Carter Connections: William's Line

 

Using DNA testing to confirm or rule out certain ancestral lines has opened up a lot of possibilities for my tree. The more tools I can use, the more helpful that DNA world is becoming to me. However, entering the realm of Ancestry.com's ThruLines approach calls for caution, as we'll see as we check the sixty five DNA matches who call me cousin on account of my fifth great-grandfather, John Carter of colonial Virginia.

The main caveat Ancestry offers, when using their ThruLines tool, is that it is drawn on the trees posted on their website by subscribers. Faulty tree equals faulty results, right? But we sometimes get swept up in how handy the device is that we forget there are errors lurking in those shady shadows of some trees.

Since ThruLines tells me I have matches descending from seven of John Carter's fourteen children, we'll take a look at each line of descent through this week. We'll reserve my own line—descending from Margaret Chew Carter—for more exploration next week. The only other line—that of a supposed child of John Carter named Bailey—has not been one I've been able to verify by other means yet, as I had mentioned last week, so we'll set that one aside.

Today, let's look at what I've been able to find on John Carter's son William. William's mother was John Carter's first wife, Elizabeth Armistead, according to the Carter genealogy I've been consulting, Joseph Lyon Miller's 1912 book, The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford," so any match through this line would be a half-cousin to me.

William married Rice Curtis' daughter Frances sometime in 1761 or earlier. According to the Miller book, the couple had five sons and five daughters, including one, nameless, who had apparently already died, as only her husband and one child—a son named William Lewis Hume—were mentioned in the book by name. The remaining four daughters were Lucy, Elizabeth, Sarah, and Frances, who were joined by their five brothers, Rice, John, Guildford, Kenyon, and Abraham.

When I double-checked the book's listing of William Carter's children with his own 1803 will from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, there were apparently some additional details not included in the Miller book. Guilford, for instance, appeared with a middle name, Dudley, and his brother William and sister Lucy apparently both had for their middle name what is surely a family name: Aylett. Daughter Frances was noted to be wife of Rice Connor. And there was an additional daughter added to the list: Sarah, wife of Edmund Foster, who was also mentioned specifically in her father's will.

While it is always possible for a researcher to miss one child in a large family, it is less likely for a parent to unwittingly omit one of their own in as important a document as a will. So when I pulled up that Ancestry ThruLines tool to see who among William Carter's descendants I might be related to, I expected to see one of those names we've already discussed. Wrong. The supposed next generation was not Lucy, or Frances, or even the formerly-missing Sarah. It was someone named Virginia.

If this DNA match were a closer relationship, I might expend some energy to build out that person's tree, just for my own information. After all, that match could connect with another line in my family instead of what appears to be an incorrect choice on the ThruLines version. But realizing the connection was based on the strength of only one segment the size of ten centiMorgans, I hardly thought that was worth the effort.

Admittedly, it is possible for people to show up as DNA matches at as distant a relationship as sixth cousin—or beyond—sharing only ten centiMorgans, that, plus a name showing in the subsequent generation which didn't match cursory research makes me less inclined to pursue any relationship possibilities. So I moved on to the next ThruLines entry for William's descendants. Surprise: that one also descended from the mystery Virginia. Strike two.

At least in the process, I found a record of William's descendants through his will, providing enough detail to push through one more generation from my fifth great-grandfather John Carter. Discarding these two supposed Carter DNA matches, we'll move on tomorrow to see what we can discover about another of John Carter's children, William's sister Margaret.