Tracing mtDNA
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Center Church of The Green, New Haven, CT
This is a description of a quest to identify all direct-line female descendants of a lady probably named Ellen (or Dorothy), who lived in Colonial Connecticut. I have not discovered her surname, but it seems that she married a man named John Thompson, and, after his death, she married a man named Thomas Harrison. The second marriage produced no female offspring, but her first marriage did yield female offspring. I have found no hints about Ellen’s ancestors. I assume that they were from England. As best I can tell, Anna Allen's maternal line traces clearly back to Ellen and John.
Why might such an analysis be useful? - Test results from familytreedna.com indicate that my mtDNA (,and hence Anna's,) is a close match to that of about a dozen people. Taking heteroplasmy into account, some of these may effectively be exact matches. The purpose of the work documented here is to create information that might help to identify our most recent common ancestor, who likely lived a few hundred years ago. There is a chance that our most recent common maternal ancestor existed in the American Colonies. Tracing the female descendants of my first maternal-line female ancestor to appear in colonial records might be used to identify the common ancestor if others can drive their family trees far enough back in time.
Having said all that, you can see/read considerably more detail in a PDF that describes 600+ descendants of Ellen that carried her mtDNA and who lived between 1640 and 1800 (roughly). And, there is a PDF that holds a graphical rendering of these people and that shows their interrelations. (The PDF is about 3 feet by more than 20 feet in size, so please don't try to print it! Use your PDF viewer to zoom and pan.) The surnames represented are lsited below, followed by a picture of a name cloud representation to emphasize frequency of occurrence.
Allen, Alling, Andrews, Atwater, Ball, Barker, Barnes, Barney, Barrow, Bates, Beebe, Beecher, Benham, Booth, Bouton, Bradley, Brewster, Bristol, Chidsey, Cooper, Curtis, Downs, Eaton, Fenn, Foote, Ford, Frost, Gilbert, Grannis, Gregory, Harrison, Hatch, Hemmingway, Hickox, Hine, Hodges, Hopkins, Hotchkiss, Hudson, Humphreville, Johnson, Kimmy, Lines, Loy, Mallory, Martin, Morgan, Morris, Moulthrop, Munson, Murray, Nelson, Osborne, Painter, Palmer, Peck, Perkins, Pierpoint, Potter, Rhombs, Robbins, Rose, Ruggles, Russell, Sanford, Scoular, Shepard, Sherman, Smith, Sperry, Stone, Terrill, Thomas, Thompson, Todd, Tolles, Townsend, Turner, Utter, Walker, Warner, Whedon, Wolcott
You will not find source references here. This is basically birth/marriage/death documentation to establish existence. I am recording some source information in a family tree that I maintain and can share with you. So, I think that you have to regard this as a current estimate, subject to errors and corrections. It is something to work from, not a polished final product.
Backlinks:
281connections Wiki:About
281connections Wiki:South Dakota Families:Loy-Allen
281connections Wiki:South Dakota Families:Mysteries