RLP 155: Barsheba Tharp DNA Case Study Part 2

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 155 Barsheba Tharp Case Study with DNA part two. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional.

Nicole (47s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (47s):
Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (49s):
I’m doing well. I’ve been working on the DNA results of our cousin, who I talked about a couple episodes ago. I built his tree out about two or three generations, and then I started adding the Ancestry colored dots to some of his closer matches to see, and which cousins descend from which of his ancestors and to help down the road with finding the right cluster of matches that I want to work with.

Diana (1m 15s):
Oh, that’s great. Do you have a color coding system for those dots?

Nicole (1m 19s):
Well, I like the ones that, yeah, Alice Childs did on her blog. I can put the link to it and the show notes that she uses, like the blue’s and the greens on the paternal side and the maroons and orange and red on the maternal side.

Diana (1m 33s):
I like that. Then you can see at a glance, which one is which, so that’s always a fun process doing the colored dots. And I like starting off fresh with the brand new set of results and doing that. Well, I have been working on a new client project. I did the timeline analysis and found what had been previously known and did my research plan. And the very first thing was to check the original 1890 Oklahoma territory census. And this had been attached to the ancestor on FamilySearch, but it was just the index record on the Oklahoma historical society website.

Diana (2m 14s):
And I thought probably Ancestry or FamilySearch had the original and sure enough Ancestry did, but it was a really terrible copy, really hard to read. And I could just make out the name. And I’m curious if maybe the one that Oklahoma society’s using as a better copy, or if it’s all just this bad, but I was able to make out that this is probably not the ancestor because the middle initial, the family thought was M which works with the ancestor. But when I really looked at it closely, it sure looks like a w because the census taker had done the race and then the race column has got double use all the way down for white.

Diana (2m 56s):
And, you know, there’s just so many, W’s this middle initial really looks like a w so anyway, I’m just barely beginning this project, but it’s kind of helpful because I couldn’t figure out why this individual would be in that area in 1890. It doesn’t really fit in with some of the other themes. So if I can just count that it’s kind of helpful.

Nicole (3m 18s):
Yeah. When things don’t add up, it’s nice to be able to find a reason

Diana (3m 22s):
It’s not the right person is always a good one. Well, let’s do some announcements. Our DNA Study Group registration is open. We are recording this earlier than this episode will be airing. And so I’m guessing there’s still spots open. And this is for our, our group starting in September, and we have applications open for our, our peer group leader. So if you’re interested in having a complimentary registration and being able to be a leader for a small group of your peers, you can go to FamilyLocket and learn more about that and apply. And then as always be sure to join our newsletter for coupons so that you can see when we put our courses on sale and take advantage of those deals.

Nicole (4m 11s):
Great. And if you’re not sure if you’d like to do a study group situation where you have weekly assignments do and peer feedback then, and our independent study courses might be right for you because you can just do them on your own time schedule.

Diana (4m 23s):
Yes. And we love having both opportunities and some people do the course, and then they want to do the study group because they feel more confident because they’ve worked through the course on their own. And others just say, I need the study group, cause I need feedback. And I need that assignment due every week. So I actually get things done. So just kind of depends on your situation.

Nicole (4m 43s):
All right, last time we talked about my case study that I wrote as part of that progenitor assignment, my case study on Barsheba Tharp’s father. So this episode we’ll pick up where we left off and we will start in talking about more evidence leading to believe that Barsheba his father was Louis Tharp. So last time we went through some of the records of Barsheba and her children. And then I found that she had some connections to the Tharp family in Hawkins county that was William Tharp and Louis Tharp. And then we talked a little bit about how Louis Tharp was married to Joanna West and possibly had two children, William Tharp, and Elizabeth Tharp Parrott and Elizabeth, Tharp Parrott’s descendant’s DNA matched the DNA of Barsheba Tharp’s descendants.

Nicole (5m 29s):
So that’s kind of where we left off.

