. . . But Then, There's Charlemagne

 

Notwithstanding my reasons given yesterday about not needing to pursue my mother-in-law's colonial Maryland ancestors any longer, there is yet one nagging thought. What about Charlemagne? After all, I have a book that says as much: that my mother-in-law is a descendant of an emperor.

So what? Some sources speculate that, based solely on statistics, anyone of Western European descent could have a chance of being Charlemagne's descendant. After all, Charlemagne was said to have had five wives and several other partners. Those, in turn, gave him at least twenty children. Then, just do the math to see how those generations could multiply over the centuries since Charlemagne's death in the year 814.

Granted, tracing one's lineage back to a date smack dab in the middle of the Middle Ages can be a challenge. Just think of how much I struggled to get back to colonial Maryland.

There is, however, one catch: if we can manage to latch on to European royalty—or at least nobility—someone in our distant past has been diligent to keep proper records of such details. From those records, one organization has, over the decades, compiled three volumes of such lines of descent. Not surprisingly, that organization is known as the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, whose Genealogist General has been tasked with overseeing such verification.

Published by the Order in three volumes over nearly forty years, Pedigrees of Some of the Emperor Charlemagne's Descendants happens to include a chapter concerning the family line of none other than my mother-in-law's ancestor, Elizabeth Plummer. Thankfully, I was able to access that second volume through a subscription to Ancestry.com, where I easily followed the trail from Elizabeth to her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, just as I had noted here in the past few days from other records.

Winding my way back through the genealogy laid out in that chapter was an eye-opening excursion. Sure, there were earls and lords, but there were also ancestors who "died" at the Tower of London, or were beheaded, or hanged for whatever political infraction they might have committed.

The litany brought me back from Elizabeth Plummer's point to the lead entry in the chapter for Isabel de Vermandois. From Isabel's vantage point—she died in 1147—there would still be a long way to go before reaching Charlemagne's era. The book refers the reader to three previous chapters to continue the genealogical saga.

But the story actually does reach back to Charlemagne, himself. Who would have thought? Especially since my mother-in-law, during my initial interview with her before launching into her family history, was so certain that the generation preceding her grandparents had "just gotten off the boat." How wrong she was.

As for my pursuit this month of Elizabeth Plummer's life story and that of the ancestors preceding her, it's sufficient—not to mention, fun—to see someone's research pointing the way to Charlemagne. Do I wish to replicate that search myself? Hardly. There are too many other questions yet to resolve—research adventures for which no keepers of the royal line of descent would care to concern themselves.

To go Deep, or Wide, or Not at All

 

Perhaps this is the genealogist's question: to go deep or wide when researching family lines. At the beginning, for many people, the idea of going deeply into the past seems a compelling goal. How far back can we go? What will we find in the stories of past generations?

The advent of genetic genealogy may have upended the draw of that proposition. After all, a sure-fire way to locate those umpteenth cousins in our tree is to build out the branches of our ancestors' collateral lines.

For the most part, that is where I've focused my time. After all, with upwards of twenty thousand DNA matches—if you count all the distant cousins in the mix—it takes a bushy tree indeed to find a place for each of those cousins. That is mostly the point of my biweekly count, incidentally: keeping track of the expanding family tree and my progress in filling in the blanks.

But when I get to a case like Elizabeth Plummer's—my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother—it hardly does me any good to add that ancestor's siblings into my in-laws' tree. Why? Because most DNA tests show matches that are capable of reaching back to the sixth cousin level. That means connecting descendants of fifth great-grandparents—if those cousins even share any genetic material in common at all.

Since it's my husband who stands in as test taker for my mother-in-law's genetic legacy, it would be a rare match indeed that would connect him to his seventh great-grandmother Elizabeth. And examining descendants of Elizabeth's siblings would mean tracing the lines of an eighth great grandparent.

