Family tradition states that American immigrants, William and Nancy Ashenhurst, were descended from Col. John Ashenhurst, a Cromwellian who moved to Ireland after the Restoration of the Crown. Another immigrant, Ralph Ashenhurst, may have been a son.

There are Ashenhursts in Canada, and throughout the English-speaking world. Do they all descend from a common patriarch? DNA will answer that question. I hope that Ashenhursts world-wide will participate in this project.

I maintained an Ashenhurst distribution list for several years in the 1990s, and maintained the website, http://ancestraldata.com/ashenhurst/, which has not been updated for years. To my knowledge, no similar page exists. This one should serve for now. There is a little-used, but ongoing, Ashenhurst discussion at http://genforum.genealogy.com/ashenhurst