I received Uncle Don’s Ancestry DNA results back some time ago and have been going through his match list trying to find a connection to another Morris family in hopes of uncovering the parents of John Jacky Morris (Don’s 2nd and my 3rd great grandpa). I have sorted his paternal and maternal matches and am focusing on his paternal Morris matches.
His closest paternal matches are coming through his paternal grandmother’s Dennis line and his paternal great grandmother’s Williams line. Lots of matches showing that these descendants are serious about DNA testing for genealogy purposes. This means that more descendants from these lines have DNA tested than descendants of his Morris line. Very disappointing and I concluded that this means my extended Morris family is just not that interested in DNA testing for genealogy purposes.
The shared Morris matches were almost all descendants of John Jacky and Amelia Morris, even down to 15 cM shared. I concluded this to mean that descendants of John Jacky and Amelia Morris are quite serious about DNA testing and are trying to uncover the parentage of this couple. Unfortunately, it also shows that those people who descend from previous generations are not too interested in DNA testing for genealogical purposes. But, all is not lost. See my analysis at the end of this post.
I did go to Gedmatch and run Don's DNA data through the “Are your parents related” tool and that told me that there are no shared DNA segments found and that his parents are not related in recent generations. That was a plus for me and it made it easier to separate his matches through each of his grandparents’ lines.
My own DNA is quite an interesting mess since my parents share DNA on chromosomes 1, 4, 8, 16, and 22 (shown below in the chart). My parents are related through three of their four grandparent lines. Their mothers are 1C and they are related on the Morris line with grandfathers being first cousins once removed. It was interesting though to see the shared DNA in my own results.
Uncle Don and I share 1699.1 cM (47.357 %) of autosomal DNA on chromosomes 1-18, 20 and 22 and 110.3 cM of X DNA. He is 100% my full uncle.
Diving into the DNA matches for Uncle Don on Ancestry I immediately recognized all his top matches as these people are already in my family tree. Uncle Don matches a lot more lines from John Jacky Morris than I do. Since John Jacky Morris is Uncle Don’s second great grandpa, I expected to see matches at the third cousin level (around 73 cM of shared DNA) and there are quite a lot of them. I was able to connect most of them but there were a few who had so little documentation I was not able to identify them. I found at least two who looked like they were adopted.
I moved on to the fourth cousin level (around 35 cM of shared DNA) and everything fell apart from there. The family trees at this level (most had not even bothered with a family tree) connected their Morris lines to John Haton Morris of Anson and Montgomery counties, North Carolina, John Morris of Kanawha, West Virginia, or Edward Morris of Richmond County, Virginia with absolutely zero documentation and I concluded that these people were simply guessing at their ancestry and copying from other family trees who also guessed at their ancestry rather than doing the genealogy to connect a paper trail. I will have to research and build family trees for these people to see if I can figure out who their Morris ancestor really was.
John Haton Morris YDNA line has his male descendants in FTDNA Morris Group M02. Not a YDNA match to Uncle Don who is in Group M29. These are different Morris families.
John Morris of Kanawha, West Virginia has long been attributed as John Jacky Morris but doing the genealogy for Kanawha John Morris shows he lived and died in West Virginia and married a woman named Jane Jordan.
Edward Morris of Richmond County, Virginia has his male descendants in FTDNA Morris Group M04. Not a YDNA match to my Morris line who is in Group M29.
I reached out to a trusted genealogist for a second opinion on my work and he concluded the same thing as I had. We never found an example of a "match descended from the same external Morris family as you would expect if you had found a source for the shared DNA in a Virginia Morris family.” The few who have DNA tested just “don't seem to share enough of the same segments." Or it could be that the "DNA there reflects John's mother's line or his wife Amelia's line or Amelia's mother's line." Nevertheless, if that is the case, we also "didn't see another lineage that kept popping up among cluster members that would possibly suggest where to look for those shared distant-line ancestors and the Morris's who married them."
What we did find were multiple descendants of a Nichols family that harks back to early Montgomery County and of a Vowel family which came from Mecklenburg County, Virginia to Granville County, North Carolina. This could be an indicator of Amelia's origins or of John Morris's mother's origins. Clearly these are two families that need to be investigated for any Morris connections.
The Vowel matches are very "strong at such a generational remove," and they "predate the second-great-grandparents and yet there are matches in excess of 100 cM" making me think that John Jacky Morris and his wife Amelia are related! That is an exciting possibility!
This is the same Vowel family that I wrote about in the post Eusebius. That Vowel family is related to the Wynn (Winn) family who became guardian of a 10 year old boy named John Morris in Mecklenburg County, Virginia in 1795. It just so happens that John Jacky Morris would have been about 10 years old in 1795.
I have 12 (10 really as 2 descend from #6, meaning it is the same DNA) DNA matches to this Vowel family through 4 children of William Vowel and his wife Martha (called Milly). Match #6 shown in the family tree below shares 105 cM with Uncle Don. An incredible amount of shared DNA since their relationship is so distant. This describes the phenomenon of pedigree collapse which occurs when you descend from the same ancestor through more than one family line, which results in having fewer distinct ancestors than would be expected in a perfectly branching family tree.
Without a doubt, John Jacky Morris and/or his wife, Amelia, were related to William Vowel of Mecklenburg, County, Virginia.
My second set of eyes fellow researcher noted that people who have “repeat ancestry along multiple lineages tend to produce genetic cousins that appear more closely related than they actually are.” Meaning there may have been some cousin marriages in the past.
Again, my fellow researcher and I concluded Uncle Don has one group of matches “dominated by Vowel's & Nichols which do not intersect with a separate group dominated by local Morris" and we asked the question “What if John Jacky's parents or Amelia's parents were first cousins—both Vowel descendants?” Or “what if John Jacky Morris and his wife Amelia were first cousins?" Would that generate enough DNA in descendants to show matches sharing more than 100 cM of DNA? You bet your DNA it would!
My final analysis:
While I have not found any evidence within my Uncle Don's DNA to pinpoint to the Virginia origins of our Morris family, I did discover that either John Jacky Morris and his wife Amelia were closely related or one or both sets of their parents were!
Next steps:
Continue to research Vowel matches in Mecklenburg County, Virginia and Granville County, North Carolina and Nichols DNA matches in Montgomery County, North Carolina.
A very special thank you to Larry for the second set of eyes on my findings.
