Project News
May 23, 2008
What better time than Memorial Day to establish a Yahoo Group focused on the history of the Cumberland Gap area, its families and the DNA results of the descendants of our ancestors who settled those stunning mountains.
DNA has become a very important tool in the genealogists’ and historians’ toolbox, as it allows us to identify those to whom we are related, either within or outside of known family surnames.
For some time now, I've been trying to figure out exactly how to facilitate communications between our DNA project members, both yline and mtdna. I tried to set up a rootsweb group, but rootsweb told me that the Cumberland Gap was not a geographic location. Now I got a good chuckle out of that.
Fortunately, Yahoo groups is much more accommodating. I have set up a Yahoo group called Cumberland Gap History, Genealogy and DNA for our group members and anyone else who has a particular interest in the Cumberland Gap area.
The goal is to facilitate friendly discussions and the exchange of information both genealogical and historical about events that took place in that general geographic area, data that exists like tax lists, deeds, etc., and the families who settled and lived in this beautiful area.
Please join the group, have fun, learn a little something, share with others and find your family.
To join, send at e-mail to:
CumberlandGap-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
You will receive a confirmation message that you have successfully joined.
Then you can post messages by sending them to:
CumberlandGap@yahoogroups.com
To check out the archives or other items on the webpage, you can visit the group at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CumberlandGap/
Communications from Penny and I will be through the Yahoo group and not through Family Tree DNA’s e-mail broadcast capability. The sheer number of participants causes us to be labeled as spammers, which is why we created the Yahoo group. Besides, it gives everyone a chance to chat.
Roberta Estes
February 12, 2007
Dear Cumberland mtdna group members,
Hello once again. I recently received a note from someone asking if I’m still the administrator of the group. I guess that means it’s probably been too long since I’ve sent a note to the members. I apologize. Please take the time to read the entire newsletter, as it is lengthy, but there are lots of good tips and information that will help you with your genealogy and understanding the Cumberland Gap area and people. If you are in the Cumberland Gap yline project, you have already received a similar newsletter today, but please read this one too. There is information in this newsletter specifically for mitochondrial DNA, although some of the historical information is duplicated.
As you’ve probably noticed, the group with 176 members has grown significantly. I used to send a personal welcome message to everyone, but the volume has gotten to the level when I just can’t do that anymore, so welcome to everyone.
First, this project is for mtdna (mitochondrial DNA) results ONLY, meaning your maternal line. This is your mother, her mother, her mother, etc. on up the tree. If you have joined this project because your paternal line (your father, his father, etc.) is from the Cumberland Gap area, then you are in the wrong project and you need to unjoin the Cumberland Gap mtdna project and join the Cumberland Gap Y-dna project using the blue JOIN button on your personal page. If your paternal and maternal lines are both from the Cumberland Gap area, then you need to join BOTH projects. This is the only way I can be sure that only the results that are relevant to the Gap are displayed. If you’re in the wrong project, please take this opportunity to fix that problem.
The reason I started the Cumberland Gap mtdna project is because the female line is so often lost, the records often being either destroyed or nonexistent. With the last name changing every generation, unless there is a family Bible, a will or a marriage record, the woman’s heritage is lost forever. However, given that our mtdna is descended matrilineally, and people tended to travel in groups, it makes sense that if we can combine our mtdna genetic matches with the local geographic history and probably some census records to find neighbors, we may well be able to reconnect our female lines again.
Let’s face it, the girl next door was much more likely to have a child with the boy next door than with the boy in the next county. Generally speaking, people who knew each other well enough to make children lived close together. If you didn’t have the opportunity to get to know someone, you very likely weren’t going to have children by them. So people often married the neighbor boy and then lived beside or just down the holler from their parents, aunts and uncles. If we can match one of these other women, we can potentially find our line again using their genealogy.
If you find someone either within the Cumberland Gap project that you match, or outside the project, and you really feel there is a good chance that you may be related to this person in a genealogically relevant timeframe, I highly encourage you both to upgrade to the mega mtdna full sequence test. Yes it is expensive, although the price has come down, but we have just recently learned that the HVR1 and 2 areas are really not enough to prove a genealogical connection within a genealogically relevant timeframe.
Let me give you an example. In my own mtdna mega-sequence, I discovered a mutation that has not been reported in any other sequence in the world. (Remember, very few full mtdna sequences have been tested to date.) If I find a woman with whom I really think I match, or it’s important to know if I don’t, then that mutation will be THE mutation to prove whether we are or we are not recently related, conclusively. We are making headway in this infant field.
