Swinfield DNA testing in 2021

During 2021 I have tried to encourage interest in DNA testing amongst the more senior members of the different parts of the Swinfield family. This is a very valuable tool for testing the relationships between people who the genealogical records suggest are connected in a certain way, joining previously unconnected branches of a family together and even bridging apparently insurmountable gaps in a genealogy. It is particularly useful when the identity of one or more parents or grandparents is unknown due to an illegitimacy or adoption or when the father of a child is not the man recorded in a genealogical document.

I wrote about the theory and practice of using DNA testing in a One-Name Study in a Blog of May 2019. As it can be used to learn more about the make-up and thus the genetic ancestry of either men or women, autosomal DNA (at-DNA) is ideally suited to testing the accuracy of the Swinfield family trees and perhaps joining the currently unconnected lines together.

This year, four members of two of the larger Swinfield lineages have taken autosomal tests with AncestryDNA. They were chosen as excellent testees as, being amongst the older members of their families, they will have more Swinfield DNA than their descendants. Where possible, testing the oldest people in the living generations provides the most information about how much of the “Swinfield DNA” has been passed down to them and through which ancestral line. It will also tell them about their ancestors and relations on many other lines of their ancestry through both their mother and father. The raw DNA data generated by AncestryDNA can also be uploaded, if required, to other testing companies, such as My Heritage and Family Tree DNA, and a third-party website called GEDMatch to increase the number and range of matches.     

Andrew and Geoff
studying the tree of Family 3 at
the Swinfield Gathering in 2014

Three members of Swinfield Family 3 & 4 have been tested in 2021.  They are Shirley Margaret Stott Despoja and Ian George Swinfield,  both part of Family 3C, and Andrew John Swinfield, who is in Family 3A. Shirley, whose mother was a Swinfield, is a particularly significant and valuable asset to the study as she is perhaps the only living great-granddaughter of William Swinfield (1804-1876), the emigrant from Warwickshire to Sydney, Australia, in 1848. He was the founder of the very large Swinfield lineage of New South Wales named Family 3.

The “Swinfield DNA”, which has been inherited by his descendants  through two of his three wives, can be identified by those who have tested today irrespective of the current surname which they now have. That same DNA will be shared by descendants of his Swinfield relations who remained in England after 1848. That same DNA is detectable in living descendants of the lines which come from William’s brother, John Swinfield (1806-1874), who followed him to NSW in 1853. Although it is probable that he no living descendants who are now named Swinfield, he was the founder of the large Swinfield Family 4 whose members will have the DNA that he took with him from England.   

Geoff and Derrick in October 2021

The other person, who tested late in 2021, is Derrick George Joseph Swinfield, my fellow Swinfield family historian. As part of Swinfield Family 5, he is my genealogical 4^th cousin whom I first met in 1972. 

His DNA is a very valuable asset to the research project as he has inherited Swinfield DNA. Sadly I am not his genetic 4^th cousin, having received the DNA passed down to me from one Thomas Brown rather than Thomas Swinfield, the brother of Derrick’s ancestor. I am now busy analysing his DNA data and matches which is not only providing very useful information about his Swinfield cousins but also finding him new ancestors and relatives on many of his other ancestral lines.

It would be great to test other selected older “Swinfields” especially from families that have not yet given a sample. I would love to have DNA samples from those in Swinfield Family 1, Family 12 and Family 44 (the Swinfield-Wells line).

                                        Any volunteers in 2022?

A Horse called Swinfield - guest post by Di Swinfield

Anyone who has undertaken an in-depth investigation of their surname (a one-name study) will know that the main method of collecting information is to search sets of data which are rich in names. The list is endless but some of the most common ones are birth, marriage and death indexes, historic censuses, street directories and old newspapers. They are often available online and when a new source becomes available it is possible to spend many hours trawling through lists of people who carry the relevant surname. We recently decided to splash out on a subscription to Newspapers.com, thinking that it would give us a lock-down project, ticking off the Swinfields we already knew about and filling in a few gaps in our research.

Regular readers of this blog will know that Swinfield is an unusual surname with the biggest clusters in Leicestershire and Warwickshire, England and New South Wales, Australia. There are hardly any instances in the USA although the name is often used there as a forename and one of the things we want to do one day is to document these people more fully and find out why they were given the name Swinfield. When we searched Newspapers.com for instances of Swinfield in the USA there were some forename hits, as we had expected, and we got ready to work through them. What we hadn’t expected was a huge number of hits about one particular Swinfield who lived in the 1920s and 1930s in New York and Kentucky. 

This Swinfield was a racehorse, a black male thoroughbred who was foaled in 1927, all racehorses having their official birthday on 1 January. The Equibase website states that he had 31 outings during a career from 1929 to 1931, with five wins, eight second and seven third places. He was bred by Walter J Salmon, a New York real estate investor, and trained at Belmont Park by Pat Dwyer. He appears to have had a fairly successful career, earning a total of $15,750 and considered at one time to be a hopeful for the Kentucky Derby. Although he didn’t quite manage that his wins included the Hilltop Purse at Pimlico, Baltimore in April 1930 and the Claiburne Purse and Homestead Purse at Hialeah Park, Florida, both in early 1931.

So why was he called Swinfield? Well, there appears to be no obvious reason, apart from the fact that his sire was called Swinburne. All genealogists like to see a well drawn and documented pedigree and the racing world doesn’t disappoint. The Equineline website has a five generation pedigree showing Swinfield’s male line back through Swinburne to Swynford and then John o’ Gaunt. We’ve spent many years disentangling human Swinfields from the posher Swinfords and it seems that the same aspirations to the nobility apply in the bloodstock world.

Many of the newspaper reports we found were accompanied by a grainy photo of the leading horses crossing the finish line but it took a while of searching before we could find a definite image of our namesake. Here he is finishing third (but promoted to second after the disqualification of the second placed horse), wearing number 9 at Havre de Grace, Maryland on 26 April 1930.