Are We Joneses or Oxleys?
The earliest known Jones/Jonnes paternal-line (Y-DNA) ancestor is 7GG John Jones (1670?-1727), who came from northern Wales to the New World sometime in the 1690s and settled in Waterford Township, Gloucester County, West Jersey. (Waterford is in Camden County today.) The official George W. Bush genealogy identifies John Jones as one of Barbara Bush’s ancestors.(())
John Jones was a cordwainer. He willed a cordwainer’s chair to his son, 6GG Henry Jones (1696-1749), also a cordwainer. Henry’s grandson 4GG Thomas Jones (1766-1849) also practiced the trade in addition to tending his farm.(())
The exact year and location of John Jones’ birth is unknown, and it is also not clear when he immigrated. The earliest documentation of his life is a marriage to Ann Prichard (1670-1734) on 29 Dec 1699 in Philadelphia(()). He died in Waterford in 1727.(()) Because the Jones surname is so common in Wales, I have always been pessimistic that we would ever determine his father. Both John and Ann were Welsh Quakers and likely came to America as part of the William Penn-inspired movement of Quakers to the Philadelphia area.
My brother and I share a Y-DNA match at the 67 marker level, genetic distance 2. In FamilyTreeDNA, this is my closest Y-DNA match. To maintain his privacy, I will refer to the match as Tom.
One of Tom’s paternal ancestors was the son of a woman who never married. Let’s call her Betsy. She was in a long-term relationship with a married man named Edward Oxley (1815-1900). Edward Oxley is Tom’s earliest known Y-DNA ancestor. According to Tom’s research, Edward Oxley was a beer seller and cab proprietor in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. Huddersfield is about 30 miles east of Manchester.
Being matched on the Y chromosome to Tom means that at some point in the past Edward Oxley of Huddersfield, England and John Jones, a Welsh immigrant to America, share a common patrilineal ancestor.
Obviously the Jones and Oxley surnames are not the same. How can Tom and I be Y-DNA cousins if we don’t share the same surname?
One possibility is a non-parental event (NPE) – meaning the presumed father is not the biological father. This could happen through adoption, love affair, or rape.
Another possibility – a strong possibility – relates to the fact that we did not always have surnames. Historically, Wales adopted surnames later than most parts of Britain. King Henry VIII decreed surnames mandatory throughout the British realm in 1544, but Wales was slow to make the switch from patronymic to fixed surnames.(()) It took about a century for Wales to fully adopt fixed surnames, approximately 1550 to 1650. Thus, our adoption of the Jones surname can be expected to only go back one to three generations prior to 7GG John Jones.
In other words, at some point in the 1500s or 1600s, either our Jones line descended from an Oxley father or Tom’s Oxley line descended from a Jones father, or even from a common ancestor who did not yet have a surname.
As for location, 7GG John Jones came from “northern Wales,” based on a genealogical note left by my 2GG Dr. Nelson E. Jones.(()) Denbighshire is in northern Wales and is suspected to be the home John’s wife Ann Prichard appears to have been from Denbigh in northern Wales and her father Prichard was also a cordwainer, so that could be the approximate location of John Jones’ birth as well.
Huddersfield, England, where Edward Oxley was born in 1815, is about 90 miles due east of Denbigh.
How many generations back they share a common Y ancestor is the big question. John Jones is 9 generations back from me and died in New Jersey. I recalculated the probabilities of how far back our common Y ancestor is based on the fact that it should be at least 8 generations prior to me, and came up with these percentages:
Using the TIP calculator in FTDNA, I found that the probability of my brother and I sharing a common Y ancestor with Tom (no common ancestor for 10 generations) is as follows:
10 generations 33%
11 generations 55%
12 generations 70%
13 generations 81%
14 generations 88%
In other words, there is a 33% chance that John Jones’s father is our common patrilineal ancestor, but more likely that his grandfather (55%), his great-grandfather (70%), or his 2GG (81%) is the most recent common patrilineal ancestor. To put this in perspective, our most recent common Y ancestor was probably born sometime between 1550 and 1650.
There are many ways that an Oxley and a Jones could share the same patrilineal ancestor. One scenario is that one Jones son stayed in northern Wales and became our ancestor and a brother of his who became Tom’s ancestor was sent to Manchester, or even Huddersfield, as an apprentice to some tradesman named Oxley and later adopted that surname. This would especially make sense if it occurred when the Joneses had not yet started using their fixed Jones surname yet.
Unfortunately, I think it unlikely that we will ever identify who that common ancestor is because of the lack of record-keeping in Wales and northern England during such a remote time. But it is cool that we can better pinpoint the timeframe and location.