Diana (5m 31s):
Right. And I have enjoyed so much reading through this and discussing this case study because it’s really applicable to so many scenarios. You know, these early ancestors in Tennessee, where the records have been destroyed or they’re scarce and trying to connect them back to a county and Virginia, that they migrated from this. And so that kind of brick walls, we see a lot. And so it’s been really fun to see how you’ve kind of worked through this case and now adding The DNA. So let’s talk a little bit about Louis’s second wife and what you found about that whole situation.

Nicole (6m 9s):
Okay. So we know that Joanna West Tharp, his first wife died sometime before his second marriage. We don’t have any death record. We don’t really have anything else giving us a date of when she died, except for the fact that Louis Tharp got married again in 1817 to a woman named Judy Vernon in Hawkins county, Tennessee. And this is another one of those rare marriage records that remains from Hawkins county that wasn’t destroyed. It has a marriage bond that Louis Tharp signed in preparation to marry Judy Vernon on September 10th, 1817. And the bondsman was Nathan Vernon, probably Judy’s father.

Nicole (6m 50s):
And it was witnessed by Willy B Mitchell, who I also found was somebody in the county who witnessed a lot of deeds and things. He was also on some of the papers of John Robert Dyer. So Louis’s marriage to Judy Vernon could have been before or after Barsheba was birth, because I had previously concluded that the most likely birth year range for Barsheba was 1816 to 1818, but there was a range of any time from 1813 all the way to 1820. But I don’t think she could have been born after 1818 because she had to have been at least 11 or 12 when she had our first child in 1830.

Diana (7m 28s):
Right. I can see why it’s really important to try to get a good birth date, which unfortunately you couldn’t get anything really nailed down, even though we had some good hypotheses

Nicole (7m 39s):
I could actually write an argument either way. And I could write a pretty good argument that she was born in 1813. I could write an argument that she was born in 1816 and 1818. It was hard to decide what I thought and I still think it’s up in the air, but let’s talk about this. Judy Vernon and the DNA evidence here was pretty interesting. And, and, you know, with the birth year range for Barsheba being 1813 to 1818, if we include all those census records, to me, it seemed more likely that she was the daughter of Joanna West. Wouldn’t you say?

Diana (8m 10s):
Yeah, because there’s a little bit more range there for her to be the daughter of Joanna.

Nicole (8m 14s):
Right, if she was the daughter of Judy, she would have had to have been born after September 10th, 1817, unless Judy and Louis like had a child before they were married, which is not too likely, I don’t know.

Diana (8m 27s):
Anything can happen in that our, our research,

Nicole (8m 32s):
I don’t, I just wondered if we had that oral history or that legend, that Barsheba was an orphan. So to me, that really correlates with the fact that Joanna West was her mother, because if Joanna West maybe died in childbirth while she had Barsheba, then that would make so much sense that Barsheba was considered in some way, an orphan, you know, after going through all the evidence, I found that Louis Tharp was alive well past Barsheba’s marriage. So it didn’t make sense. And that she was a full orphan where her father was passed away, but it could make sense that her mother died. Her father remarried a lady who didn’t like her for some reason.

Nicole (9m 16s):
And she felt like an orphan or something. Interesting. So I really had thought that, you know, Joanna West had to be the mother. Then I started looking at the DNA. Yeah. Evidence of the matches between children of Louis and Judy Vernon with Barsheba descendants. And I was very surprised. So what I found and is that Louis and Judy had eight children in their household from 1830 to 1850. And I have another table where I correlate census records. So I have the 1830 census where they have six people under nine years old and the 1840 census where they have two new little girls and four of the previous people.

Nicole (9m 59s):
And then two of the older females were missing, probably married. And then in 1850, they’d just have one inferred daughter living with them, Lucy Tharpe, that she was born in 1833. So I had to kind of piece together this family by looking at marriage records, luckily Louis Thorp and Judy Vernon moved from Hawkins county where they were married and went to White River in Washington county, Arkansas. I’m not sure exactly when they left Hawkins, but I know that by 1846, their son, Jesse Thorpe got married to Eliza Robinson.

