share large segments of DNA which would indicate that this person is more likely to be related to you with a common ancestor in the much closer time frame.


I started thinking about the various geographical locations that might show up for my own DNA results.  The one that jumps to my mind most quickly is my Nantucket ancestors.....they were so intermarried by the time just before the Revolutionary War that to connect to one family line almost connects one to all of the lines.  But the Northern Neck jumps to my mind secondly.  These people were almost certainly almost that intermarried by the time 1800 came around.....at least the lines that had moved to the area in the 1600's.  They just are not as well documented as my Nantucket ancestors.  

So I started thinking....hmmmmm....are there a series of small segments that would suggest a connection to the Nothern Neck?

 So the question I am thinking on Vivian's information is:  are there a series of small segments that would suggest a connection to the Welsh?

I would love to hear from anyone who has any answers for me on this!

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