RLP 316: DNA Confirms a Father for Clemsy Cline

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 316, DNA confirms a father for Clemsy Cline. 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 (42s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research. Like a Pro.

Diana (47s):
Hi Nicole. How, are you doing today?

Nicole (49s):
Great. I’m just excited to be working on my family history research again after being on a summer vacation. How about you? What are you doing?

Diana (58s):
Well, I am wrapping up my project on Clemsy Cline and adding profiles to Wiki Tree so that when we add DNA that will populate through those profiles. So it’s been really nice because I have my research logs in Airtable that have all the source citations so that when I create a new profile, I can just go to my timeline and pop those citations in really quickly. And it’s been so nice to have that readily accessible, so you know thankful for my research log. Well,

Nicole (1m 31s):
That’s great for announcements we have that our Airtable research logs for genealogy quick reference is available for purchase on our website. And if you’re wanting to learn about how to use Airtable, you should check that out. If you’re using Airtable for tracking DNA matches, there’s a separate guide for that. Well, for this month’s Research Like a Pro webinar series, we have a wonderful presentation by Steve Little. It’s going to be titled, who is Eli’s Daddy, A Civil War Era Open Secret, A DNA case Study. And he is going to be talking about a non paternity event and oral family history that he is going to compare against DNA and see if you can show that it’s true or not.

Nicole (2m 15s):
So this is a a very interesting case that I encourage you to come listen to. If you haven’t registered yet, you can register for $60 on our website and then you’ll access the entire year of the webinar series for 2024. The next Research Like a Pro Study Group begins August 28th and early bird registration will end July 31st. So be sure to take advantage of that early bird registration while it lasts. And if you wanna be a peer group leader, please let us know by August 10th, that’s when we’ll make the decisions about peer group leaders and join our newsletter so that you can get updates and coupon codes as those came out. And then for upcoming conferences, there’s the East Coast Genetic Genealogy Conference, October 4th through 6th, that’s virtual and in person in Baltimore, Maryland.

Nicole (3m 3s):
And we enjoy this conference and encourage you to look into it.

Diana (3m 7s):
Well, let’s do a listener spotlight. This was from our YouTube channel where our podcasts are also listed, and this one is about WikiTree from that podcast. And the listener said, I wish you would have slides that show the different steps instead of just talking. So I recognize that when we are talking about a website, it would be nice to have slides, but that’s not what we do in a podcast. So hopefully you can listen again and go and be clicking around on your computer screen as we’re talking. And I will just say, I’ve been working on WikiTree and it’s pretty easy, just like a lot of the people that we’ve had on the podcast say, just click on everything and you can figure it out.

Diana (3m 51s):
So good luck with that everyone if you’re starting to learn how to use WikiTree. Well, let’s get to our topic for the day. This is all about my final phase with my Clemsy Cline project and adding the DNA to the project. So this has been one of my brick walls for a very, very long time because we have a woman Clemsy Cline Weatherford, my third great grandmother. And the big problem was the record loss in the northeastern Arkansas counties where she was first living with her husband. And you know often when we’re trying to find the family of a woman, we go back to that marriage date, that marriage place, and look around for people with that surname.

Diana (4m 35s):
And so I had determined that her surname was Cline because two of her children that was named on their death certificates. And so that was known in the family that Clemsy was a Cline. And so I had done previous work in trying to understand what I actually had, the records that I had. So the very first step in a significant brick wall project is to do the documentary work. And so two projects gave me a family grouping for Clemsy. I had discovered in the records that there was a John C Cline who seemed to be the age her father would have been, and some possible siblings in Jacob, John and Mahala Cline who were in records near her or seemed to be associated with her in some way or another.

Diana (5m 24s):
And then some half siblings, Jesse, Abner, Ann, and Amanda Cline who were from John C Cline’s, second family. And I hypothesized her Jacob, John and Mahala were from her first family, so they would have different mothers. So my very first project, I reviewed everything for Clemsy and her husband Henderson Weatherford and I found through a tax record that they had been living in Izard County, Arkansas. And so I looked at Clines who are also in that county who are patenting land. And then project number two, I really looked at that group of Clines and I looked at all the land and tax records I could find.

Diana (6m 5s):
And the problem with this was that these were burned county. So I only had federal land patents, I had no deeds, nothing on the county level, and I had tax records that were sent to the state. And so for project number three, I wanted to add DNA and see if I could test this hypothesis that this was a family group for Clemsy. And I also did more documentary research, which You know is always suggested from a previous project. And as you’re working with the DNA, you come across things, you want to work within the documents to see if you can add further proof.

