DNA’s Role In Chancey Genealogy

 

 

To appreciate the role that DNA has played in my quest to discover the  heritage handed down to me by my ancestors, I have to look at where I was in my research prior to DNA testing versus where I am now three years after DNA testing.

 

For years, we genealogists assembled our “paper trail” by digging through countless records in courthouse basements, public libraries, and hundreds of other repositories knowing that the paper trail would eventually come to an abrupt end. My research “paper trail” on the Chancey family ran into that abrupt ending otherwise known as the “brick wall” in 2005. I still had the Internet to search but much of the information found there, lacked a source, which I found troublesome.

I can honestly say that I did not know which way to turn next. Other Chancey families were out there for me to research but there was no way, at least that I could find, to tie my elder ancestor Jeremiah into any of them. I knew from census records that Jeremiah’s birth occurred in North or South Carolina and there was a good possibility he shared children with a spouse before his marriage with my fourth great grand mother Ailsy Osteen and the children they shared together.

In the following months, my research focused on my other paternal and maternal families since I was at a dead end with my Chancey family research.

 

In 2006, a fellow genealogist and good friend Robert Chancey, a possible cousin who lived in Georgia, e-mailed me with information about DNA testing to ask if I would be interested. After a full week of intensive Internet research, I found that genetic genealogy in recent years had become another tool that genealogist were using to determine if individuals are related. Everything I read sounded reasonable with one possible exception. Although DNA testing can tell you of your relationship to another individual, how you relate to that individual cannot be determined nor can the common ancestor the two of you shared be determined without the supporting paper trail. Therefore, with that caveat in mind, I submitted my DNA sample (a simple cheek swab) to Family Tree DNA (FTDNA), a DNA testing company out of Houston, Texas and waited impatiently for my test results.

 

Three or four weeks later, I received the results from my DNA sample, immediately went on the Internet, and signed up for the Chancey Surname Project at Family Tree DNA. At that time FTDNA had about 22 other members signed up for the Chancey Surname Project. Since I was new to genetic genealogy through DNA, I had no thoughts on the impact DNA would soon have on my research.

 

Prior to the start of my DNA journey, three families of Chancey were of primary interest to me. My elder ancestor Jeremiah Chancey, Christopher Chancey, and Samuel Chancey who I thought were closely related, were the subjects of my research. Paper trails researched by descendants of all three ancestors existed but the name of a common ancestor was not to be found. As previously mentioned, there was also a good possibility that the three were descendants of Charles Chauncey and he might turn out to be the common ancestor.

 

I immediately began comparing my test results to the other members of the project and found several unexpected surprises. The first surprise was the obvious fact that of the 22 members in the Surname project, all with some variation spelling of the name Chancey, only nine were related to me. The ten members of our group share no relationship with the Charles Chauncey group (at least in the past 2000 years).

 

The second surprise was that a close relationship does exist between the descendants of Christopher and Samuel, which suggests that Christopher and Samuel were possibly brothers. However, that relationship is not as close to Jeremiah as I first thought. I now believe they were probably his distant cousins. In other words, the common ancestor for Christopher, Jeremiah and Samuel were probably much further away than I first thought.

 

The third surprise was a real shocker. The relationship of two members in our tested group (living in a small community in Columbus County, North Carolina) was closer to me than the relationship of descendants of Christopher and Samuel. This new piece of information has given me new direction for my paper trail research.

 

For my future research, I will continue to seek out new information the old-fashioned way of looking through courthouse basements, genealogy societies and elsewhere as I did in the past. In addition, I will continue to utilize the Internet to seek out new information digitized almost daily by university libraries. Now that I find Y-DNA testing is a valuable tool in determining relationships and supporting my paper trail, I am certain that DNA will play a valuable role in the future research of my ancestors.