New Jersey Nicholsons

In 1722 at Haddonfield, Camden County, New Jersey, Samuel Nicholson and Sarah Burrough stood before a Quaker meeting and signified their intention to marry. After the clearness rituals and conversations, the couple did marry later that year and went on to have several children together, including Samuel Nicholson Jr, who was born in Haddonfield about 1730 and allegedly migrated to North Carolina.

Haddonfield Quaker Meeting Notes

I've had this Quaker couple in my wife's Nicholson family tree now for almost 3 years. However, the paper trail to them has been non-existent and I've been relying on online family trees buoyed up by a few distant DNA matches. Building a proper proof here has been on my to-do list for a long time. This is not that proof but it's a step in that direction. 

 To the best of my knowledge, our Nicholson line runs as follows:

• Bill, my father-in-law, and DNA test subject
• Rosy Nicholson, born 1921 in Saskatchewan, Canada
• Leonard Nicholson, born 1880 in Mercer County, Missouri
• William Thomas Nicholson, born 1831 in Wilkes County, North Carolina
• Lazarus Nicholson, born 1789 in North Carolina
• Samuel Nicholson Jr, born about 1730 in Gloucester County, New Jersey
• Samuel Nicholson Sr, born 1699 in Camden County, New Jersey
• Joseph Nicholson, born 1669 Nottinghamshire, England

However, after Lazarus the trail grows more... speculative. I guessed that the father of Lazarus Nicholson was Samuel Nicholson of the same county, mostly based on age, proximity, and naming patterns of children. However, considering the purported age of Samuel Jr when Lazarus was born and the existence of several related North Carolina Nicholsons who don't trace back to Samuel, I suspect there may be a generation missing somewhere in the above list. 

Then it gets even more speculative. Internet gossip claims that Samuel Nicholson was born in New Jersey to a family of Quakers. However, as mentioned above, I haven't seen any direct sources for this claim. While there are other analyses I could do to prove or disprove it, I'm currently focusing primarily on DNA. 

I tested Bill's 1st cousin, Ian Nicholson, to see what evidence Y-DNA could provide. His two closest matches were not closely related to him; the most recent common ancestor is probably many generations back. However, both matches claimed the Nicholson surname on their paternal line, meaning that the Nicholson name has been attached to this paternal line for a long time. Unfortunately, one match did not know his family history and the other has not yet responded to me. The next step may be to find a more distant Nicholson male cousin who knows his lineage and convince him to test.

In the meantime, one of Bill's autosomal DNA matches contacted me. Bill and this distant cousin share 23.7 cM on 1 segment and their family trees intersected at  John Roberts and Sarah Marks, who are possibly Bill's 7x great-grandparents. Could this be their most recent common ancestors? Autosomal DNA is rarely useful for proving such distant relationships but sometimes you get lucky. 

If Samuel Nicholson's parents were indeed Samuel Nicholson Sr. and Sarah Burrough of New Jersey then John Roberts and Sarah Marks would have been his great-grandparents. If we could confirm these two as common ancestors then that helps confirm the rest of the line underneath it. 

Ancestry DNA does not have the best tools for genetic genealogy but it does have the biggest database of matches. Looking only at Ancestry DNA data, I took all the matches whose family trees claim or strongly suggest specific common ancestors with Bill on his lineage to John Roberts and Sarah Marks and then mapped all the relationships with each other.

In addition to using Bill as my test subject, his cousin Myrtie Rempel also shared her DNA results with me, which added many more matches to the DNA network. There are other descendants of Leonard Nicholson who have tested their autosomal DNA on 23andme and Family Tree DNA but the databases on those sites are much smaller and I can't compare the DNA results across the different platforms. 

If a distant genetic cousin shares DNA with you, the origin of that DNA may be difficult to prove. Even if you both claim the same common ancestor, perhaps you have another common ancestor in some other branch of the family tree. However, if that genetic match also matches other people who claim that ancestor and doesn't match cousins on any other branch of your family tree then you probably have a winner.

Ancestry only shows shared DNA matches if you share at least 20 cM so the relationships of more distant cousins with more distant cousins are not shown. I also excluded any matches who shared less than 8 cM, although most have much more than that. In addition, Ancestry aggressively screens out many shared segments because it deems them as IBS, which means that you have an endogamous population, which means the remaining shared DNA is of somewhat higher quality.

As a final note, there are many more genetic matches not shown here, simply because I was not confident of which ancestor was the source of the shared DNA.

Node 45 above is the distant cousin who contacted me. The graph shows that he not only shares DNA with Bill but with his cousin, Myrtie, and 3 other distant cousins. Node 40, with whom he shares DNA, represents a descendant of Samuel Burrough and Hannah Roberts, the hypothesized grandparents of Samuel Nicholson Jr who died in Wilkes County, North Carolina. The 2 yellow nodes, 17 and 18, are descendants from Samuel Nicholson Jr and Lidia Dickhouse through a different child than Lazarus. 

Because I created such a busy graph, I didn't represent the strength of the connections. However, here are the mean averages at each generation of cousin match:

My conclusion here is that Samuel Nicholson is related to Lazarus and his descendants. Whether he a father, grandfather, or uncle is certainly an open question, however.

Next, the descendants of Samuel Nicholson are almost certainly descended from Samuel Nicholson and Sarah Burrough. Whether or not the Samuel Nicholson who married Lidia Dickhouse is their son or grandson is also debatable. It also appears very likely that Sarah Burrough is the daughter of Samuel Burrough and Hannah Roberts and that Hannah is the daughter John Roberts and Sarah Marks.

So I strongly believe that the Nicholson line reaches back from Leonard Nicholson all the way through Samuel Nicholson and Sarah Burrough, who were married in New Jersey in 1722. Whether or not an ancestor got missed in there somewhere is another question.