That is the result of using the most widely available DNA test, the autosomal test. If, however, we had used either the Y-DNA test or the mitochondrial DNA test (mtDNA), our reach could be extended even farther. But those tests, in our case, would not apply. For one thing, Elizabeth Plummer lies on my mother-in-law's line of the family, so my husband's Y-DNA results would be of no help there. But for the mtDNA test, we could almost have qualified. The necessary matriline held steady for six generations—but then veered off to that woman's father's line, before returning to that ancestor's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth.

And so, we are left in the nether reaches of genetic genealogy. Choosing to trace the lines of Elizabeth Plummer's siblings would be an exercise chosen simply for the fun of it. With so many other fifth and sixth great-grandparents still a mystery to me, I'd take that as my cue to move on to other family history puzzles.

More Trailblazers

 

When first starting my search for Elizabeth Plummer, my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, I was concerned about access to records from such an early time period in American history. After all, researching ancestors from the mid-1800s onward is so nicely facilitated by multiple record sets, documents which were not so robust in their more formative years of governmental oversight.

As it turns out, I am finding more trailblazers willing to lead me to those earlier ancestors than I've found for the average "garden variety" specimens of more recent ancestral eras. A twirl through FamilySearch's Full Text Search the other day, using for a key word the property name "Dodon," the lone results came not from documents, but from two published genealogies.

They're not actual documents, but I'm not proud; I took a look. Trailblazers are simply that: researchers willing to point the way. It's still up to us to determine that genealogy assertions can be properly verified with documentation, whether we accessed the trailblazer's announcement through a published book or from Aunt Mary's oft-repeated family tale.

A closer look revealed that the original source of the collections, which FamilySearch had listed as United States Genealogies 1891-1995, turned out to be Genealogical Records of Members of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Maryland.

In those collections of membership applications to The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, the Full Text results zeroed in on references to Thomas Plummer, whose daughter Elizabeth married William Ijams. From that one paragraph of a genealogist's report regarding the membership application, we find several points explained:

• that Thomas Plummer was father of Elizabeth, the eventual bride of William Ijams
• that Thomas Plummer had married someone named Elizabeth Stockett, not Elizabeth Yates
• that the elder Elizabeth's parents were Thomas Stockett and Mary Wells, daughter of Richard and Frances Wells.

We had seen elsewhere that there was confusion about Elizabeth Plummer Ijams' mother—mainly in the work of genealogist Harry Wright Newman, before he had amended the error. The annotated NSCDA membership application helped point the way to a trail of explanatory records.

And with that, as long as the trail proves reliable, I've been gifted with a path to the past moving far beyond what I had expected to find in the quest for this month's Twelve Most Wanted. Indeed, going to the national organization's website today, I can search for those names in their Register of Ancestors, but I find the annotated applications preserved at FamilySearch.org for all to see to be a far more complete guide than I had expected.

There Were Three Brothers. . . or was that Four?

 

Looking for the history of the properties mentioned in various wills connected to the family of Elizabeth Plummer Ijams—Dodon and Bridge Hill—I thought the name of the one estate, Dodon, was unusual enough to try my hand at an online search for more information. That attempt led me quickly to an entry on Wikipedia which involved generations of an entirely different family. Sorting out the actual narrative meant searching even farther down a convoluted path.

Inevitably, the tale led me to one of the banes of genealogy: that legendary opener, "there were three brothers." Or was that four? Even that story line had me confused.

The chase started with an entry in Wikipedia. According to that article, Dodon—also spelled Doden in some documents—is currently a 550 acre farm in Maryland near a village called Davidsonville. The farm, still in operation, is said to have been in the hands of family members descended from the Scottish immigrant who originally obtained the land in 1669.

That the ancestor, called James Stewart in one descendant's memoirs referred to in the Wikipedia article, was the original owner of Dodon was countered by another report in that same Wikipedia page. The second version noted that a doctor, Francis Stockett, had owned that very land in 1668.

The Stockett version of the property's history was thankfully footnoted in the Wikipedia article, so I jumped to the identified source, Joshua Dorsey Warfield's 1905 history, The Founders of Anne Arundel and Howard Counties, Maryland. 