Nicole (10m 40s):
So by that time they had arrived in a new place. Unfortunately, the records in this county in Arkansas, Washington county, they also had a courthouse fire. And so there’s no land or probate records for this place, which was really disappointing. Louis would have only had a will or a state record, how helpful would that have been? I did find that the only other Tharp’s and this county at that time were some of these older married daughter’s in that 1850 census year. So there was Anna, Mary, Mathilda and Jesse, and they were all enumerated with their, our inferred spouses and children on the same page as each other on the 1850 census.

Nicole (11m 23s):
And there was another daughter who was living in a neighboring county. And there was even one more son who got married there in White River in 1847, but then he left in 1849 to go to California. Hmm. For the Gold Rush. And then there was like a newspaper article about how he died along the way, which was pretty tragic. There was a whole bunch of them in there in the party that didn’t make it.

Diana (11m 48s):
So was this the only Tharp family in Washington county, Arkansas, so you kind of figured that they were all part of that nuclear family?

Nicole (11m 57s):
Yes, they were, and they were all married there too. So I was able to piece it all together and there just were some, you know, some good clues showing that they were all related, especially, you know, DNA evidence coming down from all of them. Right. Okay. But yeah, this is another case where, you know, a lot of these children, the parent to child relationship could be its own Proof Argument.

Diana (12m 22s):
Right. So when you moved to The DNA portion of this, what did you find out? What

Nicole (12m 28s):
I expected to find is that these would be half siblings, half cousins, and share less DNA than what Barsheba her descendants shared with Louis’s first marriages descendants. But what I found is that the number of centiMorgans shared was a lot more. And so at first I thought this meant that Barsheba was a full sibling to Judy Vernon’s children and making her a daughter of Judy Vernon, because I have some amounts of shared DNA between Barsheba’s descendants and Judy’s descendants that are like a 100 centiMorgans, 106 centiMorgans, 83 centiMorgans.

Nicole (13m 9s):
And these relationships are like fourth cousin. And so I’m trying to decide, is this the half fourth cousin or a full fourth cousin? So the range of relationships that I found here between Judy’s descendants and Barsheba s descendants was all the way from fourth cousin to fourth cousin, twice removed to fifth cousin, and even the fifth cousin shared 45 centimorgans. The problem that I ran into that I mentioned in the last episode is that for half relationships, there’s not a lot of data for some of these, you know, half fourth cousins once or twice removed. There is data and the Shared cM Project for a half fourth cousin, however, there are not very many people who provided data for that half fourth cousin relationship.

Nicole (13m 56s):
So it’s not statistically relevant really, you can’t say, oh, just with these like few submissions that this represents the full range of what you would expect to see for a half fourth cousin.

Diana (14m 10s):
Right. Because you just don’t have enough data. And I’m sure the reason is that people are that far back are not sure they don’t know either what is this relationship? You know, so they don’t want to report something that they don’t know for sure. And that’s more difficult,

Nicole (14m 25s):
Right? So at the time of this recording, we’re looking at the Shared cM Project and released in March of 2020. And so at that time, there were 89 submissions for the half fourth cousin relationship. So with, with those 89 submissions, the range for half worth cousin was zero to 74 centiMorgans with an average of 30 centiMorgans. So when I first looked at that, I thought, OK, that rules out the idea that Judy Vernon is the stepmother of Barsheba because these people are sharing 100 centiMorgans and their either a fourth cousin or a half or fourth cousin, if they’re sharing a hundred centiMorgans, which is over the 74, they can’t be a half.

Nicole (15m 14s):
They have to be a full fourth cousin.

Diana (15m 15s):
So what did you do to resolve that?

