Checking Another Line

 

We've been examining the DNA matches supposedly connected to my Broyles ancestry. Yesterday, we looked at my ThruLines results at Ancestry.com for one child of Adam and Mary Broyles, Demilia. Admittedly, that would be a difficult line to research, simply because of the many surname variants for Demilia's husband. But it also appeared that the DNA matches listed in ThruLines for that line of descent disagreed with the research presented in the recent Germanna Foundation publication, The Broyles Family: The First Four Generations. 

Sometimes, when I run into a research tangle like that, I jump to work on a collateral line. So let's do that with another line of descent from Adam and Mary Broyles, my fifth great-grandparents. Since two of the sisters had married brothers with the Brown surname, I thought I'd try my hand at checking out the DNA matches for Anne Broyles who married Hugh Brown.

Let's look first at what Cathi Clore Frost, author of the Germanna Broyles Family book, uncovered. There, we find a listing of nine children for Anne and Hugh, two sons and seven daughters. One son had the unremarkable name of Joseph, but his younger brother's name was a standout: Cicero. Likewise, complicating research on children of a surname as common as Brown, many of the daughters' names were plain: Mary, Nancy, Peggy, Ann, and Patsy. Only their sisters Violet and Athaliah offered an unusual twist to the mundane.

When I took those names to the ThruLines readout for my thirteen DNA matches with descendants of Anne Broyles and her husband Hugh Brown, I couldn't get very far at all. The reason: I was stuck on the very next generation. Every one of thirteen DNA matches linked to Anne Broyles had Anne married to someone with the surname Gotcher—not exactly a Brown there.

Something is clearly amiss here. Yet no less than ninety one Ancestry subscribers have Anne Broyles' descendants listed with a surname Gotcher, not Brown. Time to undertake a much closer reading of Cathi Clore Frost's many endnotes to see if I can find my way out of this tangle.

In the meantime, it's back to those collateral lines in search of more clues. After all, I have ThruLines connections to several other children of Adam and Mary Broyles to examine. I expect we'll continue this exploration for several more days to come.