Nicole (6m 41s):
You had done a lot of research on all these projects and it’s only right to do DNA next. Right?

Diana (6m 48s):
Exactly.

Nicole (6m 50s):
Now you can test the hypothesis that these possible siblings have descendants who share DNA with you,

Diana (6m 56s):
Right? And I think it’s so exciting that we do have another source like DNA where we can add some confirmation because previous to that, I would’ve just said, well, I think this is probably her family, but I wouldn’t have anything else I could use to test unless You know something like a family Bible popped up somewhere, which it hasn’t. And I don’t know if it ever will. So it’s great to have DNA,

Nicole (7m 19s):
It is. It gives you something concrete you can do to test your hypothesis. So let’s dive into how you did that. Well, DNA clustering is the first step in kind of finding the right matches that are going to be relevant to the project. So you can cluster DNA matches using tools like colored dots, the LEEDs method, just looking at shared matches on testing websites, auto clusters, and network graphs. For this project, Diana chose to create a focus network graph using Gephi software and Ancestry DNA matches for her cousin Lucrecia. And some of the matches in each cluster had family trees. So that helped her to be able to find the ancestral lines that were relevant for each cluster.

Nicole (8m 1s):
And the documentary work had led to the hypothesis that Mahala Cline Shockley was a sister to Clemsy, and then there were some of her descendants in one of the clusters in the Gephi network graph, the purple cluster. So that was exciting. And seeing many connections between DNA matches provided some evidence that Clemsy was biologically connected to this group of Clines. So that’s exciting.

Diana (8m 25s):
Yeah, it is. And that cluster, the Gephi graph showed a group of Clines, but then also three other clusters around that one also connected to that one that were also connected to WeatherFords and Clines. So there are a lot of people that are all interconnected along these lines, which is so great. That’s what you wanna see. You know a lot of people sharing DNA with one another. so it was really good to see that and just gives me so much more evidence to work with with all of these matches.

Nicole (8m 58s):
Right. And as we’ll talk about in the rest of this episode, this isn’t the end or the final DNA proof. This is just the start. This is where you kind of use the clustering to help you get to the matches. And then once you analyze the matches and get their trees and write about it, then you can get closer to saying that you’ve proved it. Right.

Diana (9m 17s):
Exactly. And you always have to get a good coverage of the ancestors genome. So I do have some future research ideas, but you know this was a project that gave me the confirmation that yep, you are on the right track and you keep going down this path. Whereas if I had not found any matches whatsoever, you know, then I would think, okay, I, something else is going on here. So you know this was first dipping my toe into the water of DNA with this project.

Nicole (9m 46s):
Well, today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com, your go-to resource for unlocking the stories of your ancestors. Dive into the newspapers where your family’s history unfolds as you search nearly a billion pages in seconds. Newspapers.com offers an unparalleled treasure trove of historical newspapers providing a window into the past with papers from the 17th century to today. Newspapers.com is the largest online newspaper archive. It’s a gold mine for anyone seeking to uncover stories from the past. Whether you’re a seasoned genealogist or just starting your journey, Newspapers.com makes it easy to search for obituaries, birth announcements and the everyday stories that shaped your family. It’s like having a time machine at your fingertips.

Nicole (10m 27s):
And here’s the best part, our listeners get an exclusive offer. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. That’s FamilyLocket at Newspapers.com. Sign up today at Newspapers.com and embark on a journey of discovery.

Diana (10m 43s):
All right, so let’s talk about the next step that I took. And this was using multiple test takers to add DNA evidence. So I had done the Gephi graph with cousin Lucretia’s, DNA, and I had a lot of matches. She is one generation closer to Clemsy Cline than me, so I often start with her DNA, but I also have my own matches. And I also have those of my cousin, Gary, who has shared his Ancestry DNA with me. And we all come through a different child of our grandmother, great-grandmother, depending on the generation, Dora Algae, Royston. And Dora was a granddaughter of Clemsy.

Diana (11m 25s):
So this gives me additional coverage of Clemsy’s genome because we will each have inherited different DNA segments coming down through the lines. And, it was really fascinating to see that was very, very true. And in fact, although I was a generation further removed, sometimes I shared more DNA, it seemed like I got a pretty good dose of Cline DNA. So that was really fun to see as I was doing all the comparisons. So our connections, Gary and Lucretia and and myself, two descendants of Clemsy siblings would be either fourth or fifth cousins. And some of those would be half relationships because of John Cline’s second family.