Nicole (15m 18s):
At first, I was like, oh, Judy’s the mother. Great. I figured it out. And then I talked to some other people. I was in the Introduction to Genetic Genealogy course at SLIG. And I wrote a little paragraph about this for one of my homework assignments and submitted it to Gretchen who was the teaching assistant, and she wrote back, you know, there’s only 89 submissions here so this is not enough data to rule out that a centiMorgan match is not a half fourth cousin. And she suggested looking at the meiosis groupings, which I hadn’t really looked at before. But if you go to the Shared cM PDF file, which is like, where Blaine publishes the Shared cM Project, but it’s not the same as the table on DNA painter.

Nicole (16m 4s):
But if you go to the actual PDF file, there are several pages with graphs for meiosis groupings. And this is where relationships that have the same number of separating meisoes are grouped into one chart. And so it gives you more data. So instead of just seeing those 89 submissions for the half 4th cousin relationship, we can see all of the data for this number of separating meioses. So in my meiosis, grouping 10, that includes the half fourth cousin relationship. And there were 2,633 submissions. So its much better, ah, for that grouping, the range of shared DNA is zero to 126.

Nicole (16m 49s):
So that tells me that sure, a 100 centimorgan match or could be a half or fourth cousin.

Diana (16m 53s):
Interesting.

Nicole (16m 53s):
So that was a really tricky piece of information to try to interpret, to see what this evidence really means. Because at first I thought it meant that it ruled out Joanna West as Barsheba was mother. But now I see that it doesn’t; still possible for either to be the mother.

Diana (17m 12s):
Wow. I think that’s so interesting. And that reminds me so much of the phrase that we use in genetic genealogy that the DNA doesn’t lie, but our, our analysis may be wrong. You know, that analysis can be so tricky and it just takes keeping an open mind. What is the term that we always bring up, confirmation bias? Making it mean what you want it to mean? We always have to try to, I feel like disprove it as much as prove our hypothesis.

Nicole (17m 40s):
Yeah. You know, I was first I had kind of a bias that Joanna West was the mother. Then when I, once I saw this, I was trying to fit Barsheba’s birth date to fit after 1817. And after that 1817 marriage to Judy Vernon, it’s like, oh, well Barsheba, must’ve been born in 1818 because the DNA is so much higher with Judy Vernon’s descendants.

Diana (18m 0s):
It’s just that, there’s just, like you said, you could make that birthdate mean anything, you know, I mean, we could have an argument for both so

Nicole (18m 8s):
We could, we could argue either way on this case for either mother. Another thing I wanted to point out with this is that one of the reasons, I think why the DNA shared between Judy Vernon’s descendants and Barsheba’s descendants is so high, is that Judy Vernon was the second wife of Louis. So her children were born later and their descendants were born later and they’re closer by relationship than to Elizabeth Tharp Parrot’s children. So those relationships were like fifth cousin range and these ones or more fourth cousin. So they’re just a little bit closer in generations and time.

Nicole (18m 49s):
And that also explains in my opinion, why the centiMorgans or higher.

Diana (18m 54s):
Yeah. That is a really good explanation. Interesting.

Nicole (18m 58s):
Yeah. I looked back at the table of shared DNA between our Barsheba’s descendants and Joanna West’s descendants that we talked about last episode, there’s nobody who is even a fourth cousin, there’s only a fourth cousin once removed and more distant, but there were a lot of possible fourth cousins among Judy Vernon’s descendants. So that’s one step closer and there were just a lot more descendants too, so there was a greater pool to draw from. I only had five descendants of Joanna West, and they were all just through that one daughter, Elizabeth, who may not have inherited a lot of the same DNA that Barsheba did.

Nicole (19m 41s):
But then with Judy Vernon’s descendants, I have found a lot more of her children and I had eight DNA matches who consented to share their results for this case study. And so I just had more data. So the range was a little bit bigger and I did have some smaller matches, you know, down at 11 centimorgans, but then I had some in 20, 30, 40, 50 all the way up to 100. So I had just a bigger range of matches.

