DNA for Genealogy

I recently had my DNA tested. After a little research, I chose Ancestry.com b/c 1) it’s easy to use; 2)  huge number of family trees to match to (plus historical records to verify and document your tree); 3) they keep the DNA, so as technology improves you may get more results; and 4) the raw DNA data is easily downloaded, then uploaded to other sites with more powerful technical analysis tools.

I’ve uploaded my data to Family Tree DNA (for a moderate fee) and to GEDmatch.com (free). These allow you to match one-to-all (a fishing trip) or one-to-one (to zero in on someone who looks like a genuine match). I am barely beginning to understand it all, but am pleased so far.

Also, my family tree is complete (as far as I know it) on Ancestry and is public.

I have found the tutorials on the site linked below to be very helpful, including Lesson 2 which helps you figure out which company to start with. The answer may depend on where your ancestors were from, as well as what kind of information you are seeking. If you are looking for relatives within the time frame of a typical family tree, don’t skip the autosomal (atDNA). The others will take you back into deep time, but won’t show spouses, other children, cousins, etc., just a son-to-father-to-father chain or a daughter-to-mother-to-mother chain.

On the other hand, for African Americans searching for a white male ancestor, the Y-DNA test may be the most efficient way to start.

GEDmatch.com has a whole page of links for learning, under the title DNA for Dummies.

Thank you for a terrific year!

WordPress tells me that Magruder’s Landing received more than 7,000 visits in 2014! That’s more than a tenfold increase over 2013. I am truly astonished, and thank you all for your interest, your encouragement, and your willingness to share information, photographs, and sources. I’ll do my best to keep you coming back in 2015.

Trafficke arrives in March!

trafficke-coverMy new book, Trafficke, will be released in March by Ahsahta Press. Trafficke began in 1994 with a few simple questions: who, and what, was Alexander Magruder? And, for that matter, what was Maryland in 1652? Those questions, and the answers, have led me down many roads I could not have imagined when I set out. The resulting text travels through Scotland and Maryland, McGruther/Magruder family history, and the whole arc of slavery in Maryland, from the 1660s to Emancipation…and a little beyond.

You can read a description at SusanTichy.com, find an excerpt in the online poetics journal, Evening Will Come, and follow the book’s adventures on its very own website, Traffickeblog.com.

You can place a pre-order at Ahsahta Press or wait for it to show up on Amazon. Once the book is out, you’ll also be able to purchase a signed copy directly from me, or order it through your favorite independent bookstore.

What would America look like…

…if the contributions made by slaves in the building of this country were memorialized as we memorialize those who gave their lives in military service?

If their gravestones aren’t well marked and their lives continue to go unrecognized, there are new injustices every year. Why isn’t their suffering and contribution memorialized?… We should honor their service. We should honor the service, even if it was involuntary service, of those who contributed to our nation’s economies and acknowledge what they suffered and overcame.

Will Hairston, from Coming to the Table: A Collection of Stories
Coming to the Table (CTTT)

 

Slaves imprisoned in Baltimore to evade DC emancipation & Union Army recruiting

A followup to my post on DC emancipation petitions…

The following is a partial list of people who were jailed in Baltimore by slave owners hoping to evade the April 1862 D.C. emancipation and/or the Union Army’s recruitment of black soldiers in Maryland. (Slaves in Maryland were not emancipated until January 1864, when the state adopted a new constitution.) This snapshot shows page 337 of Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War, edited by Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, et. al. (The New Press, 1992). The correspondence from which the list was extracted is dated July 27, 1863, in Baltimore.

This volume is an extract from The Black Military Experience, Series 2 of the multivolume work Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Cambridge University Press, 1982). The abbreviation in the last column notes the owners’ disloyalty to the Union, that being a condition for recruitment of their enslaved workers.

I will try to track down the rest of the list. Please write if you have the list or know where it can be found.

 

From _Free at Last_, ed. Ira Berlin et.al. The New Press, 1992.

From _Free at Last_, ed. Ira Berlin et.al. The New Press, 1992.

For the benefit of those searching for ancestors, here is a searchable list of the names: Charles Dorsey, William Sims, Samuel Davis, John Francis Toodles, Henry Toodles, Henry Wilson, James Dent, George Hammond, Charles Foote, Michael Fletcher, Betsy Ward, Virginia West, Ellen J. Roberson, Lena Harrod, Rachel Harrod, Sophia Simmons, Martha Wells, Susan Collins, Willie [Collins?], Martha Clark.

I have checked the names of those from Prince George’s County. All but one of the slave owners’ names are familiar to me, neighbors and possibly kinfolk of Magruders. The surnames West and Clark also occur among those enslaved by Magruders in Prince George’s County and the District of Columbia.

Are you an American McGruther or McGruder who is not descended from Alexander Magruder?

If you have been trying in vain to figure out how you are descended from Alexander Magruder, take heed!

It has long been believed that every Magruder and McGruder in America is descended from Alexander Magruder, who was brought to Maryland as a prisoner of war in the 1650s. I recently learned from Don McGruther in Scotland that other families came to the U.S. during later waves of immigration. Some of those families arrived via Ireland and their descendants today may think of themselves as Irish American.

Don would like to find any McGruthers, McGruders–or those with other versions of the family name, such as McGrew, McCrew, or McCrue–who came separately to North America. He has compiled extensive information from public records and may be able to help you trace your Scottish ancestors. If you are interested in having your DNA analyzed, it may also be possible to establish how closely you are related to Don’s line, to the Alexander Magruder line, or to others, even without a paper trail.