Even if you don’t do the mega-mtdna sequence, you can still learn valuable information from your matches. Like all DNA testing, the more refined the test, the better your matches will be. If you can’t upgrade to the mega right now, at least upgrade to HVR2. I have fewer HVR2 matches than HVR1, which means I can eliminate those as matches in a genealogical timeframe who match with HVR1 but not HVR2. I am related to them, but just further back in time.
Sometimes you are related, but you are not related since the advent of last names. I call this anthro-genealogy, because it falls between genealogy and the deep ancestry called anthropology. However, if you are trying to learn about your own family history, remember that people most often migrated in groups. This is true for as far back as history takes us. No matter where you were going, you would need help and family gives us the security of knowing we are not alone.
Most of the early settlers in the Cumberland Gap area were of Scots-Irish descent. As a short history lesson, the Scots (or Scotch) Irish were a displaced people from the lowlands of Scotland to the area of Ulster in Ireland when England ruled Ireland in the early 1600s. This is known as the Ulster Plantation Era. In 1717, a famine combined with huge rental increases and increased pressure to convert from being Presbyterian to being Anglican, the Church of England, spurred the first wave of immigration of the Scottish people living in Ireland to the colonies. Even though they had been living in Ireland more than 100 years, they still thought of themselves at Scots, hence the name Scotch-Irish.
The Scotch-Irish were not the only people seeking a new land. The Protestant French Huguenots who survived St. Bartholomew’s Massacre in 1652 and who were not burned at the stake for being “heretics” were given 20 days to leave France under penalty of death by the Catholic government. They also became a displaced people and migrated heavily to Germany, the lowlands (Netherlands, Belgium, Flanders) and to England. They too immigrated to the colonies early, forming Manakin Town in early Tidewater Virginia in the 1600s.
Another persecuted group were the Amish, Mennonite and Brethren, all pietist sects, opposed to violence in any form, including self-defense. They were driven from Switzerland, then from Germany.
The peace-loving Quakers were being purged from England and they too sought refuge in the colonies.
The commonality between all of these groups is that they all departed from the old country to the colonies through ports of Great Britain. The Colonies were a British holding and all immigration was regulated by England in one form or another. Before 1738, Pennsylvania was run by the proprietor William Penn and he was the only colonial proprietor who would tolerate religious freedom. In fact, he actively encouraged these groups to settle in his colony as he needed settlers to clear the woods and to provide a buffer against the “savage Indians” who were understandably unhappy about the encroachment upon their lands.
In 1738, Virginia enacted the Religious Toleration act passed to encourage settlement in Virginia by deferring taxes for 10 years and providing settlers with a musket and very cheap land. In one case, the Presbyterians (Scotch-Irish) were provided with a 10,000 acre land grant. Settlers began pouring across the boundary between Pennsylvania and Virginia for free, or nearly free land. Again, they often migrated in groups.
As soon as (and sometimes before) the land west of the Alleghenys and Appalachians was open, the settlers were there, often initially as squatters, then as land owners. People poured into the current Virginia counties of Augusta, Orange, Botetourt, Washington and Rockingham and then the settlers streamed on down the valleys into what would eventually become East Tennessee. I’m sure we are all familiar with the history of this area, that it was initially North Carolina, then Virginia, then the State of Franklin, then North Carolina again, then Tennessee. The boundary lines were also in dispute, and many who thought they lived in Virginia in fact did not. It’s no small wonder that very few records of this timeframe exist, and those that do are widely scattered among various counties and states.
Why does all of this matter to you, as a genealogist, if you are trying to find your roots? We are often very quick to dismiss matches with people of different surnames. However, when trying to establish mtdna matches, all of the matches will have different surnames. Looking at the patterns of those surnames can provide us very valuable clues to the history of our own family. Where are those people who we match from? Look at their genealogies, not just their surnames today. Why did their ancestors come to the states, and when? What was their migration path both in the old country and in the colonies? All of these subtle clues together help us determine the history of our own family, often long before last names were adopted or assigned. Don’t quickly dismiss matches to other surnames. Ponder the possibilities. Knowing that the Cumberland Gap area was heavily populated with the Scotch Irish first, along with the French Huguenots, some German groups, a few Quakers and some English from the Virginia shoreline colonies, what can those matches tell you about your early ancestry?
For more information about how to work with your results, see the Project Results section of this page.
Best of luck with your genealogy, and please, let me know of any success stories generated from the Cumberland Gap project.
Roberta Estes