Diana (20m 11s):
You know, I wanted to just mention for anyone listening, who’s just like a little bit lost with where to find the meiosis, that if you go to DNA painter in the Shared cM Project over on the left, under Blaine Bettinger, it will say more about this project, and then that gets you to the PDF. It’s kinda small. And then if you click on that, it gets you into the document that really explains a little bit more detail. And I think it’s kind of like the idea of learning more about the census. The more you learn about it, the better you get at using the evidence. And so with DNA, the more we learn about these tools, the better we will get at evaluating, which is what you had to do.

Diana (20m 52s):
And you had to figure out more about how to use this DNAs. So there’s always more to figuring this out. So let’s talk about the next thing that we always have to consider with DNA and that’s pedigree completeness. Why was that important to this project?

Nicole (21m 8s):
Well, when I saw these high numbers of shared centiMorgans, you know, 90 and a hundred centiMorgans for a possible four or half fourth cousin, I thought, you know, this sounds like a lot. I wonder if this is an inflated amount of DNA because they have more than one ancestral couple in common. So I just wanted to do a check on some of those higher amounts of centiMorgans to make sure that they didn’t have any other common ancestors in our recent timeframe. So I took some of these matches who shared 95 106, that range of centiMorgans, and just looked at their pedigrees and took note of how complete they were and made a table of pedigree completeness.

Nicole (21m 49s):
And they were all pretty complete except for one was only 67% complete. But I was still able to rule out the fact that they were sharing another common ancestor based on the location of where their ancestors lived. There was one whose whole paternal side came from Buckinghamshire, England, and the person who we matched with all their ancestors came from like early America. So it didn’t seem likely that they shared a common ancestor that would have contributed a lot of DNA making the amounts of higher.

Diana (22m 21s):
Yeah, that makes sense. I always really like it when there’s a branch of the family, that’s much different either with ethnicity or location and that can help you just to add a lot to them off or realize that there wouldn’t be a second and shared ancestor

Nicole (22m 36s):
There was a point where I did think, oh no, there is another shared ancestor between these two matches. And it was because a Thrulines hint was showing up for the match on Ancestry between the two and it really freaked me out. And so I went and analyzed that whole Thrulines hypothesis and realized it was just a false one because we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but it was one where there was a common name and identities had been merged and the tree of the person who had shared the results with was inaccurate. So once I fixed all that up, that went away and there was no additional common ancestor. So that was a relief.

Diana (23m 14s):
That’s good. So to get your percentages, did you just count up that, you know, you’re supposed to have 16 greats, 32 great greats, so then you just counted how many they knew and did the percentage that way.

Nicole (23m 25s):
Yes. So I did how completely a tree is to third great grandparents’ and then how complete it was to fourth great grandparents’ and I tried to do it out to the level where I had found the common ancestor to be the Tharps. Going one generation beyond that is good because they could have a common ancestor, like one or two generations further out that could still be inflating the amount of shared DNA.

Diana (23m 48s):
There are so many ancestors once you get out to those levels, it’s so important to just pedigree complete list and realize that, Hey, especially if you are in an area where people married within family groups, its so likely that there could be another ancestor

Nicole (24m 3s):
And some of the trees I had to build out myself. And so the citations for all the pedigrees for these matches go to my own public member tree on Ancestry, where I have built out the tree for each person.

Diana (24m 16s):
Yeah, that’s a good way to do it so anybody really wanting to take a look at that can go verify that for themselves. Okay. So now that you have established Barsheba’s descendants sharing DNA with many of Louis Tharp’s children, what did you do next to bring in some more DNA evidence? Because at this point you’re still not completely sure.

Nicole (24m 38s):
Well, I was pretty sure that Louis was the father at this point, but I did have a lot of DNA matches who came from siblings of Louis. And since I had already shown that he migrated from Fauquier county, Virginia to Hawkins county, I thought it would be not too difficult to show his parents and siblings through documentary evidence and then show the DNA matches who came from them, which concretes the idea that Louis was the right man and it wasn’t that other random guy named Robert Thorpe because I have matches going back even one more generation.

