I've been continuing to research the Campbell family in Greene County, Tennessee based on the obituary for Eleanor Campbell. She might have been a niece of my brickwall ancestor Sarah "Sally" Campbell born about 1811 likely somewhere in Tennessee according to her daughter. I've been searching at Ancestry.com, and researching the digitized deed books and probate records at FamilySearch. So far I haven't been able to find anything linking my Sarah to Greene County, TN, or Eleanor for that matter. Maybe eventually a bible record may surface or there are courthouse records that haven't been digitized? In the meantime I wonder if I can at least confidently mark the DNA segments from our Greene County, TN matches as coming from Campbell on my Genome Mate Pro segment map? I do have segments I can confidently attribute to lines such as my Browning line.
In order to have confidence in which ancestors these segments can be attributed to I first needed to make sure these matches didn't match my Mother on more than one line. Since my Mother is closer generation wise to Sarah Campbell-Wray I'm using her match results to establish who these segments came from?
Since AncestryDNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage, and FTDNA all predicted with some confidence that the Greene County, TN Campbell matches descended from George Lafayette Campbell, were 4th cousins to my mother I feel I only need to establish the segments came from ancestors going back to her 3rd or 4th Great-Grandparents on her Campbell line.
I began to suspect Benjamin Browning, a brother of our ancestor Nathan Browning, may have fathered George Lafayette Campbell? He remained in Greene County, Tennessee whereas my Nathan Browning was already in Indiana when George was born. This would make most of George's descendants 4th cousins once removed of my Mother. Sarah Campbell was my mother's 2nd Great-Grandmother. Her parents would have been 3rd Great-Grandparents making any matches through them her 4th cousins..
I have a number of Browning segments confidently marked at Genome Mate Pro and none are shared with the Greene County, TN Campbells. To try to eliminate a possible relationship through the Browning family I marked all my mother's matches through Browning at Ancestry, then went back and looked at shared matches with the Campbell matches just to make sure none were shared?
I was surprised at how consistently correct matches in the 4th cousin range at Ancestry were. They were right over 90% of the time. Since there are removals some of these cousins can end up as distant 5th to 7th cousins.
Going through the relevant matches, and looking at shared matches, I haven't found any related to the Browning family. Since I haven't worked on grouping matches, other than the Brownings, you don't see any groups listed with the Campbell matches below.
What I did discover is one of these Greene County, TN matches shares Sarah Campbell-Wray as an ancestor through her daughter Charlotte Temple Wray. This match doesn't share any of the other Campbell matches with my mother even though they are all descended from George L. Campbell? I assume that's because they are distant cousins and share different segments with my Mother, and no longer share enough DNA with each other to match. (I'm also assuming that matches that are shared consistently between these families share the same segments. It would certainly help to know which chromosome the segments are on to verify that.)
Another way to establish which line these segments came from would be to compare the segments with other descendants of Sarah Campbell and her husband Anderson Wray. That way you can eliminate other routes of inheritance. Unfortunately their son William died in the Civil War and a couple of their daughters died young also. Other than my Mother's Great-Grandmother Elizabeth Wray-Forgey only two other daughters lived long enough to leave children.
The easiest way to find matches who share Anderson Wray and Sarah Campbell as ancestors is to look at Thrulines at AncestryDNA. Since Sarah died young Anderson remarried and had more children with his 2nd wife. Looking at matches listed with Anderson Wray I have to be careful that they descend from Sarah. The only descendants I could confirm are descendants of Charlotte Temple Wray-Estep, one of Sarah's daughters.
I then looked for these Thruline matches, and their shared matches, at all of the other companies that share segment information. I was able to find a match at MyHeritage descended through another daughter of Sarah's name Polly Thurman Wray-Hall. She had a segment on chromosome 18 like the Greene County, TN Campbell matches. The segments didn't overlap however. This segment appears to come from the Wray side of the family.
I had marked segments on chromosome 18 as likely from the Wray line and not the Campbell line on my Genome Mate Pro segment map. This worried me because the segments were close together. Our Wray family crossed paths with the Campbells just like the Brownings did. The Wrays, like some say the Campbells also, originally settled in Virginia.
I decided to collect up more matches with segments on chromosome 18 since that one related to the problem I'm working on. The tip end of chromosome 18 seemed to relate to the Greene County, TN Campbell family while the rest appear to be related to the Wray line. There is some overlapping which made me think of the possibility all of 18 related to the Wray family?
A positive factor in favor of chromosome 18 being split between Wray and Campbell is the fact matches on 18 don't always match each other. The matches on the tip end all descend from George Lafayette Campbell of Greene County, TN, whereas the longer segment matches to the left all match each other and share only Wray ancestors. So some of this overlapping may include false positive areas? My Mother's parents came from completely different ethnic backgrounds so I don't have the problem of separating matches from the same places. My maternal Grandmother was Nicaraguan. I don't believe overlapping is related to a segment misattributed to my Mother's father's line.
Generally most of the Greene County, TN Campbell matches line up as expected on the far right tip, example below.
I can confidently name the segments to the left of the Campbell segments as coming from our Wray family line.
I decided to confirm that the Wray family and Campbell family matches didn't match each other. Since some of these matches had a kit at FTDNA I was able to use the Matrix tool. Below you see a Wray match on Chromosome 18, GA, compared to George Lafayette Campbell descendants. All of the Campbell descendants match each other as expected, but don't match the Wray descendants who all share segments on chromosome 18.
With more than a dozen matches now shared with Greene County, TN Campbells I have not found these matches associated with any other families of ours. Some share small segments on chromosome 18 but others also share larger overlapping segments on chromosomes 8, 5, and 12. The latter segments have not presented a problem with any other matches' segments overlapping with them. The segments on chromosome 18 are all shared by the descendants of two of George Lafayette Campbell's daughters. That would be about half a dozen matches. I'm leaning towards believing these segments are Campbell, and came from our ancestor Sarah Campbell.
I'll keep collecting matches on these segments. I believe I'm on the right track, at least I haven't been proven wrong yet? I'm definitely open to any information that surfaces even if I'm proven wrong.
Final thoughts
Comparing with matches who tested at 4 different companies is challenging. All of the companies have different tools and some are better than others. I wish there was one company with good tools, trees, and a large database of matches to compare with. At this point we have to jump around between companies because, for instance, Ancestry has better trees and Thrulines, while other companies offer segment information. 23andMe and MyHeritage give you predictions regarding how shared matches are related to each other. Knowing how matches are related to each other helps to group them with families. From a list of shared matches this match below is a 3rd cousin to my mother and the father of this match.
Sometimes close relatives, even siblings, test with different companies and in that case their relationship isn't apparent unless you can compare them at GEDmatch. We have to somehow pull all of the information from all of these sources together which is time consuming. As things stand now genetic genealogy is mainly for those with time to devote to learning about all of the different tools and navigating between companies. If you're looking to test with one company in order to solve a brickwall out past a 2nd Great-Grandparent's generation you are unlikely to do that at one company.
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