Saturday, January 17, 2015

Family Group #15


The following comes from Ron Hawkins whose DNA results connect him with Family Group #15.  If you have questions or comments, Ron can be reached at:  ron.hawkins@wildblue.net


Our Hawkins line starts off in England with Robert and Mary (perhaps Marie) leaving there in April of 1635 aboard the Elizabeth and Ann and arrives in Charlestown, Massachusetts in the month of May.

Robert and Mary had three sons, Joseph, Zachariah and Eleazer. The branch of Zachariah settled around Long Island and the branch Joseph settled in and around Derby, Connecticut. Not much of the line of Eleazer is known. Rumors on the internet say he may have ventured to the south somewhere, or perhaps may have died before starting any family at all. I am almost certain that Robert and Mary may have had some daughters, but I have not come across and records indicating that they had any. Alot of my information has been found in the Allen County Library in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where vast amounts of books are on shelves and numerous records on microfiche.

After the Revolutionary War our branch of the family migrated to the Cincinnati, Ohio area, later to Covington, Kentucky for awhile before they again migrated to the southern part of Indiana where they spent sometime before migrating north in Indiana just south of Wabash where they stayed for sometime. One of our ancestors in that area made his wealth as a teamster of oxen and yoke.

In our family history it talks the mansion that he built and in Somerset, Indiana. One winter during deer hunting season in Indiana, with nothing to do I decided to try and locate this so called mansion. Just before arriving in Somerset I passed a cemetery located north of Somerset and decided to stop in there for a look around after finding or trying to locate that mansion.

In the town of Somerset there were just a handful of houses and filling station and the local post office. I inquired at the filling station as to where Somerset actually was and told them I was doing genealogy work on my family. They explained to me that what I see now is actually the town of the new Somerset, the old town lies underwater as the Army Corps of Engineers years ago made a reservoir which hides the old town during the summer months. I left there and headed down to the water and to my amazement the water level was down and I was able to walk from where I parked and onto the river bottom eventually finding the foundations of buildings from the original Somerset. After spending sometime looking around I continued on my main objective to find that mansion.

As I said earlier the time frame was deer hunting season in Indiana and I came across two hunters and decided to stop and ask them if they possibly heard of the mansion that was built and owned by a Hawkins family. One of the men pointed and said do you see that brick house across the fields? That is it.





After stopping there and taking a couple of photographs I left and went back to that cemetery north of Somerset. When arriving there I noticed that this cemetery was made up of several small cemeteries and later discovered that when the reservoir was constructed they had to remove and re-interment the remains of those people to higher ground because the water of the reservoir would have covered them where they originally were laid to rest. In that new cemetery I found many of my distant relatives. Part of my line once again moved on and settled in Culver, Indiana also known as Lake Maxinkuckee. This is where my 4th great grandparents, Zadock and Jane (Cooper)  Hawkins are laid to rest, on the southeast corner of Lake Maxinkuckee and my 3rd great grandparents William and Telitha (Owens) Hawkins are buried about 10 miles from them just across the county line in another small cemetery.





Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Hawkins family that has not been connected to DNA project



Here is what Wikipedia says about Elijah Craig:

    Elijah Craig (1738/1743 – May 18, 1808) was a Baptist preacher in Virginia, who became an educator and capitalist entrepreneur in the area of Virginia that later became the state of Kentucky. He has sometimes, although rather dubiously,[1][2][3][4] been credited with the invention of bourbon whiskey.


I was chatting with a lady about the family that I am going to describe below at a busy time of the year.  I will try to add to this story some of what we were talking about as I have time.

This Hawkins family is one for which I have an extensive data base.  However, I have no reason to believe yet that it will connect to my own Hawkins family line.  I have called this family the John and Mary Long Hawkins family.  However, I am almost certain that Mary's maiden name was NOT Long.  The lady mentioned in the above paragraph was encouraging me to give them a new and more accurate name.

This family was found in the Northern Neck of Virginia VERY early.  They are a very colorful family!  I will try to find links on-line to tell some of their stories.  However, this morning I am interested in telling just one of the stories.  And that is the fact that their grandson is said to have been the inventor of Bourbon.

I have never found a will for John Hawkins.  However, after his death, there are land transactions that I have used to sort out his children.  I believe that he and Mary had six children who lived to adulthood.  One of the daughters is Mary Hawkins born about 1716 in Prince William County, Virginia according to folklore that is found on the internet.  It may be well documented, but I have not done the research for myself.  Mary married Tolliver (Taliferro) Hawkins c. 1730 and this information is again from another researcher that I met in Florida.  Mary and Tolliver had a son also named Elijah Craig and it is Elijah who was a part of the Traveling Church that traveled from Culpepper County, Virginia to Kentucky looking for religious freedom after the Revolutionary War.