The spelling of your name might be a clue. In Scotland the name was spelled variously, with McGruther, McGruder, McGrudir, and McGrouther among the most common. Magruder is a uniquely American spelling, adopted from the signature on Alexander’s 1677 will. If your family arrived later, it’s most likely you are using one of the Scottish spellings–or perhaps a different spelling altogether. A few of Alexander’s descendants do use one of the Scottish versions of the name, so to find your line of descent you’ll need more clues than just the spelling…but it is one place to start.

If you know or believe you might be descended from later immigrants, please get in touch. You can write to Don at mcgruther(at)btopenworld.com, or contact me via the Contact tab at the top of this page.

Don’t be a stranger!

African-American Magruders in Washington DC Slavery Petitions, 1862

I’ve just published a page on Af-Am Magruders Named in Washington DC Slavery Petitions, 1862.

All those enslaved in the District of Columbia were emancipated by the Compensated Emancipation Act of 16 April 1862. Slaves were freed immediately and slave holders had 90 days to file a petition for compensation. Though the 3,100 slaves emancipated comprised less than 1% of enslaved people in the U.S., its ultimate impact was far greater, providing a legal framework and precedent on which the Emancipation Proclamation was modeled.

The website Civil War Washington has transcribed and indexed those petitions, with images of the original documents attached–an outstanding resource for any African-American searching for ancestors in the city. Because both owners and the enslaved frequently moved back and forth across city limits, this source also should be searched for those with Maryland or Virginia roots. Most former slaves left their owners immediately and by 1870 70% of the approximately 3,100 emancipated people had left the city. So even if your family has no known connection to DC, you should take a few minutes and search these petitions. The site is well designed and both quick and easy to use.

As always, the best sources for details about enslaved people are those created at moments when it was in the slave owner’s interest to provide a full name and a full description. In this case, owners had to present their slaves for examination, or, if a person had run away, produce witnesses who could testify to the slave’s condition and value. Petitions provide surnames, physical descriptions, and, in many cases, details about the enslaved person’s skills, living situation, and family members. Petitioners also had to say how and from whom they acquired each person–more priceless detail for genealogists.

More than 150 slave holders failed to file a petition. To receive compensation, each had to swear (among other things) loyalty to the Union; so most of those who failed to file are assumed to have been Southern supporters or known sympathizers. Others were residents of Maryland or Virginia, whose slaves had been living–perhaps hired out, perhaps fugitive–in the District. On 12 June 1862 Congress passed a supplemental act allowing slaves whose owners had failed to petition to file petitions for their own freedom. Each of these supplemental petitions includes the individual’s request for freedom plus the testimony of witnesses who could verify ownership, residence in the District, and other details. These “supplemental petitions” were the first instance in which slaves were allowed to petition and give testimony in a Federal court, another legal precedent with far-reaching consequences.

On my page, I list the African-American Magruders I found named in the petitions, with a few notes on their circumstances and possible connections to other families or individuals.

Bernice Bennett’s Geneaology Blog Talk Radio

Yesterday I met an extraordinary woman, Bernice Alexander Bennett, and discovered her Thursday evening Blog Talk Radio program, “Researching at the National Archives & Beyond.” Bernice’s guests are authors and researchers with wide experience. Topics among recent programs include searching incarceration records, genealogy resources in Louisiana, and Freedmen’s Bureau records. Last week’s show, Dr. Maurice Gleeson on “The Irish in the Slave Trade,” addresses both Irish men sent as bound labor to the West Indies and American colonies and Ireland’s participation in the African slave trade, and also debunks a few unfounded beliefs about these histories.

All shows are broadcast live, including call-in and write-in questions and comments from listeners, and all shows are archived–174, so far. Sound quality is not like commercial or public radio, but it’s fairly good. Broadcast is Thursday evening, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time…and one upcoming program features Edward E. Baptist, whose book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism I am reading now and highly recommend. From now on, you’ll find a link to this program in my blogroll, listed as Bernice Bennett: Genealogy Live Talk Radio.

Legacy of Slavery in Maryland: Searchable Database of 300,000 names

The Maryland State Archives Online is constantly changing, which can be confusing for users but more often presents new opportunities for research without leaving home. Today I want to draw your attention to the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland database. Now expanded and easier to use, this database includes more than 300,000 names of people both black and white. It searches Census records from 1776-1880, and 26 additional categories of records, including runaway ads, chattel records (sales of slaves), manumissions, slave jails, accommodations docket (fees for housing runaways), and assessment records (assessments of slaves in estate inventories). Most of the records are from 1830-1880. The database provides basic information, sometimes a description of the person, the name of the owner, and a full citation to the Maryland State Archives (MSA) Record Series from which the information has been transcribed.

Runaway ads can be extremely important sources of information. Slaveholders provide the most complete information about a slave when in it is their interest to do so, so the ads often include personal characteristics and skills, as well as full name, appearance, height, and distinguishing marks. They also include speculation about where the runaway might be headed, and most often that is back to where they came from or where they have family members. Browsing the ads for runaways from Magruder plantations, I’ve learned that one man likes to dress well; that another is a good carpenter; that a woman is an excellent cook; that another woman talks too much; that another man had been free to hire himself out in Washington City, but had recently disappeared, probably headed for Baltimore and then to Pennsylvania and freedom.

Good luck in your search.