New DNA tests for the Swinfields?

Over the past decade, I have been employing DNA testing in an attempt to determine if all Swinfields are ultimately related. If they are, their family trees could be traced back to one man who chose to use that hereditary surname and pass it on to his sons, daughters and their descendents. As it is the custom for women to take the surname of their husband at marriage, Swinfield would only have passed down male lines or on occasions when women, who were either single or married, had issue out of wedlock.

To date, the male line has been the most useful path to follow through the family trees to try to answer that question. Men inherit their surname from their father and keep it throughout their whole lifetime unless they change it for reason of inheritance or when they become a celebrity. In the same way, they also inherit their Y-chromosome from their father. That is the one part of the DNA which determines that a foetus will become male. By testing the Y-chromosome of selected living male Swinfields, it would appear likely that four of the five major Swinfield lineages, which have been tested to date, do have an almost identical form. That would strongly suggest that there was indeed only one ultimate male ancestor of all present-day Swinfields who would have lived in the 13th century and chose to use the surname. That may have been to mark where he lived at that time. There are several place names in England which are similar to Swin(g)field, notably in the counties of Kent and Staffordshire.

Now we have another type of DNA test which we can apply across all ancestral lines of our family trees. Irrespective of which of our 16 great-great-grandparents was a Swinfield, we may have inherited a discernible proportion of his or her autosomal DNA. The autosomes are all the other 44 chromosomes that we receive from our two parents in addition to our sex chromosomes (which are termed X and Y). We receive a random assortment of such chromosomes through the ancestral lines from our forebears. However, in addition, the autosomes are not passed on intact but also undergo what is called recombination, where they can interchange segments of DNA with their "pair". Consequently, siblings and cousins will inherit a different assortment of DNA from their common great-great-grandparents. Some may have lots of Swinfield DNA while others will have so little that it cannot be measured.

Autosomal DNA testing for genetic genealogy is a powerful tool in the family historian's armoury. Because of the "dilution" of DNA from one ancestral line through the generations, it can only be used over about the past five or six generations to seek or compare 4th or, at the most, 5th cousins. We can now look at both the male and female lines of our Swinfield family trees. Even if was your mother's father's mother who was a Swinfield by birth, and she received half of that from her own Swinfield parent, we may be able to detect that element of her autosomal DNA in you!

At present, only three representatives of two of the legitimate (as far as we know!) Swinfield lines have tested. Those are from families 5D and 5F. Remember that my line has not inherited any Swinfield DNA due to the "non paternity event" of 1840. My father, myself and those in our branch of the tree, as far out as our 2nd and 3rd cousins, have no Swinfield DNA!

Now would be a great time to test other Swinfields across the major family trees. An autosomal test, such as that provided by AncestryDNA, is best done on the most senior member of each branch, as they will have inherited more Swinfield DNA than their issue. That person, who could be of either sex, would preferably have a father or mother who was a Swinfield by birth. The test kit can be purchased for about £70 (GBP) (when they are on offer) and your DNA will remain as a legacy to your children and descendants after you have gone. We can link your test result to an online tree and then look for DNA matches to learn more about your relations.    

                                 

Who will put themself forward?
 If you would be interested in finding out more or can recommend a family member 
 who will take a test, contact me by e-mail at geoff@gsgs.co.uk or via Facebook.  

Latest research and discoveries

It is 14 months since I last wrote about the Swinfields and the research which I have been conducting on the family's history. Early in 2018, I wrote about the exciting discovery of the "Family Bible", now in America, which Thomas Swinfield had taken with him on his trip across The Atlantic in 1854. That book had in it a record of his ancestry, which is what I now call Families 5 and 2, stretching back through five previous generations to Richard Swinfield born in 1645 at Markfield in Leicestershire. It has survived a journey of thousands of miles by sea and land via New Orleans and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to its current home in Montana.

Since then I have not been idle although I have not yet written about new discoveries. Over the past months, I have been actively pursuing the research in online indexes and sources as well as through original records. That has included three days in Leicestershire Record Office in September 2018 and a day in the Staffordshire Record Office in March 2019. I have also been utilising the new DNA tools that have recently been made available by the genetic testing companies to locate new branches of the Swinfield trees. That has given me new information which I trust will be of interest to all of you who are interested in our surname and its history. 

One very significant discovery, which happened in February 2019, is that yet another Swinfield Family Bible exists.

This time it documents members of Family 3C who live in New South Wales in Australia. Following the announcement in the newspaper of the death of Dawne Gwendolyn Swinfield in January this year, I wrote to her family expressing my condolences. Her son John passed on my message to his sister Julie Holmes. She informed me that she has inherited the Bible that was given to her great-great-grandfather, George William Swinfield (1854-1936), by his wife Elizabeth (McCarthy) as his 24th birthday present on 24th July 1878. The Family Register pages have been used by that couple and their descendants to document the births, marriages and deaths of another six generations of this branch of the family.  

What a genealogical goldmine!                 How many more bibles are waiting to be discovered? 

                                                    Do you have one?