Common Ancestor Tales

Finding the correct family for Sarah Harris (wife to Henry Harris the Coach Plater) has involved many hours of sleuthing over the last six years.

When I first researched my ancestor Susan Phillis Harris most of the tree’s on Ancestry stated that her mother was a Sarah Walshaw from Shoreditch. But when I researched into the Henry and Sarah Harris marriages for the period there were so many options I could not see a particular reason to pick that one. So I decided to consider the other records to see if there was a more likely one. This involved researching a huge number of Harris families – all to no avail.

After considering many options I spotted this marriage where the Henry in question was from the Parish of St Martin in the Fields. I already knew that Henry and Sarah’s daughter (my ancestor) Susan Phillis Harris was baptised at St Martin in the Fields church a few years after this.

I also found this document about a Henry Harris living in St Clements Danes working as a volunteer soldier. This also seemed to fit with my couple. Susan Phillis Harris was married at St Clement Danes church. Could this be our Henry and Sarah?

So next I started a record search for a Sarah Chambers on Ancestry and found a family in Camberwell which seem to fit the bill. This Sarah Ann Chambers would only have been 15 when she married Henry but it would have been shortly after both her parents died. So it felt quite likely plus according to the document above she would have already have had a child when they married. The marriage contract states that Sarah is 22 however I believe it was quite common to lie in need at that period. There was not much chance people would be caught.

From the records Sarah Ann Chambers was the third daughter to Nathan Chambers and Sarah Ann Bampton. Nathan was a farmer from Camberwell who seemed to farm alongside a couple of brothers. Camberwell would have been all fields and farms in the late 1700’s when Sarah was born.

So next I thought I would take a look at my DNA to see if this could possibily be our Sarah. In order to use the DNA tools in Ancestry effectively the best thing to do was to build out a tree of the Chambers family and build down to as many descendents as possible. I did this quite extensively. And to my suprise a few months later a match did pop up on my mother’s thrulines – it was a match to Jane Chambers – Sarah’s sister. I checked it throughly and it seemed accurate.

It was fairly amazing that this needle in a haystack approach had worked so I was now keen to consolidate this connection. The match had a shared match with another also connected to the Chambers family. I got in touch with some members of that family – strangely it was a match to a grandson but not to his mother or grandmother further up the line who had both tested their DNA. They should have been strong matches to my mother but she had no match to them. This was a bit suspicious especially since my mother seemed to have some paternal matches with the grandson. The match could be due to some other connection elsewhere in my mothers tree.

So in truth there really was only 1 decent match and one should not count a single match as sufficient proof of a link to a family. It is too easy to get incorrect connections by chance or via some other connection.

So what has followed has been a many year attempt to get a second match between Sarah and her siblings. Descendents of Sarah’s sisters Martha Chambers (1 set) and Jane Chambers (2 sets) shared their DNA with me shortly after finding that intial match and I examined them with a fine toothcomb. But I really had no luck.

I then got more involved in finding siblings for Susan Phillis Harris, with some success. From the research there are a set of four siblings with many matches between them which I have discussed in another post. To do this I managed to get a number of matches of matches to share their DNA with me which involved quite a lot of effort. Each were checked carefully but sadly none of this shared DNA seemed to have any links to the Chambers family.

Last week I was coming to terms with the fact that I should give up on the Chambers family of Camberwell. I thought perhaps if I attached a different wife to Henry I might be able to find some matches via thrulines that way – I even did some extensive searches for Sarah Walshaws relatives within all the matches I had.

However in a last ditch attempt to find some Chambers connections last weekend I wrote to over 100 descendents of Henry Harris to share some information I had written about him and to see if I could get any more DNA to look at. I really had got to the end of the road with the information I had.

Four very kind people shared their DNA with me in response. And to my shock one of them had a match to Martha Chambers. This is from another descendent of Susan Phillis Harris but via her first husband – the Rycroft line. For me this makes it even more solid as a finding. It was to a different Chambers sister and from a different part of the family than my mother’s. I am very pleased. Taken as a whole the five sets of DNA matches shown below really show quite comprehensively that these four sisters were a family. The fifth sister Sophia died aged 9 and the brother Joseph does not appear to have married.

Thanks go to the five people who shared their Chambers DNA with me and many many trees that I used to build my Chambers tree. Without either of those I would not have been able to prove this. This really is a crowdsourced effort! I think if I had not had the clues about St Martin in the Fields I probably would never have found the Chambers family – so some luck involved here too.

This is also the furthest back along this line that I can prove with DNA. Nathan Chambers was born in the 1750’s – based on DNA from my mothers generation you can get back to this period but not much further. So I am pleased to hang my hat up on this line and declare it complete.