Diana (12m 8s):
And so I had a range of autosomal DNA to be looking for. And of course this far back, it’s a small amount of DNA that you will be sharing, but we can use autosomal DNA because this isn’t so far back that we will have no DNA from an ancestor. So it’s estimated that up to 50% of fourth cousins will not share enough DNA to show up as a match. And only 15 to 32% of fifth cousins will share enough DNA to show up as a match still, fourth cousins could share 0.195% of their DNA and fifth cousins could share 0.0488%.

Diana (12m 49s):
So you can see that there’s just not going to be as many matches this far back. And so the really interesting thing with this, looking at all the different matches in the Gephi graph and those clusters, you can see that there were likely pretty big families with a lot of descendants so that there’s going to be more people. And if this was a family that had very few descendants, I would not be seeing those robust clusters like I am seeing. So just for instance, in our family group with Dora Alga Royce and she had 10 children, and as I looked, I could see there were, there were big families throughout this whole Clemsy Cline Weatherford grouping.

Diana (13m 31s):
So even though we’re not going to share DNA with all of those people, there were enough descendants that we had some decent sharing.

Nicole (13m 40s):
Right. It’s interesting how when you get to that level of cousin you know you have so many more fourth and fifth cousins out there than you have first cousins. And it just multiplies every time you go to a more distant cousin You know you have thousands of fourth and fifth cousins. And so even though you only share a little bit of DNA with them, and a lot of them you don’t share any DNA with at all, you will have so many more fourth cousins showing up in your DNA match list than you will first cousins just because of the sheer number of them, even a smaller percentage of them is still a lot.

Diana (14m 10s):
Exactly.

Nicole (14m 11s):
Well, the next step is to verify the biological connection to Clemsy. So many of those matches in the purple Cline cluster were connected to Clemsy and Henderson Weatherford as direct descendants of them. And this was important to analyze, to set the foundation for the project. Diana looked and found matches through each of their six children and analyzing each match with the Shared CentiMorgan Project, she saw that the amount of shared DNA and the trace relationship was within one standard deviation of the main. So that’s a good foundation to see that Lucretia and Gary and Diana were all matching descendants of Clemsy Cline and Henderson Weatherford in the expected amounts.

Nicole (14m 52s):
Then she diagrammed the relationships and created entries in her Airtable research log and added the descendancy lines to the DNA match in her Ancestry tree. So for the research report, she created a table for each child showing the DNA information.

Diana (15m 10s):
Right. So when I was writing my report, I wanted to find a way to clearly show how much DNA we all shared with these different descendants. So my table, I anonymize it so I could include this report in the blog post and also do snippet of it. So for instance, for Eliza Jane Weatherford, she’s the oldest daughter of Clemsy and Henderson Weatherford, and we had four matches. There’s there are more matches, but these are the ones that had good trees that I could really verify. So I named them Eliza 1, 2, 3, and four. So for instance, let’s look at Eliza two and I would show how much DNA I shared with her, which was 47 cM, and she would be a fourth cousin to me.

Diana (15m 53s):
And the expected mean was 35 centiMorgans shared. So my 47 is within the standard deviation. So I have a column for that showing that anything between 12 and 58 is within one standard deviation of the meme. So it’s kind of a lot of statistics, but I like putting it in a table. So it’s really clear to see that every one of the relationships between myself, Gary, or Lucrecia with a descendant, in this case it was through Eliza, the oldest daughter, they were all in the expected amount. There was nothing going on that gave me pause, nothing too high or too low.

Diana (16m 34s):
And so that was just a nice way for me to analyze the DNA. And so if I’m remembering right, six children of Clemsy Cline and Henderson Weatherford and I had found descendants through each of those children lines. And so I have a little diagram of those relationships and I have the table that says the specific amount of DNA shared between the three of us who were the the main test takers that I was using.

Nicole (17m 1s):
How great, that’s so nice to break that up into six sections and just be able to not have really big tables and really big diagrams, but just be able to focus on one descendant of Clemsy at a time.

Diana (17m 14s):
Right? Because when I first put my diagram into my report, it was just way too big and I had to make it so small you could hardly even read it. And so what I did was I did put it in there and then I explained that the appendix would have it broken down by child. So I put all these smaller diagrams and tables for each child in the appendix so that somebody could go and look at all those and see how we matched with each one. So You know sometimes we have to play around with it a little bit. And I just like to have things be readable in the report, not have tiny, tiny printing in a diagram. ’cause you have so much information in it.

Nicole (17m 51s):
Yes, absolutely.

