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I did notice the second Beddoes marriage, of Mary Beddoes of Culmington and Edward Haynes of the parish of Diddlebury. Checking the original record, the witnesses were actually Thomas Haynes and Ann Beddoes. Given the date of the marriage, this would be a different Anne Beddoes than the one in my direct line ancestry, as she would have been Anne Howells by this point.

As it happens I was just looking at this old thread here which links to Edward and Mary's marriage. Edward and Mary apparently had two children, Elizabeth (who later married Thomas Whiteman) and a Sarah. Mary Haynes Beddoes later remarried to a Francis Tipton by license in Culmington, 8th May 1806, witnesses Sarah Beddoes and Benjamin Morris.

It would seem likely that the two Beddoes marriages on the same day in 1796 show a pretty close familial relationship. The information about the Beddoes/Haynes might at least help me sketch out what some of those relationships are!
 

Hi all, I'm hoping to get some fresh eyes on this part of my tree to 'check my working', so to speak, and see whether I have the relationships right.

To begin, I'm fairly sure I have this particular line of my tree correct back to my 4x great grandparents Elisha Howells and Anne Beddoes, married on the 23rd of May 1791 in Culmington Shropshire. The signed witnesses were 'Obad. Beddoes and Thos. Pearce'. At first I assumed 'Obad.' was short for 'Obadiah', but when I looked into the various local records I found that the given name was most likely actually 'Obed', a different biblical name.

Where I'm not sure if I'm right is my assertion that this Obed was Anne's father. When I first added Anne to my tree, Ancestry suggested a number of trees which had her parents listed as a John Beddoes and Elizabeth Brookes, with their daughter Anne being baptised on the 10th Nov 1776 in Diddlebury.

I was initially somewhat doubtful about this parentage, as it would make Anne 15 at the time of her marriage to Elisha. I instead found a baptism of an Anne Beddoes in Edgton on 21st June 1774, parents Obed Beddose [sic] and his wife Mary, which would make Anne 19 at the time of the later marriage.

Now Diddlebury is closer to Culmington than Edgton, but I think that Obed may have moved to the latter location when he married. There is a 31st January 1772 marriage between Obed Beddoes of Seifton and Mary Griffiths of Edgton. Seifton is right next to Culmington.

While there are a number of later Obed Beddoes born in the area over the following decades (likely all in the same wider family) as far as I can see, there is only one candidate for the birth record of this eldest and seemingly first Obed, namely a Quaker birth record in 1741, in Seifton, parents Richard and Mary Beddoes. To my mind the Quaker faith likely explains the choice of name. Obed was baptised into the Anglican church on 2nd of Nov 1817, just a few days before his death. The parish record mentions his being resident in Seifton Batch and his previous Quaker religion.

So that's where I currently stand. I've pencilled in Obed as Anne's father because there are only a certain number of local baptismal records for Anne Beddoes between the 1740s, when Obed was born, and the cut-off point of around the 1770s where the prospective Annes become too young for the later marriage.

I'm interested to know what other Rootschatters think. Do I have a strong enough case to pin Obed as a direct ancestor and the father of Anne?

So in the Greenlough parish records I can find the following Mary O'Neill's baptised in the 1850s. I've highlighted the one I believe you've already found from 1852:

• Mary O'Neill - 1851 - Parents: John O'Neill and Rose Slamin (sometimes written Slamen)
• Mary O'Neile - 1852 - Parents: Daniel O'Neill and Nancy O'Neile
• Mary O'Neill - 1855 - Parents: James O'Neill and Peggy McPake (spelling variant of McPeake)

After that there is a gap until the next Mary, born in 1862, probably slightly too young to be your ancestor.

Daniel O'Neill and his wife Nancy O'Neill have come up a few times in the research of myself and the previously mentioned Patrick O'Neill, a co-researcher who is a descendant of the Stafford O'Neills of Ballymacpeake in Greenlough and has done a huge amount of research in the area.

Patrick is a DNA match with some confirmed descendants of Daniel and Nancy through their son John O'Neill, who married a Rose Heverin. The couple then both moved out to New Zealand. I'm therefore fairly certain that either Daniel O'Neill or his wife Nancy are somehow related to the 'Stafford' O'Neills. Of course, O'Neills marrying O'Neills make the precise connection difficult to find, but I believe it's in there.

In terms of your own link, it may be of note that the area that Daniel and Nancy lived in, right by the Dreenan Bridge (number 12 on the map below, taken from the Griffiths valuations) had a huge number of Henry families living there, many the immediate neighbours of the O'Neills. In fact, Henry is one of the most common surnames in the area. There are also a number of confirmed links between other O'Neill families  in the area and Henry families. I believe Patrick already has a number of them in his own tree.

What I would suggest is that firstly you contact Patrick (I can pass on his contact to you); he is far more knowlegeable in the Greenlough area than myself. You've mentioned wanting to use DNA, and I find myself wondering whether you could be a match with Patrick, or at the very least share some matches.