The Warfield account did provide some helpful details, yet at the same time gave off the air of legend with its genealogy trope, "there were three brothers."

The information referred to by the Wikipedia article was contained in a section of the Warfield book headlined, "The Stockett Brothers." There, the author explained that there were four Stockett brothers, naming them: Thomas, Lewis, Henry, and Francis. These brothers had first obtained land grants under the Calverts in Maryland in 1658.

The book then provided some background information on each of the Stockett brothers and their involvement in the early years of the province. Following that brief history, the author picked up the timeline ten years later, stating, "In 1668, all three brothers removed to Anne Arundel." No explanation for what became of brother number four, making my confidence in the account diminish.

Despite that glitch, Warfield noted the names of the properties obtained after the Stocketts' arrival in Anne Arundel County. Familiar property names surfaced with this note. For Henry Stockett, there were 664 acres of land called "Bridge Hill." To his brother, Dr. Thomas Stockett, an equal portion of land was designated, "Dodon."

With that explanation, we're now left with our earliest sighting of land called by those two estate names, and the explanation of who obtained those two parcels in 1668. The next goal is to find documentation to map out how those estates came to be part of the inheritance passed down to Elizabeth Plummer's Ijams descendants.

Even after that sequence, though, there are gaps in the explanation of who owned the land. As we noticed yesterday, Harry Wright Newman had explained that brothers Isaac and Thomas Plummer Ijams had inherited both Bridge Hill and Dodon and, in 1796, had sold the properties to someone named James Davidson.

But how did Dodon move from that new owner to the ancestor of Dodon's current proprietary family, George H. Steuart? Steuart, according to a Wikipedia article, had purchased the property in 1747 from Stephen Warman. Could there have been two different properties in Anne Arundel County called by that same unusual name?

The dizzying effect of conflicting narratives is almost enough to make me want to start from scratch and scroll through microfilms of early property records to see for myself—or at least hope to find accessible digitized versions of such records to answer some questions.

 

Dodon and Bridge Hill

 

Yesterday, I had wondered whether it might be possible to simply search the names of tracts of land mentioned in family wills, following the family by following the land. My reasoning was this: if the land was known by a singularly distinguishing moniker, could it help point me to the ancestral origins of its owners?

The two tracts of land mentioned in the wills of my mother-in-law's Maryland ancestors did have identifying names. While the one granted by William Ijams to his son John had the seemingly common name of Bridge Hill, it was often coupled with the mention of another, more remarkable name: Dodon.

Sometimes written in documents as "Doden," that particular tract of land had passed from the Stockett family to the Plummer family and then eventually to the line of the senior William Ijams. While I am still working on pushing the timeline back before the Stocketts claimed the land, in the meantime, I have discovered that the property has, moving forward, had a long history of multiple owners.

Just entering the name of the land—Dodon—in a search engine, either on its own or coupled with the name of the paired property, Bridge Hill, has been informative. While my original attempt to find results through FamilySearch's Full Text Search for those property names in colonial Maryland's Anne Arundel County yielded no land or tax records—material which might better be found through Maryland State archives—taking that question straight to the Web turned out to be a more productive route.

Also, searching the line of inheritance of Dodon in Harry Wright Newman's Anne Arundel Gentry produced seven passages in the book. The land moved through branches of the extended family until two Ijams brothers sold the property in 1796, and, as Newman noted, "thus passed from the family the hereditary estates...which had been in the...family for five generations."

Dodon as a parcel did not entirely disappear with that sale, however. Nor did it simply cease to be part of a family's estate, no longer passed from generation to generation. It was interesting to discover its new identity, once it had been sold out of the Ijams family's possession. We'll take a brief detour tomorrow to explore what can be found, simply by searching online for the name of a family's estate. 

Letting the Land Lead us

 

In reviewing the legacies bequeathed by Thomas Plummer to his descendants, I began to spot property names which seemed familiar. Just to double-check, I returned to the will I had found for Thomas' son-in-law, William Ijams, husband of the baby of Thomas' family, Elizabeth Plummer, to review the details.