Diana (25m 15s):
That really helps us cement that.

Nicole (25m 16s):
Yeah. Yeah. So it was great. I was able to return back to the discussion of Fauquier county with those wonderful personal property tax records. I had a child list for Jesse and Lucy Tharp, who I believe I had, there was a permission that they gave for one of their daughters where they were listed as the parents of the daughter who got married. So that’s how I knew his wife’s name was Lucy. Anyway, all of the sons that they had were found to be children of Jesse through being tied to Bowles and his household on the tax records. And then the daughters, I found that they were Jesse Tharp’s daughter through marriage records in Virginia, where he was giving consent for these girls to be married because they were too young and then one daughter was old enough, but the parents were still listed.

Nicole (26m 3s):
So that was great. I had marriage records and tax records providing parent child relationship.

Diana (26m 9s):
And yeah. Oh, that is really good. Especially if you’re going to try to tie the DNA to this generation going back.

Nicole (26m 14s):
Yeah. And that was actually a pretty big challenge because this was one generation further back. And so proving the parent child relationships and my descendancy diagram for the DNA matches was really hard. And I still haven’t finished because some of them moved out to different parts of Tennessee where there’s very few records. And, and so I haven’t quite finished writing these separate Proof Arguments for some of the descendancy links in Jesse and Lucy Tharp descendancy diagram.

Diana (26m 47s):
There is a lot of work when you add DNA. How many DNA matches did you end up with who were descendants coming down through this Jesse and Lucy Tharp?

Nicole (26m 59s):
So I just had four, there were more, but the ones that I used are the ones that gave permission to be included and published. This group ranges from being fourth cousins once removed to fifth cousins twice removed with Barsheba’s descendants. So a fourth cousin once removed, usually shares between zero and 126 centiMorgans and a fifth cousin twice removed is 0 to 65 centiMorgans. What I found is that the amount of shared centiMorgans fit perfectly within that range. So I had some that were only nine centiMorgans and some matches that were as high as 81 centiMorgans a fourth cousin once removed. It’s interesting to see how the recombination works with certain lines of Barsheba’s descent and certain lines from the Tharp family just inherited some of those same segments.

Diana (27m 46s):
Yeah. You already mentioned a little bit, but I wanted to note it again, that when you did your diagram showing these descendants and the links down to the testers that you just such a nice job of including all of those links underneath. So that’s all within one table and you’ve got the citations explaining how you have the parent’s and that’s a lot of work putting in all of those citations.

Nicole (28m 10s):
Yeah. At first I thought I could just link to my Ancestry tree for all of that, but the more I thought about it and the more that I read of other people’s Proof Argument in the NGSQ, I realized that it’s best to include the documentation right there for people to see. And I didn’t have any space limitations because I was just publishing it on my website and not in a journal with a page limit. So I decided to go ahead and include it right there.

Diana (28m 37s):
Yeah. And it’s formatted in a way that it’s easy to read where you bolded the names of people. And, and I loved just looking through and seeing it’s a census record, it’s a marriage record, it’s a tax record. And I don’t know that I would go and check up on every single one of those, but just having that documentation, there gives a lot more veracity to your diagram, knowing that you’ve done your due diligence and putting these families together. Thanks. Well, one of the things we do talk about in DNA research is triangulation. So were you able to find any segments that triangulated among these Louis Tharp descendants?

Nicole (29m 15s):
Since I had so many matches, I thought, you know, if I could just find a triangulated segment for some of Louis’s children, that would really be helpful. So I did end up finding three descendants of Louis Tharp, one through his first wife, Joanna West, one through his second wife, Judy Vernon, and then one through Barsheba Tharp who I am trying to prove is his daughter, but I’m not sure which wife she comes through. So I don’t think I mentioned this earlier, but instead of listing every DNA match’s name in the study, I just gave them all a group and a number. So Barsheba Tharp’s descendants are group A and Louis and Joanna West descendants are group B and Louis’s second wife, Judy Vernon, those descendants are group C and then going back to Louis’s siblings, that’s group D.

