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.