mtDNA for Elizabeth and her children

 

Elizabeth and Sarah. Color using MyHeritage.

Back in March, I reached out to cousin Lynn, a direct maternal line descendant of Elizabeth Thornhill Jones through Elizabeth's daughter Catherine. She agreed to take the mtDNA test through FamilyTreeDNA. The result came back last week, giving us a mtDNA haplogroup for her, Elizabeth and her children, along with Elizabeth's mother Sarah Westall.

With this post, I'm following the example of my recap A Place on the Mitotree for the maternal line path of Maria Jesus Vasquez. Lynn's result was U5b2a1a1, a uniquely European haplogroup.

FTDNA. Discover report.

There's further analysis to do with the results and comparing against mtDNA matches from that haplogroup. Hopefully the results will help connect Elizabeth and her mother Sarah into another family in Colonial Virginia, and perhaps we can follow their path back to Europe. FTDNA suggests joining the Cumberland Gap-mtDNA project along with several Scandinavian and British DNA projects.

From a search on Perplexity, there are few scholarly articles mentioning this mtDNA haplogroup in Colonial America, but it is an ancient European maternal lineage. It is interesting to see Finland as a possible origin location. On MyHeritage's Ancient Origins, my Dad's report has .8% Sami.

Elizabeth and her children

Elizabeth Thornhill was born in Culpeper, Virginia about 1808. She moved with her parents Joseph Thornhill and Sarah Westall, and siblings from Culpeper to Jefferson County, Tennessee. Elizabeth married Robert Thomas Jones in Jefferson County on 20 October 1824. She and Robert had at least the following eleven children in Jefferson County:

• Robert Thomas Jones Jr, 1825-1847
• Catherine Jones, 1826-
• Elizabeth Jane Jones, 1827- before 1875
• Margaret Caroline Jones, 1831-1894
• Emeline Jones, 1832-1865
• Adaline Jones, 1835-
• Joseph Thomas Jones, 1837-1910
• Mary E. Jones, 1839-1900
• Martin Van Buren Jones, 1842-1918
• Francis Marion Jones, 1844-1865
• Sarah Melissa Jones, 1846-1888

As mtDNA is inherited from the maternal line, all of Elizabeth's children would have also shared the U5b2a1a1 haplogroup. Only Elizabeth's daughters passed down this haplogroup to their children. This also means Elizabeth inherited the haplogroup from her mother Sarah Westall.

One more note, for the image at the top of the post, I used the features on MyHeritage to enhance and colorize the photo showing Elizabeth and her daughter Sarah Melissa Jones Daniel. The photo was shared to me in 2015 by a distant cousin descending from Sarah Melissa.