Nicole (30m 10s):
So I had three DNA matches A9, B2, and C1 that had a triangulated segment on chromosome 14. So I just had a little table here where I include that B2 matches A9 at this part of chromosome 14, and they share 16 centiMorgans. And then C1 matches B2 at the same part. And they share at 12 centiMorgans, and then A9, and C1 share overlapping that same area with twenty-six centiMorgans. So they all share that same 12 centiMorgans, that C1 and B2 do. So there’s basically a 12 centiMorgans triangulated segment where not only do they all share it with my Barsheba Tharp descendant, but they share with each other.

Nicole (30m 57s):
And so it’s true triangulated segment where there’s three people who share a segment with each other. And then the point of that is that they all probably inherited it from the same ancestor in this case, Louis Tharp.

Diana (31m 9s):
Well, and I think it’s so interesting that you had descendants from each of his wives. So it had to be Louis’s DNA coming down that they all share.

Nicole (31m 18s):
Right. That, that was the only segment that I found that was like that. There were a lot of shared segments among these people, but not all of them were through different wives. Yeah. And a lot of my matches were on Ancestry so I didn’t have segment data for everyone.

Diana (31m 34s):
Interesting. And you just had some that would upload to GEDmatch and so that you could use that for the comparison.

Nicole (31m 42s):
I was limited by who had uploaded to GEDmatch. That’s true.

Diana (31m 45s):
Yeah. Well, finally, at the end, here you go back to naming patterns. So I think you have done a good job of weaving the DNA with the documentary evidence and kind of telling the story all the way through. So right at the end, what did you find out about naming patterns?

Nicole (32m 4s):
Well, after doing all of that descendancy research and the DNA diagrams, I noticed quite a few of Louis Tharp’s grandchildren were named after him. So there was a John Louis Tharp who is the son of William Tharp. There was a John L Parrot, some people had that as John Louis Parrott in their family trees on Ancestry. But I couldn’t find any like original records that proved that. If it’s passed down in their family, it kinda makes sense, but he was a son of Elizabeth Tharp Parrot. Then there was Louis Tharp, Ferris, who was a son of Joanna Tharp, who is Judy’s daughter. And then there was a Louis Roberts and a son of Anna Tharp another of Judy’s daughter’s. And then of course, there’s Louis T.

Nicole (32m 46s):
Dyer, who was the one we started with. So it was great to see all these grandchildren named after Louis Tharp! I just thought that was kind of a fun piece of evidence to end with and tie it all together.

Diana (32m 59s):
And that is strong evidence. Louis, it’s not a super uncommon name, but it’s not as common as John or William or Samuel, some of the ones that we see a lot of. So I think that is good evidence. What did you put in your conclusion?

Nicole (33m 13s):
Well, I just said evidence points to Louis Tharp as the father of Barsheba Tharp. And then I restated the methods I used: family records, proximity in Hawkins county, naming patterns. And then the fact that a DNA study tested the hypothesis that Louis was her father and seemed to confirm it. Then I had a little sentence about even the children of Louis’s siblings matched Barsheba’s descendants adding additional evidence. But my final statement was more research is required to determine which wife of Louis was Barsheba’s mother. And cause I just didn’t want to say one way or the other because I still wasn’t sure.

Diana (33m 54s):
Yeah. And we still have that up in the air. Very interesting. Well, I certainly learned a lot about how to put together a Proof Argument using DNA and all of this wonderful research from this case study. So thank you for putting it all together in a way that we can read and study and learn a little bit more about how do you see, and in our own research,

Nicole (34m 15s):
You’re welcome. You know, after I had written this and put it up as a work sample for our ebook Research Like a Pro with DNA, I was looking at one of the first reports that I wrote about using DNA with John Robert Dyer and how I found Barsheba Tharp. And I had done a network graph and in that network graph, I had found this cluster of people who I was like, oh, this looks like they are connected to Barsheba Tharp descendants. And within that cluster or a bunch of matches who went back to this couple, who seemed to be Joanna West’s grandparents. So I had hypothesized in that very first report that Joanna West was the mother and that these matches were from her grandparents who lived in Fauquier county, Virginia.