Diana (17m 53s):
All right, so the next thing to do is to discover the biological connections to Clemsy’s siblings. So I had established that we were biologically connected to Clemsy because we matched through all of her children. And so the next thing I wanted to do was to see if Gary and Lucretia and I matched descendants of Clemsy’s siblings and the documentary work had turned up hypothesized siblings and half siblings. So I will just say again, we based our DNA work in the documents. So one boon to this research was the 1850 census. And in that census, John C Cline is with his second family and he has four children in his household and they are named, you know, hooray for the 1850 census!

Diana (18m 43s):
And I was able to find DNA matches ascending from two of these children, Abner and Ann. And the really fun thing was when I went to look at the documents for Abner and Ann, I found that they shared a migration from Missouri and Arkansas. Clemsy was in Missouri. These other two I think were in Arkansas at least in 1850. They were, they all end up in Dallas County, Texas in the late 1850s. And in fact, Ann is married, she’s married to a Madison Smith. So she shows up as an Ann Smith. And I would never have guessed that Ann Smith was Clemsy’s, half sister, you know, just looking at the census, but she’s just a couple pages away on the census.

Diana (19m 25s):
So discovering this connection, finding DNA matches that, that are really pointing to this and then seeing them all in the same county was just really, really fun and exciting to see that oh yeah, this family group migrated together over to Texas. So one of the tricky things with these half relationships were that a lot of the connections were half fourth cousins once removed. And this is one of those relationships where there is no statistical data in the Shared centiMorgan project. So I couldn’t really use the standard deviation from the mean because we didn’t have enough data in that project with that specific relationship.

Diana (20m 7s):
However, the amounts of shared DNA for the three of us ranged between 11 and 50 centiMorgans. So you know those were decent amounts. And I also ensured that each of those matches were in the Cline cluster. Looking at their shared match list, they had all sorts of Clines and WeatherFords in there. So You know, even though I didn’t have the data statistically to use, I could verify they were in shared match lists of Clines and WeatherFords and we had enough DNA between the three of us that it looked really good.

Nicole (20m 41s):
Well that’s great. I remember doing a project with the half fourth cousin level and just being surprised that there wasn’t data for that in the, in the Shared cM Project. But luckily there is that meiosis grouping number 10 that has some of those, it has like half fourth cousins, but it doesn’t have half fourth cousins once removed. Exactly.

Diana (21m 3s):
Exactly. I know I checked that and I was like, oh shoot. But yeah, I’m hoping with the later release of that, which should be coming sometime in the next while, that we will have more statistics for those distant relationships, especially the half relationships, they’re more difficult to tease out.

Nicole (21m 21s):
Yeah, maybe one more meiosis grouping would include that. And it’s interesting how back then it’s so much more common for people to be married twice and to have children with both spouses. Yes. So there’s a lot of half relationships,

Diana (21m 34s):
Right? And often that first wife dies before the 1850 census. And in this case, if there’s no marriage record or at least I haven’t found a marriage record yet, but I’m guessing there is none, you just don’t even know who she is. It’s so sad. You know that there’s just nothing to identify her

Nicole (21m 50s):
Except DNA

Diana (21m 52s):
Except DNA. That’s true. Yes.

Nicole (21m 54s):
And we’ve had client projects where we’ve got a very strong hypothesis for who it is, even though that woman is so elusive.

Diana (22m 2s):
Right. So that might be a really fun project. Next. And we have done mitochondrial DNA testing, which would go back to Clemsy’s mother. You know mitochondrial DNA though you need a good hypothesis to compare to because looking at the match list, Lucrecia did the mitochondrial DNA for this one. And there’s just you know so many different surnames. There’s nothing that jumps out at you, of course with the women. So right.

Nicole (22m 26s):
It’s

Diana (22m 26s):
Gonna take some work. But we do have tools that could possibly identify her.

Nicole (22m 30s):
Yeah, hopefully you can find some hypotheses that you can then test with that mitochondrial result. Well the next step after finding all these biological connections to the siblings of Clemsy is to write it up into a conclusion. So wrapping up the research and explaining your reasoning, that’s such an important part. And the final report that Diana wrote includes an objective limitations and results summary. And then she discusses the documentary research. She summarized the previous two projects and then showed what she found in this current phase. So the DNA portion also includes a DNA background and the diagrams and tables show the genetic connection.

Nicole (23m 11s):
And so writing up the report gave the following final conclusion, this DNA project aimed to prove or disprove the hypothesis that John C Cline was the biological father of Clemsy Cline Weatherford. Continued research in the documents found in Illinois connection for John C Cline deeds and tax list of Sanon County. The Weatherford family resided in neighboring Morgan County, Illinois during the 1820s and thirties. Clemsy may have met and married Henderson Weatherford in Illinois then moved as a couple to Izard County, Arkansas with John C Cline. Alternatively, the couple could have met and married in Arkansas. The WeatherFords and John C Cline followed the same migration south.

