When I initally got my Ancestry 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 paper trail I had in my tree at all.
Gradually 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 Sarah Harris in particular “Anthony Wynne”… I then noticed that Sarah Wynne was witness at Susan’s second marriage. And that some of their children were baptised at the same time.
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 my tree 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 very small part of the story and it can really help someone who is searching far back if one can share DNA between different DNA matches. A different set of DNA can show a whole different part of the family – some of the best DNA I have got to view is that of matches of matches to my own DNA. We are all the same famiily but we don’t share any DNA.
Gradually as I have built out my tree further ancestry has given me considerable help with it’s thruline technology and any shared matches I have viewed seems to make use of my tree. I also pay for the additional DNA features so I can see more matches.
I think the extended matches have helped with finding the last sibling who was the most elusive. 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.
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 the tree 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.
Going up the tree another generation I have some good DNA evidence from multiple descendents who have shared their DNA with me that Henry Harris came from Bilsington in Kent – this will be the subject of a seperate post. However I am less clear about his wife Sarah – One of my uncles has two matches to the Chambers family but I have not found this on any of the other 8 sets of DNA I have for this family – so I need to do further work here. This is pretty incredible that we can prove a tree right back to common ancestors from the mid 1700’s when records really were pretty poor.
The links between these first four offspring of Henry and Sarah Harris is now proved beyond doubt. I have so many matches between them.
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. I have however perservered and the results have been very satisfying.
I actually think that it is pretty urgent that we do this now because we have a limited time frame before this group of matches are no longer with us and we simply won’t be able to use the DNA to go this far back. 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 many more people. The time to do this work really is now!
Shared matches from descendents of Mary Lillian Harris
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