Nicole (34m 57s):
It was before I had done this research. So I hadn’t remembered it. And when I went back and I was rereading this later after I wrote this case study, I thought, oh my goodness, like, this is the exact evidence that I needed to know which mother was the right mother. And so I did a little more research on that. I found another person who’s researching the West family in Fauquier county, Virginia. And he gave me some great documentary evidence proving that couple is the grandparents of Joanna West. So I feel like I’m on a really good track now to write another Proof Argument.

Diana (35m 33s):
So you think her mother’s Joanna west, is that your,

Nicole (35m 36s):
I do. And I just think there were not that many children of Joanna West to compare with. So there were just more of Judy’s, so it was misleading at first because they shared so much, but they were closer generationally and there were more of them so it seemed like they were sharing more DNA than they should for half siblings and half cousins, but really, Barsheba’s descendants share with this Arnold family who are the grandparents of Joanna West on her mother’s side so it makes a really good argument that Joanna is the mother. And also the fact that Barsheba was thought to have been an orphan

Diana (36m 12s):
Right, that makes sense.

Nicole (36m 14s):
Or, and that goes along more with the age that we thought she was born before the second marriage in 1817. So it’s more likely to me that she was a little bit older than 12 when she got married.

Diana (36m 29s):
Right. Okay. Interesting. So all of those DNA matches coming down through Judy Vernon are really through Louis. I mean, through their descendants that they’re just, they’re really Louis’ or

Nicole (36m 40s):
Judy, the stepmother I think. And all the shared centiMorgans are inherited from Louis

Diana (36m 45s):
And they just appeared to be larger and to seem like she would be the mother because they’re closer generationally

Nicole (36m 50s):
And they just maybe happened to inherit more of the same of Louis’s DNA than Barsheba did, you know, the ones that are higher. Most of them were not high. Most of them were below 70 centiMorgans, but there were two or three that were 80 or a 100. And so those ones were causing me to pause and think, What is going on here?

Diana (37m 13s):
Well, this is a great case study and I think all of our listeners would enjoy reading through it. Now that we’ve talked all the way through it and discussed it. I think sometimes when you read something, it’s nice to hear the story behind it. And hopefully that’s what we have given everyone is kind of the story behind the research and now you can go read it and see if you agree with Nicole’s conclusions.

Nicole (37m 38s):
Yeah. It’s funny after doing so much, so much research on a project, I thought when I first started doing this, that it was really obvious that Louis was the father, but then after doing all the research and writing, it almost seems like there’s more questions in my mind now than there were at the beginning.

Diana (37m 58s):
Oh, that’s fun. Well, I think you’ve got the DNA evidence that pretty pretty well proved Louis is the father.

Nicole (38m 3s):
Yeah. It was fun to use DNA evidence, although quite a challenge and it adds a lot of pages.

Diana (38m 8s):
It does that does I will know that of those 30 pages, probably half of them or citations and tables, if not more. So those take up a lot of space.

Nicole (38m 20s):
They do, the citations take up a ton of space.

Diana (38m 23s):
Yeah. But they are very important. Well, thanks everyone for listening today. And we hope you really enjoyed learning more about DNA and how to use it to approve the father of a woman born in the early 1800s in Tennessee. That is probably one of the most challenging research cases that you’ll have. So hopefully you can use something you learned in your own research.

Nicole (38m 43s):
Yes, I hope so! All right, everyone have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Diana (38m 43s):
All right. Byebye!

Nicole (38m 43s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com to share your progress and ask questions. Join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our e-course or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.