One common ancestor couple has intrigued me more than most. They were Henry and Sarah Harris who lived in the Great Wild Street Area just off Drury Lane. You can read more about Henry here.
When I initally got my DNA results four years ago I had no matches to the descendents of Henry Harris aside from my own close matches. I could not prove the tree at all. Over the past four years I have managed to dig deep into the data through the kindness of others who have shared their DNA with me. I thought it might be interesting for people to see how very varied different peoples matches can be and a little of the journey I took to get there.
Initially I built out my tree using the paper records by looking for potential siblings of my ancestor Susan Phillis Harris but when you are looking at the early 1800s it can be hard to prove that that these really were siblings. When I found a candidate I would then try and build my tree down to see if I could find potential matches. I also scoured the trees of my matches for potential “Harris” connections.
My first break through was to find matches to Henry’s fourth daughter Sarah Harris – I noticed there was a match “Anthony Wynne”… I then noticed that Sarah Wynne was witness at Susan’s second marriage. And that some of Susan and Sarah’s children were also baptised at the same time. This seemed to be a habit in this family across several generations. To me it indicates that they were a fairly close family.
My next breakthrough was to realise that there was a third older sister Mary who married a George Langley. Once I started searching there was a great deal of paperwork related to various stays this family and her daughters family had in the workhouses. They made for pretty sad reading. I managed to make contact with a couple of descendents of Mary and built out the links down to her descendents pretty throughly. One of those matches MB has very kindly shared her DNA (see figure 1 below). This is a particularly nice set of matches because it shows she carries DNA for all four of these siblings since she has matches to descendents of each one. This is quite unusual.
The more distant your DNA is from a common ancestor the less likely that you will have DNA to all of their offspring because each of your parents only have give each generation half of their DNA so that by the time it reached MB she only carries 1/32 DNA belonging to Henry and Sarah. So the liklihood of matching sibling becomes pretty low.
For this reason your own DNA will usually only tell a small part of the story and it can really help someone who is searching far back if one can share your DNA with those of different DNA matches. A different set of DNA can show a whole different part of the family – some of the best DNA I have managed to view is that of matches of matches to my own DNA. We are all the same family but we don’t share any significant DNA – as it has become too watered down.
Gradually as I have built out my tree further ancestry has given me considerable help with it’s thruline technology. I also pay for the additional DNA features so I can see more matches than the basic subscription allows. I think the extended matches have helped with finding the most recent sibling Henry who was the most elusive. I found my first match to him a few months ago.
I always knew that there was a brother Henry because he is mentioned in the 1841 census as living at his sister’s home along with their mother Sarah. After an exhaustive search of Harris’s I did find a match to a possible Henry Harris. I then did a great deal of detective work using the GRO database of births/deaths to identify mothers and their children. Through this work I have managed to talk to two descendents of Henry Harris who have shared their DNA with me. This has given me a really nice rounded picture of this tree.
How do you share DNA in Ancestry?
This is very simple you need to go to your DNA page and select the invite button on the right hand side
You then need to press Invite again on the next screen
And then enter the email address of the person you would like to share with.
They will then be sent an email invite. It is very simple to do and allows others to support you in finding the history of your family.
The default role of viewer is fine for anyone else looking for clues and means that they don’t interfere with your record of use (e.g. notes, unviewed matches etc.).
My own ancestor Susan Phillis Harris had two marriages and I am a descendent of the second marriage and the only one who survived to adulthood and had a family. In some ways it can be harder to find matches to half siblings than that of full siblings. The half siblings were the Rycroft familly. I am really grateful to a Rycroft descendent EC who shared her DNA with me quite recently – this has enabled me to unpick the rest of Rycroft family and find many descendents.
I still believe that there is at least one further sibling to uncover. I have a fairly solid paper trail to Louisa Harris … however I have yet to find any of her descendents who have done a DNA test – let alone share the results with with me.
The links between these first four siblings Mary, Susan, Sarah and Henry is now proved in my mind beyond doubt. Below I have drawn out the matches across all 7 sets of DNA that I have access too with the help of ancestry thrulines. From zero initially I now have so many matches between them. I think they illustrate nicely how far you can uncover a family using DNA as a support method.
It can be quite hard when one initially approaches a very distant relative to explain why you would like them to share their DNA with you. It has taken some resiliance but the results have been satisfying.
I actually think that it is pretty important that we try to work together on this now because we have a limited time frame before our generation of matches are no longer with us. After that we we simply won’t be able to use DNA to go this far back. The time to do this work really is now!
I am extremely lucky to manage the DNA of my mother and two siblings – being able to look with these three lenses have given me access to a wide group of people and through them to further matches. I really must thank all of them once again they have been most helpful.
Shared matches from descendents of Mary Lillian Harris
Number 1 – MB
Shared matches from descendents of Henry Harris Junior
Number 1 – JC
Number 2 – JM
Shared matches from descendents of Susan Phillis Harris
Number 1 – EC
Number 2 – WT
Number 3 – DT
Number 4 – MT
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