In William's 1734 will, for three particular sons he had named specific properties in Anne Arundel County, part of colonial Maryland. To his son William, he had bequeathed a one-hundred-acre parcel called "Cheney's Resolution." To his son John, he had designated one hundred acres which he had called "Bridge Hill." And to his son Plummer, he had mentioned sixty four acres of land adjoining Bridge Hill, "the said parcel of land called Doden."

Upon stepping back another generation to review William's father-in-law's will, I began to see familiar names given to some of the properties that Thomas Plummer gave to his own children. While "The Seamas Delight" might not have been a familiar name for that hundred acre parcel Thomas gave to his namesake son, nor the parcel "Scots Lot" which went to Thomas' daughter Mary, wife of William Jackson, when it came to the part of Thomas' will mentioning his daughter Elizabeth (and his wife, also named Elizabeth), I started recognizing some property names.

To his daughter Elizabeth, Thomas Plummer had granted all 164 acres of his current dwelling and property known as Bridge Hill. And until his wife's passing, that land was first meant for the elder Elizabeth.

After Thomas appointed his wife Elizabeth as his executrix, he explained that the land granted her was "part of Bridge Hill and Doden." Thus we see how those property names became repeated in the next generation's wills.

There it was: those same parcel names as we had seen in the Ijams will. Those parcels may have been passed along from previous relatives to Thomas Plummer, then to the Ijams family. I wondered if there might be a way to let the land lead us: to simply follow the history of the land itself to learn more about the families. 

Stepping Backwards to Move Forward

 

Sometimes, a step backwards can get us moving forward.

After working on my mother-in-law's Ijams and Plummer line for half a month, I thought I'd check on the most distant ThruLines report for that family line at Ancestry's DNA to see if there were any updates. There were—well, there were, if you count a diminishing number of results as progress. 

In the past, Ancestry's ThruLines had shown five or six children descending from William Ijams, grandson of Elizabeth Plummer Ijams, and fifth great-grandfather of my husband, who is the surrogate tester standing in for my mother-in-law. Today, however, there were only two descending lines, and each of them, thankfully, can be confirmed through documentation.

Since connections with fifth great-grandparents is as far back as ThruLines shows for autosomal DNA tests, William himself would have to stand in as proxy for his paternal grandparents' DNA composition—the best I could do under these testing conditions.

Today, however, those stray other lines—names listed in previous ThruLines results that I hadn't been able to confirm through documentation—have simply vanished. Poof! If the DNA test candidates represented by those ThruLines results were indeed distant cousins, they obviously must have been connected through a different genetic route. Perhaps, someone had presumed there was a connection and had made a mistaken entry in their own tree which, repeated as others copied that tree, got picked up by ThruLines.

Though it is theoretically possible to find DNA matches who share a most "recent" common ancestor at a level of seventh great-grandmother, as Elizabeth Plummer Ijams would have been to my husband, it is not likely to confirm such a match. On average, DNA matches who are eighth cousins, as such a descent from seventh great-grandmother would yield, would share 0.000763% of their genetic makeup, according to a chart drawn up by Hope Carnicle, reported by a post on the ISOGG.org wiki.

In other words, eighth cousins could share up to forty two centiMorgans. Or they could share none.

In most cases, we'd never see such DNA matches, because the odds are against us. In my mother-in-law's case, a second strike would come in the form of multiple intermarriages over those many generations spanning her family's heritage, so even if a segment match registered, we'd have to delve deeper to determine which ancestor actually contributed that match. It might not be the ancestor we were suspecting.

In the end, while this change in results at Ancestry's ThruLines report doesn't strictly lead us to matches who share Elizabeth Plummer's DNA, it does zero in on those matches who actually were descendants of Elizabeth's grandson William Ijams. A far more accurate report may do nothing more than bolster my confidence in the tool, but a gesture like that can go a long way, in my opinion.