Castle surname yDNA project

A couple of years ago I dreamed up a project to prove or disprove the folklore that says that Jacob Castle (the long hunter) was a descendant of one of the sons of Yelles Cassell who left the Palatinate to move to Pennsylvania in the late 1600s.  These men first live in Germantown, Pennsylvania and some of them continued to live there for generations.  

So I bought a kit for a man whose paper trail connected him to Jacob Castle (the long hunter) who moved to southwest Virginia c. 1747.  This man is an autosomal match to me, so I am fairly certain that he does indeed represent the Castle family from which I descend.  Then I searched Ancestry public trees until I found a man who had a good paper trail to Yelles Castle and whose family continues to live in Germantown even to this day.  Much to my disappointment the participants for whom I bought yDNA kits did not match.  But I am not yet convinced that this means that Jacob did not descend from Yelles Cassell.   And here is what I am thinking at this point of my project.

Unfortunately the man who was the administrator for the Castle surname yDNA project had not done much to organize the participants who had joined the project.  I sent him several messages over a years time and he never responded.  So I asked FTDNA if they would add me to the project as an administrator which they did just before Christmas this past year.  Beginning the new year I began to organize the participants into family groups.  It is not a large project.  FG#1 contains Jon Castle who is my participant who has excellent paper trail to Yelles and whose family still lives close to where the early Cassell brothers lived when the first came to our shores.  Jon only has one match who carries the Castle/Cassell surname.  Even at 67 markers there are only 3 matches.....2 of the matches carry a different surname.  Does this indicate a birth incident for Jon's line or just the fact that not many men who have ancestors who fit the description of connecting to Yelles Cassell have tested at this time?

Family group #2 is a larger group.  It is probably the largest group in the project.  All of the men in Family Group #2 claim connection to Jacob the Longhunter except for one participant who does not have information about his paternal line.  I have asked among the participants to see if there is any chance that any of them do NOT connect to Jacob but instead connect to another son of Yelles and no one has come forth with a yes to that query.

So I am not farther along with my project.  However yesterday I noticed something of interest. I was chatting with the man who doesn't know his paternal line to see if I could send him anything helpful.  And As I looked at this man's matches, I noticed that the first 10 matches (except for one) claimed connection to Jacob the longhunter OR carried the Harmon surname OR claim connection to ancestor with Harmon/Harman surname.  Then many of the participants who are slightly less close matches have VERY Scotch/Irish surnames...NOT GERMAN.  Could Jacob Castle have had Scotch-Irish heritage instead of German?  Did he change his name?  Could his Castle surname have had connections to Great Britain instead of Germany?  Will we be able to solve this puzzle with dna?   My participant who descends from Jacob the long hunter has haplogroup R-M479.  This haplogroup could be British or German .....this does not raise red flags.

I wanted to add a map to this post to show that Jacob Castle and Jacob Harmon were relative neighbors in the mid 1700s....

Gleanings of Virginia history. An historical and genealogical collection

 I had a bit of extra time last night and started reading Gleanings of Virginia History.  An historical and genealogical collection by William Fletcher Boogher.  It is available on archive.net.  His book is particularly easy to read and navigate and I found myself wanting to spend the entire weekend reading and using his material....it starts with the very earliest settling of Virginia and then goes on to the French and Indian War and then the next section is about men being paid to protect the western frontiers....all of these subjects of great interest to me because of my Farrar family, and my Castle and Morrison family, and even one small section was about early settlers in what is now Stafford and Prince William Counties....

However I am in the midst of preparing for my DAR meeting next weekend....so I decided to make notes and safe until later in the month.

Page 23 is the start of the money spent on protecting the frontier in 1756.  And it is names by county.  Valentine Castle is named on page 36.  He is said to be from Augusta County.  This year would have been when Augusta County was everything west of the Shenandoah Valley.  So if Valentine is a part of our Castle family group he could have been living almost anywhere..

The most helpful thing is that people are paid in groups which means you can get a feeling for if this is really your own ancestor by the neighbors and friends....for example, Andrew Hays and Robert Campbell are paid with a fairly large group on page 47

Page 113 begins Boogher's information about the Scotch-Irish of Augusta County.

https://archive.org/details/gleaningsvirgin00booggoog/page/n126/mode/2up

Then there is some information about the revolutionary war and some genealogies of a few families of Virginia....There IS an index.  

Miscellaneous

The photo of the athletic club that is featured in the next blog post made it hard to read my information on the right hand side of the blog.  And it is a rainy, gray day this morning.  So I decided to write perhaps a tempory blog post to move the one causing the problem down lower.