Secondly, I would take a look through the other Mary Greenlough births and see if you can rule any of the other births out and narrow it down to Daniel and Nancy's child.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for the replies, all!

Jewish Peoples of Europe would usually refer to Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic Jews have a much more complicated DNA makeup and are more genetically diverse, having more often inbred with local populations where they have found themselves, whereas Ashkenazi Jews are a very homogenous population that have intermarried over many many centuries mainly in central and eastern Europe. So even if that very small segment were accurate, it would more likely refer to a distant Ashkenazi Jewish ancestor rather than a Sephardic one. Sephardic Jews will often show large proportions of North African, Italian, Middle Eastern and Balkan DNA, with smaller amounts of West Asian or Sub Saharan African.

That's a useful thing to know, thanks, Melba! I had assumed that, going by the rather vague name, they were trying to cover a very broad umbrella of European Jewish populations. As mentioned in my last post, the possible Sephardic link suggested by my match with 'A' is looking a bit more wobbly (though not necessarily completely 'disproven', either) due to disagreement over particular ancestors among my matches sharing that line. I've reached out to A to see what evidence if any they have for the link to that particular family branch.

I have done a more general search for (non DNA-matched) trees with A's claimed Sephardic ancestor, and there are a lot of trees with the same family line in it (an Ancestry search kicks out almost 500 of them), as well as exactly the same name change.

The number of people with this identical family line is somewhat more than I would usually expect from people simply copying and pasting trees - but then again these trees (unlike A's) also go back couple of generations a fairly famous Rabbi from the Portuguese Sephardic community in Amsterdam of the 17th century. So it could be either a genuine, well researched genealogy shared by a lot of people, or a case of 'borrowed glory' from a famous name, I've yet to decide an opinion on that question.

Possibly entirely coincidental, but I do happen to match with another person who has an ancestor in England of around the same time period and with the same Portuguese/Sephardic surname, though using a different English last name as an alias. This match and I share a very small amount of cMs, so I'm at the moment not looking into that too seriously. Just an interesting side-note that I happen to have two matches with two aliased people of the same surname (and I would guess the same religion, going by the combination of alias, Portuguese Sephardic surname, and the usage of the names Isaac and Abraham).

The chromosome browser cut off points for matches vary btween sites but are quite low so if the match isn't showing in chromo browser results it must be a very small segment, possibly from an ancestor predating traditional genealogy records or as a result of ancestors from an endogamous population.  There are what are known as 'pile up' regions where hundreds of false matches can share a segment/segments totalling around 7-8cM  and they are reported as dna matches in results.

I'm pretty sure I can see this segment of DNA in Ancestry's chromosome viewer (see attached image), as it's the only piece of unassigned DNA I can see anywhere on my chromosomes. It's on a part of my paternal Chromosome 1.

Annoyingly, Ancestry doesn't seem to have anyway to find out precisely where this segment is in terms of start and end points, so I can't look at GEDmatches or DNA Painter to compare it to other specific tests.

You're of course right that it could be a pile-up, though I think it at least doesn't appear in any of the common pile-up regions shown on DNA painter.

Thanks for writing that up, Rick!

First of all, it's interesting that we have an O'Neill/Downing marriage prior to 1782. If we presume, based on the names of some of John's children that he and Margaret were in the 'Stafford' Downing line, then that is conceivably another origin point for 'Stafford' O'Neills. I've mentioned before how the Ballymacpeake Stafford O'Neills seem slightly more remote from the other 'Stafford' family branches, including my own. I've often wondered if they could have been a slightly more distant branch of cousins from the 'four daughters' Stafford families.

Another small, circumstancial thing I notice here is that the Ballymacpeake Stafford O'Neills had a number of 'Neal O'Neills' born in their line, a first name which is entirely absent in my Rocktown branch.

Secondly, regarding the 'natural' sons of John Downing. I have read before that in these kind of legal contexts the phrase 'natural' when used regarding children often means illegitimate (or at least, born out of wedlock, whether they are accepted by the father or not is another matter). It doesn't seem there's full consensus on this, as others argue it just means 'biological son' with no other implication. I think it could work either way in this case, I just wanted to raise the possibility that things could be flipped, with Stafford being the 'legitimate' son of Hester and John and Francis being illegitimated, but accepted children of John.

As to Stafford only getting 200 pounds while John and Francis get the farm; it could indeed show that John and Francis were the more important children, but I have also seen cases where older, established children (who may already be set up with a situation of their own) get less, while younger children who have yet to 'get on the ladder' so to speak, get more. Again, I think things could go either way with this will, but I think it's something to note.

Another possibility comes down to where the young Stafford was at the time of the will. My 3x great McChrystal grandfather only got a small sum of money on his father's passing despite being the eldest child, while his sister got the family farm, but this was because my 3x great grandfather was away with his own family working in England at the time and. The Griffiths valuation revisions show he took over the farm from his sister a few years later on his return.

I'll leave it there for now, but I hope to write up a little something soon on some parallel research that's been going on into the history of the O'Neills of the area. It might shed some light on some of the kinds of O'Neill families the Downings might have been marrying into.