In December of 2019 I did an AncestryDNA test. This is an autosomal DNA test which is the only kind of test that will help connect my family line to the descendants of Mary McLeland Wharton. Establishing this connection was one of my primary research goals with the Ancestry test. I’ve already tested my father’s Y-DNA and that didn’t provide any clues towards the father of James and Mary McLeland. So I was interested in doing this the “long way” around using atDNA to find cousin matches. Based on my research into both James and Mary’s family I realized this was in the distant cousin realm – the part of atDNA that is the least reliable and least “definitive” for establishing relationships. But I have good indirect documentary evidence for the connection so the atDNA results were hopefully going to provide additional evidence for a strong hypothesis.
I had a huge number of matches in Ancestry’s DNA database, well over 40,000. That is primarily a tribute to the interest in DNA testing among my German-Russian kindred. Nearly 75% of those matches are traceable to that German-Russian heritage of my mother both from her father and her mother’s lines. My German-Russian cousins are my closest matches, including ALL of my 2nd cousin matches, all but 5 of my 3rd cousin matches and about 50% of my 4th cousin matches. In other words, of the 1,000 matches who are closer than 5th cousin nearly 800 are on the German-Russian side. Whew!
However, I wasn’t expecting the descendants of Mary McLeland would be in that 2nd-4th cousin group. We would be nowhere near that closely related. The best I could expect would be 5th cousin or maybe 5th cousin once removed and 6th cousin is probably more likely even 6th cousin once removed.
And so it proved. After several months of comparing shared matches, looking at other people’s online trees, updating my own research and then finally looking at Ancestry’s Thru-lines product – I have a cluster of 3 matches who all appear to descend from Sally Scott Wharton Mannon, primarily via her son Samuel Rice Mannon. All three share small amount of DNA (11-10 cM on 1 segment which is a good threshold for meaningful results for distant cousins) with me. And their predicated relationship via DNA is pretty close to what my calculations suggest – 6th cousin or 5th cousin twice removed. I believe I can state with confidence that there is no other relationship pathway possible between us. Sally Scott Wharton Mannon’s family moved to Mercer County,Illinois about 1835 and son Samuel Rice Mannon moved on to Appanoose County, Iowa and then Kansas.
Of course the huge irony is that Sally Scott Wharton is sometimes considered, by Mannon descendants, to be descended from a mythical first wife named Sally Scott (see my lengthy blog post on this topic.) Alternatively she is supposed to be a daughter of Mary McLeland but named after that mythical first wife. The DNA evidence seems to rule out the first one completely. The DNA evidence and the documentary evidence as shown in the blog post rule out the second scenario as well.
So what next? Well I’d like to discover matches with other of Mary McLeland Wharton’s children although what I have combined with the DNA convinces me that Mary and James McLeland were absolutely siblings. I’d also like to find a straight line female descendant of Mary’s and a straight line female descendant of various Scott females, especially Sarah Scott (before 1778 – aft 1792) daughter of John Scott and Margaret Brown. I would offer to pay for mt-DNA testing on a bunch of people if we could make a strong tie to a Scott family for James and Mary’s mother. Probably a pipe dream.