I think that I will just spend a bit of time brainstorming about the upcoming Revolutionary War celebration and some of the things I might like to do.  I will continue to write and present a monthly short presentation about what was happening 250 years ago in our country that particular month.  On slow months such as the winter months when we are just waiting for the weather to get better, I may talk about other facets of the times.  In October I want to continue to mention the ratification process taking place to follow up on the program that we presented October 2024 with Westmoreland.  Just talking about other colonies that had their own ratification process ....our first was about Virginia.

I loved the project that The WV Davisson Chapter of the WV DAR did....I would like to think of the best way to incorporate this into our upcoming celebration.

 

The Athletic Club

 The Herald Dispatch featured an article by Jim Casto with a photo supplied by David Smith today.

The three story building at 624 9th Street was built in 1915-1916. This photo of it dates to when it was being used as the Athletic Club 

When first built it had retail shops on first floor and apartments above.  In 1922 it became the Plaza hotel.  Its close proximity to the C&O railroad station supplied guests.  After the Swartz brothers closed their Continental Club in Chesapeake in 1949, they moved to this location and opened the Athletic Club.  By 1973 the Athletic Club was no longer in use and it was bought by a Beauty College.  My parents and grandparents spoke of the Athletic Club many times.  I don't think that children were welcome on the premises?  

Indian treaty of 1744 and Southwest Virginia

Much of the below is taken from

 https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/e7469af5-2f00-4139-93e3-f2fcdbbf2469/content

The author seems to be Ryan S. Mays.  I am hitting the high points but the main emphasis of this blog post is to remember how to get to this information again.  

1744 was the year that there is the first primary documentation that Adam Harmon had settled on the New River.  And June 1744 was the time in which a meeting was held in Lancaster PA between representatives from PA and VA and Maryland as well as representatives from the six Nations and other northern Indian tribes.  Note it ends with Adam Harmon's at Tom's Creek on New River

I will zero into the box above so it is clearer where Tom's Creek is

There is an excellent map of where the author of this article believes likely the location of Adam Harmon's cabin.  I am not going to try to reproduce his drawing.  But it is very worth visiting the site to see.

It would seem that the six nations indians gave up their rights to the land that lay in Virginia and that in return they were promised use of the road.  This opened up settlement of the Virginia lands on the western waters.  

The footnotes to this article are excellent if one wishes more information.  

There is a great little map on the blog site 

https://rattlingoldbones.blogspot.com/2014/03/adam-harman-pioneer-on-new-river-1745_19.html

There is more good information on this blog site.  The below paragraph is found on this site.  The information is taken from the first book that Kegley wrote when Mary Kegley was just helping him.  It is a huge book that I own.  The two facts inferred in this paragraph is that in order to obtain a tract one had to settle and improve the land which kept settlers from buying for resale only and also that that this was the time period when the french and Indian War was beginning and that the Shawnee warriors were coming as far south as this area.

In fact, the Harman name appears on grants in numerous places in the area, so many places that M. B. Kegley and F. B. Kegley observe, “It is apparent that the Harmans were interested in tracts of land on Pine Run, Walker’s Creek, Bluestone, Sinking Creek, as well as the tracts on Tom’s Creek and the Horseshoe, but their large selections were more than they could ‘settle and improve’ and as a result most of their claims were forfeited.”[21] One might also infer, given the danger from attacks on the settlements perpetrated by Shawnee warriors, which intensified with the start of the French and Indian War, that the Harman families may have abandoned their tracts for that reason as well.22

The Cohongoronto River according to wikipedia is another name for the Potomac river.  Looking at the below map you can see that the road above uses the Great wagon road that is already in existence in 1740 down to what is now Roanoke Virginia.  What is interesting is that the great Wagon road continues south into the Carolinas at this point.  However, the Shenandoah Valley itself begins to go south west at this point and this would have been the road that our Castle family would have taken when leaving the land they had bought from Stover....and sold about 1740.

As the road came through the valley Below Harrisonburg to Lexington the men who were mentioned are Colonel James Patton, Patrick Campbell, and Patrick Hayes. The latter two are my ancestors and I know where they were living on the Beverley Manor in this time period.  This would have been about halfway between Harrisonburg and Lexington right on the Great Wagon Road 

Captain George Robinson settled on 191 acres on a branch of Buffalo Creek. 

The next road that went from Adam Harmon's to the