Nicole (23m 51s):
Research in Texas found Clemsy and her proposed half siblings, Abner and Ann all residing in Dallas County. In the 1850s and sixties, John C Cline and Milka had moved to neighboring Kaufman County by 1860, the proximity of Clemsy and these relatives adds further evidence of this being her family examining DNA matches for the key test takers who were descendants of Clemsy found matches with descendants of Mahala, Abner and Ann Cline. It is almost certain these Clines are Clemsy’s biological family. And John C Cline was her biological father. Adding additional autosomal DNA evidence will strengthen this conclusion. Mitochondrial DNA for a descendant of Clemsy was analyzed but found no matches at a genetic distance of zero similar southern locations among the earliest known female ancestor pointed to possible connections, mitochondrial, DNA testers from Mahala and Ann Cline’s lines will help to confirm genetic connections.

Nicole (24m 50s):
Wait, hold on. If Ann is a half sibling, then they wouldn’t have the same mother. Right?

Diana (24m 55s):
Right. And so I just, I kind of wanted to make sure that Milka was not

Nicole (25m 1s):
Her

Diana (25m 1s):
mother, a mother of Mahala. Mahala is in a middle zone. I think she is a full sibling to Clemsy, but I don’t know when John married Milka and she would’ve been very, very young to have Mahala. But it’s possible. So if I could find mitochondrial DNA testing from both of those lines, I could maybe shore up, which is Milk’s daughter and which is the first wife’s daughter.

Nicole (25m 24s):
So you’re sure that Clemsy is the first wife’s daughter, but Mahala you could place in your family with more mitochondrial DNA evidence from Anne and Mahala. Right.

Diana (25m 33s):
Mahala is several years younger than Clemsy. Clemsy is born, we think about 1820. It makes the most sense. And Milka was born in 1807, so she would’ve been 13 to have had Clemsy, which as you know from your, some of your research in Tennessee is possible, but less likely. And so I’m just on the fence for Mahala. I think that she’s a full sibling because both sisters appear to have been born in Alabama and that seems like a connecting link for them. So there’s just a little bit of unsureness about who’s mother is who. So that’s why I’d like to get some mitochondrial DNA to see if that will help.

Nicole (26m 15s):
Oh, that’s great. I think that would be interesting to compare the mitochondrial DNA from all three of those women’s descendants. And when I had my question about who was the mother of Barsheba and the Barsheba would’ve been 13 when she had her first child, if she was the daughter of the second wife, something like that. But it ended up that she wasn’t a daughter of the second wife. And so she was a little bit older. She was at least 14, 15 or 16 or older when she had her first child. Her birth year was just so difficult to pin down.

Diana (26m 45s):
Yeah, A lot of times we just have to use logic. That’s where I’m at with this family because all of them have varying birth years. You know. Nobody has censuses that agree in, in a very small range. So it’s a little tricky. But the really great thing is that I now have clues about all these descendants that I can hopefully reach out to. And I’m hoping that I can find mitochondrial DNA test takers among perhaps people who’ve already tested with their autosomal DNA, because they could be more likely to want to take a test. But you never know until you ask people and seek them out, what you can do with the DNA. Well, aside from seeking mitochondrial DNA from Mahala and Ann Cline’s descendants, I also can add more matches to the analysis.

Diana (27m 33s):
And I’d really like to reach out to some of these descendants of Mahala and Anne and Abner and see if they would share their DNA results with me so I could see more of their connections. So you know there’s always more work to do with the DNA to really shore it up and help you feel like without a doubt, this is the family. But at this point, I am just really thrilled that I’ve been able to figure out what I have and You know. I remember looking at Clemsy years ago and seeing these Cline children in her household that were not her children, and wondering who in the world they were. And now to have kind of put together this Cline family despite the Burned County challenge has been really fun.

Diana (28m 18s):
And it really was DNA that helped to confirm it. Otherwise I would have a great hypothesis, but it would be difficult to say. Yep, I am pretty sure this is our family. So for anyone listening, if you are interested in seeing how I did these three projects, you can read the reports. They’re on the blog post that’s connected to this podcast, and you can see the progression of the project, how I started with the documentary work. Continue that in the second project and add A DNA in the third project. Hopefully it gives you hope if you also have a Burn County challenge and have a female ancestor with no apparent links to any biological family, DNA can help.

Diana (29m 0s):
So thanks everyone for listening and we will talk to you next time.

Nicole (29m 4s):
We’ll talk to you next time. 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 books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.