OK.....I have to add a correction to my above story.  I googled to make sure that Elijah was indeed a part of the traveling church and that is NOT accurate:

Toliver Craig, Sr. (born Taliaferro Craigc.1704—1795) was an 18th-century American frontiersman and militia officer. An early settler and landowner near present-day Lexington, Kentucky, he was one of the defenders of the early fort of Bryan Station during the American Revolutionary War. It was attacked by the British and Shawnee on August 15, 1782.
Craig and his family were early converts to the Baptist Church in the Colony of Virginia. His sons especially preached their religious views during the 1760s and 1770s. As a young man, his son Rev. Lewis Craig was a Baptist preacher jailed in Fredericksburg, Virginia for preaching without a license from the established Anglican Church, in a case considered important for religious freedom.[1]
Toliver and his sons Lewis and Joseph Craig led 400-600 members of their congregation as "The Travelling Church" into Kentucky in 1781. A younger son, Rev. Elijah Craig, worked with James Madison on state guarantees for religious freedom after the Revolutionary War before following his kin to Kentucky, where he became a successful preacher, educator, and businessman.
Toliver Craig, Jr., became an important landowner in Scott and Logan counties, Kentucky. He was elected as a representative to the Kentucky state legislature.
As far as I know, we do not yet have a DNA participant who has excellent paper trail to this family.  If anyone can correct me on this statement, I would be very happy.  I would pay for a participant myself who does have an excellent paper trail to this family if someone would find a man with Hawkins surname who would be willing to test and has the right paper trail!  Please e-mail me directly at moses@earthlink.net if you have information to add to this post.

My husband and I visited this site probably ten years ago and took the photo at the top of this blog post along with others:



Monday, January 12, 2015

Family Group #15


January 2015 has been a big month for this family group!

The participants in this group who carry the Hawkins surname,  come from two branches.  One is the Kentucky branch  and the other comes from  New Brunswick, Canada.   
Two of the participants are sixth cousins, once removed.  Their common ancestor was Zadock Hawkins, Sr., who served in the American army during the Revolutionary War with his two sons William Wilmot Hawkins and Zadock Hawkins, Jr.

Zadock Hawkins, Sr., died in the war.
William Wilmot Hawkins deserted the American army and joined a Loyalist unit the very next day after his father's death.  Since Loyalists were not welcome after the war, William Wilmot Hawkins fled to New Brunswick when the Patriots proved to be victorious.  Lynn Garn found documents in the National Archives in Washington, DC, and the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick that provide the evidence of the desertion from the American army and subsequent joining of a Loyalist unit by William Wilmot Hawkins.

Zadock Hawkins, Jr., also deserted the American army during the Revolutionary war. He surfaced about 15 years later in Kentucky.  Lynn and Ron Hawkins  descend from this branch.

There are two other participants who carry the Hawkins surname and have DNA matches to the decedents of Zadock Hawkins, Sr.  One participant still lives in Great Britain and has no connections to any American ancestors that he know of.  The other has a non-working e-mail address and I have no information for his family.

The match between Ron Hawkins and the other participant whose research connects his line to Zadock is a he success for this group.  It validates many years of research proving the connection between the New Brunswick line and the Kentucky line.  I particularly enjoyed the story told by Lynn and Ron about the work that they did together to sort out these ancestors:
       

Paraphrased from an e-mail from Ron:  
Hi Marsha,
My research began with a pamphlet written in 1933. The title is: One Hundred and Fifty Years of the Hawkins Family 1783-1933 by Z.T. Hawkins. This pamphlet was only 33 pages.  I started my research where the pamphlet ended c.1933 and brought the research forward to c.1998. About 2 years later a distant cousin of mine, Lynn Garn joined in with me to work on the project.  A few years later a cousin in Canada, G. Christian Larsen also joined in. After years of work we finally published our book of 702 pages and named it the families of Zadock Hawkins. We found that our on-line update posts connected us with distant cousins who contacted us saying they were related to us and told us how. The book is in numerous libraries and also in Washington, D.C. So in short there are three co-authors of this book and if you do a search online you will find info about it.

Here is the link for a copy of the original pamphlet from the Family Search site:

https://familysearch.org/eng/library/fhlcatalog/supermainframeset.asp?
display=titledetails&titleno=151810&disp=One+hundred+and+fifty+years+of+the+Hawki

I will add until I have more links that the final book has three authors:

Lynn E. Garn, Ronnie Eugene Hawkins, Sr., and G. Christian Larsen have done extensive research on descendants of Zadock Hawkins, Sr.

Here is a link for the research of these three authors:

http://www.garnweb.com/hawkins/ 

and

http://www.garnweb.com/hawkins/book.htm

and

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nbpennfi/penn10FamilyofZadockHawkins2.htm

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nbpennfi/penn5Hawkins.htm

The DNA test results confirm the genealogical research that connects the Kentucky and New Brunswick branches of the family. The following article documents the genealogical evidence that Lynn E. Garn discovered that connects the two branches of the family:
The Family of Zadock and Lydia (Wilmot) Hawkins of Derby, Connecticut, by Lynn E. Garn, The American Genealogist, April, 2001, Vol. 76, pages 106-115.