Following the last post on DNA, this article goes into further detail on the findings in Yorkshire and other northern counties of England.
When I joined the Halsted project there was already an established group of men who had tested and matched each other (not necessarily exact matches), although almost none of them were already in our own database. However in all cases we did already have their distant ancestors recorded. I was gradually able to construct this tree. The more recent names have been redacted for privacy reasons and those not redacted are probably too small to read in any case. The details are not important.
Tree of descendants from Yorkshire
Those with red outlines have taken a Y-DNA test. All descend from two cousins, Jonas and Henry Halstead, who were born in Yorkshire in the early 1600s and emigrated to America.
Another four testers match these men but due to lack of knowledge about their own ancestors they cannot be added to the above tree yet. This research is ongoing.
Now we come to the interesting part.
Note that names have been changed.
The town of Burnley is said to be the ancestral town of many Halsteads. Due to its proximity to Halifax (7 miles) it had been thought likely that men with an ancestor from the town of Burnley would match the above Yorkshire group but among all the Y-DNA testers I so far had only one single man, Simon Halstead, who claimed a Burnley ancestor and he did not match them. This led me to believe he could have had, in his tree, a Non Paternal Event (NPE) i.e. an illegitimacy, adoption or affair etc.
Click on the above image for a full size readable copy
Map of north of England
From previous research it was known that there are also many Halste(a)d descendants with Carlisle ancestors and one of our big questions was : were they originally from the Yorkshire family or are they a completely separate family? I proactively sought living men with Carlisle ancestors and eventually found David Halstead who agreed to do a test.
This is where we had a great surprise. David from Carlisle matches Simon from Burnley. They are an exact match, and as we saw above this means they could share an ancestor who was born around 1800. They both have small trees and there is no evidence so far of where they connect, but there is no doubt that they do. We now know Simon has no recent NPE on his Halstead line. This research is ongoing.
It is of course possible that these two men are related to the Yorkshire group, but not in the male line. For example perhaps a Halstead daughter moved long ago from Halifax to Burnley and gave birth to an illegitimate son, to whom she gave the Halstead surname. He would go on to sire sons and grandsons with this surname, one of whom went to Carlisle, but they will never match the Yorkshire group on Y-DNA. There are many possible variations of this hypothesis!
Alternatively the two families of Halsteads may be genuinely completely distinct.
We would like to find more men to take a Y-DNA test, which will be provided free of charge by the Trust. To make further progress on what’s been discussed above, we need men with Burnley or Carlisle ancestors.
In parallel to this we are also looking for men with the Halstead surname (or variant) whose ancestors come from Sussex or Essex in the south of England.
If you are interested, or would like more information, please contact Hester Coley at dna@halsted.org.uk
Hester Coley
Halsted Trust DNA Research Director
Hester has been a professional genealogist for ten years and is a Member of the Association of Genealogists & Researchers in Archives (AGRA). She specialises in genetic genealogy, which usually means applying DNA analysis to a client’s brick wall in their family tree, most often to determine the identify of an unknown grandfather. DNA can also be used to solve problems of several generations ago.
