Finding Daughters of Daughters

 

Problem: how to find whatever became of daughters when looking at the descendants of a colonial Virginia ancestor. That's the task I'll be facing this month when I ask that very question regarding my fifth great-grandfather John Carter.

More to the point: I'll specifically be looking for daughters of John Carter's daughters. Beyond that point, I'll extend the search to those granddaughters' daughters, and then some.

If you sense a matriline pursuit here, you are on to what my goal will be for this month. The problem is, first, determining just how many wives John Carter actually had. If you look at a privately-published genealogy book written by the husband of one of my distant cousins (also a Carter descendant by virtue of John's daughter Margaret Chew Carter, wife of Zachariah Taliaferro), you'd read that there were two wives: Elizabeth Armistead and Hannah Chew. Another published genealogy asserted the same.

There are other documented indications suggesting that the spousal count was actually three. That, as it turned out, was one of the questions I grappled with the last time I dug into the Carter family history in 2024. The mentions of grandchildren in some key extended family members' wills points to a third wife, who also had a daughter. But which daughters belonged to which mother? Records from that time period in the 1700s are scarce.

There is, of course, a modern research tool now available to us, especially suited for use in specific questions such as mine. If we want to determine which Carter children belonged to which of John Carter's wives, we can simply follow the genetic record. But which genetic record becomes key.

In a case like mine, where John Carter was my fifth great-grandfather, it would be difficult to isolate a genetic segment of reasonable size and confirm that that strand was specifically inherited from that ancestor—and shared with distant cousins in my own generation. Worse—as is the case with one Carter descendant I know—the relationship could be more distant than even my own, hampering the use of autosomal DNA testing even further.

There are other DNA tests with a more powerful reach, of course, and they are beginning to come into play in questions such as that of our John Carter. When I last explored questions about John Carter's line two years ago, I mentioned one study using Y-DNA to examine his own relationship to other Carter men in colonial Virginia. This study I became aware of, thanks to that Carter descendant I just mentioned, Patrick Jones, who included findings about this Carter family in his blog, Frequent Traveler Ancestry.

Thanks to Patrick's discovery of wills and legal documents on this Carter family, it has become quite clear that there was a wife whose name had not been included in those old Carter genealogies. And with the apparent question concerning which Carter descendants belonged to which of John Carter's wives, there is another powerful DNA test which can be called into play: the mitochondrial DNA test (mtDNA). 

In a post last August, Patrick outlined the possibility for such a project, and shared an example of a similar study which was reported in the Spring 2024 edition of the Journal of Genetic Genealogy.

In order to explore use of such a test project for our research question, it would require willing subjects who could claim one specific line of descent: a daughter of a daughter of a daughter reaching back to John Carter's wives. Proposing specific matrilines through documentation would be a first step in isolating possible project participants. Though piecing together that sort of pedigree may prove difficult, I certainly would like to see such a study become a reality.