Mitochondrial prospects

With the new start of a new year (and decade), I always make genealogical resolutions. Often these renewed exercises in persistence focus on long-standing unsolved puzzles. At the top of my list, my mother’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Jane Durin. Inspired by several articles in Nexus almost twenty years ago that outlined various contributors’ matrilineal ascents, I worked out my own matrilineal line that hit the brick wall with Jane’s marriage in 1667. My documentation for each successive generation looked reliable, especially since most of the marriages were recorded in town vital or church records:

1. Jane Durin married in Salem, Massachusetts 1 October 1667, John Elwell (Salem VRs)
2. Rachel Elwell married in Gloucester, Mass. 19 March 1694/95, Joseph Haskell (Gloucester VRs)
3. Rachel Haskell married in Gloucester 31 December 1716, Jeremiah Riggs (Gloucester VRs)
4. Rachel Riggs married in Falmouth, Maine (intention dated 14 June 1735), Thomas Pennell (Falmouth VRs)
5. Lucy Pennell married in Portland, Maine (intention dated 5 November 1761), William Cotton (Falmouth VRs)
6. Sarah Cotton married in Harpswell, Maine 13 April 1788, Seth Phinney Jr. (Harpswell VRs)
7. Bethiah Phinney married in Bowdoin, Maine 15 September 1817, Silas Curtis Hall (Joseph B. Hall, Hatevil Hall and Descendants)
8. Louvica C. Hall married in New Shoreham, Rhode Island 5 January 1847, Reuben Welch Paine (Original family register)
9. Mary Bethiah Paine married in Fairhaven, Mass. 8 September 1879, Mariano Sylvia (Fairhaven town record)
10. Marian Adeliza Sylvia married in Marion, Mass. 13 July 1904, John William Rhodes (Marion town record)
11. Lois Irene Rhodes married in Rutherford, New Jersey 11 May 1931, Emory Maurice Morse (Rutherford town record)
12. Marilyn Morse married in Maywood, New Jersey 13 July 1957, Francis Michael Dwyer (Maywood town record)

Who was Jane Durin, wife of John² Elwell (Robert¹)? Though much has been written and published on the Elwell family, no one has yet discovered Jane’s identity. Based on the Durin surname and location in Salem and Gloucester, Massachusetts, I speculate that Jane may be a sister of Susanna Durin who married John Best, also in Salem, on 10 October 1670. Perhaps Moses Durin/Durell, a servant of Robert Elwell, and a soldier of King Philip’s War, belonged to this family. Without finding Durin antecedents in Massachusetts, I continue to explore the possibility that the Durins came from the Channel Islands.

Accessing mt DNA testing through FamilyTreeDNA, I hoped this tool might supply some answers in identifying other matrilineal descendants of Jane Durin, or at least generate fruitful possibilities for further research. That did not happen. Mom’s line had 84 matches in this database (Haplogroup H5k), only two with a genetic distance of zero. Both of those matches derived from women in Norway whose lineage charts ended in the late eighteenth century. Of the remaining matches, none had lines extending to ancestors in colonial New England.

Once I adjusted to the disappointment of no Eureka! moment, it left me to ponder several explanations:

• Jane Durin’s remote ancestor could also have been the mitochondrial ancestor of the two women in Norway with no genetic distance.
• The database at this time may simply reflect that none of Jane Durin’s other mitochondrial descendants have paid for this level of testing.
• My paper trail could be wrong, and if so, where did the break occur at what I thought was the correct parentage?

Autosomal test results from other companies suggest that the six generations preceding my mother are correct. Certainly, Bethiah Phinney Hall connects to me through the DNA of three of her children. Bethiah’s mother Sarah Cotton had a sister, Comfort Cotton (not a fabric!), whose descendant matches my mother’s DNA with 15 cMs in one segment.

As with all DNA databases, I await the exciting prospect of notification of a new close genetic match in my mother’s mt DNA line. In the meantime, though, I resolve to collect and assess evidence that may or may not prove Jane, Sarah, and Moses Durin were siblings—my first resolution of 2021.