DNA Circles: Robert Patrick and Elizabeth McMullen

Two more of my DNA Circles on Ancestry.com are centered on Robert Patrick and Elizabeth McMullen. Looking at these two ancestors in more depth has led to questions I didn’t know I had.

Robert “Robin” Patrick is my 4^th great-grandfather. He was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1764, and lived in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee before settling in Floyd County, Kentucky. His daughter, Sarah Patrick, born 5 January 1830, married Lewis Reed on 3 May 1849 in Morgan County, Kentucky. Their daughter, Nancy Emily Reed, married James Thomas Day in Magoffin County, Kentucky, in 1876 and moved to Oklahoma before statehood. They were the parents of my great-grandmother, Sarah Florida Day.

For years, without question, I have listed Robert’s wife and my 4^th great-grandmother as Elizabeth “Betsy” McMullen. However, in doing more research for this post, I have found that there are facts about the marriage of Robert and Betsy that call into question whether she is my ancestor. In 1819 after the birth of seven children, Hugh, Henry, Hiram, Robert, Nancy, Margaret, and Brice—the latter two were twins born in 1816—Betsy filed for divorce, citing her husband’s adultery and abandonment as causes. According to Betsy, Robert was living with another woman.

Robert was ordered to come before the court but never appeared. One sheriff remarked that he “got sight of the defendant but could not arrest him.” Elizabeth was afraid that Robert would dispose of property with which he could provide her support, and Robert was “restrain(ed)…from removing or consigning his property without the jurisdiction of (the) court.” Apparently, after living with a woman named Nancy Prater Allen for several years, Robert finally married her after Elizabeth’s death in 1830. It has been assumed that all of the children born after Betsy filed for divorce in 1819 are the children of Nancy. In 1838 the couple, along with Robert’s brother James and several other families, left Kentucky for the West. They traveled over 700 miles to the new state of Arkansas, mostly by river raft. Robert was 74. If nothing else, he was a tough old man.

Most of Robert and Nancy’s children—Robert Jr., Wiley, Jemima, Mary Ann, George, and Rhoda--moved with them to Arkansas. And therein lies the problem. Sarah, my ancestor Sarah, didn’t. She married Lewis Reed in Morgan County in 1849. She is listed on the 1850 census in Morgan County with her husband; they are both 20 years of age. She died in Magoffin County in 1892. If she was born in 1830, she should be Nancy’s daughter.

But why would Nancy move to Arkansas and leave an 8-year-old behind in Kentucky? Who did she leave her with? So is Sarah really Betsy’s, as I have shown in my tree all along? Looking at just the evidence of family names, it would appear not. Sarah did not have any daughters named Elizabeth, but she named the daughter who would become my 2^nd great-grandmother Nancy Emily. Surely Sarah would not name a daughter after the woman who had caused her father to abandon his family.

No doubt because Robert had so many children—most researchers claim 17 total—I have tons of matches to Patrick descendants. Not only do they show up in my DNA Circles and on the Ancestry DNA site, but also on Family Tree DNA. In all, I have at least 50 matches with Patrick descendants. I think I can confidently say that I am a descendant of Robert Patrick. But from which wife?

Again, the lack of chromosome data on Ancestry hampers my ability to answer this question. In theory I should be able to compare amounts of mutual DNA with my matches and determine if we descend from a full or half relationship. In other words, are we only connected by Robert Patrick, or do we have both of our 4^th great-grandparents (Robert and Betsy, or Robert and Nancy) in common?

Putting that question aside for a minute, let’s look at my matches (35 of them!) within the Robert Patrick circle. Within the Robert Patrick circle are descendants that match at least one other person in the circle by DNA and also show Robert Patrick as a descendant in the tree they have submitted to Ancestry.

The trees don’t always match the facts. Some list all of the children with birthdates through 1830 as Elizabeth’s (since she was his known wife during that time period and no date of an actual divorce can be found), even when the submitter’s ancestor is quite probably a child of Nancy’s. Some list all the children born after 1819—the date of the divorce petition—as Nancy’s, even though in the case of Sarah, that doesn’t really make sense. Some even show Elizabeth dying in Arkansas, although that was obviously Nancy.

I have to admit that I had listed Elizabeth as the mother of all the children, because I didn’t know until recently about the existence of the divorce petition. This resulted in my being placed in the Elizabeth McMullen circle, even though she might not be the mother of my Sarah. (By the way, when I changed the mother’s name in my tree to Nancy Prater, my Elizabeth McMullen circle disappeared. Now, even though I have changed the name back to Elizabeth, her circle has not reappeared. Shoot. I wish I hadn’t been so hasty; in comparison to Robert’s circle with 36 members, my Elizabeth circle had only 15 members. I really wish I had compared the names before the circle disappeared.)

Within the Robert Patrick circle are descendants of 5 of the 7 children that Robert had with Elizabeth McMullen: 4 descended from Margaret, 3 from Hugh, 3 from Henry, 3 from Brice, and 2 from Hiram. The remaining members of the circle descend from probable children of Nancy: 8 from Mary Ann, 5 from Jemima, 4 from George, and 1 from Rhoda. I am the only descendant of Sarah in the circle.

Eight members of the circle are DNA matches to me. Three of those are descended from Robert Patrick through his daughter, Jemima, a daughter of Nancy; then I have one each from Margaret, Henry, Hugh, and Hiram (all children of Elizabeth) and one from George, a son of Nancy.

The conclusions I reached about my first two DNA circles—Samuel Wheat and Cynthia Stephenson—also apply here. 1) Exploring these ancestors in more depth is a good exercise and gives a direction to my further research. 2) Lack of tools to manipulate the DNA data and erroneous trees make the DNA Circles a dubious help.

My main question is: Where was Sarah from 1838 to 1849? She wasn’t with her father, and she couldn’t have been with either mother. Nancy was in Arkansas, and Elizabeth was dead. So where was Sarah? Maybe if I can ever determine which of Robert’s wives was her mother, I might be able to find her with relatives of that wife. And then again, maybe not. I could only theorize, since her name doesn’t show up until the 1850 census after she is already married to Lewis Reed.

The Patricks and related families ended up in Madison County, Arkansas, and a little community, still called Patrick, grew up around them. Patrick, Arkansas, where Robert and Nancy are buried, is about two hours from where I live in Oklahoma. Robert Patrick was the grandfather of Grandma Day, my grandmother’s grandmother. I never heard my grandmother mention any relatives in Arkansas, and on some of our family trips we weren’t that far from Robert’s final resting place. Still, it makes me wonder. Grandpa and Grandma Day came to Oklahoma first, and later the Castle family followed. Even if Grandma Day never had any contact again with her grandfather, aunts and uncles in Arkansas, she had to know they were there. Maybe their trek by river 60 years before gave her courage to leave all she knew in Kentucky and move to Oklahoma.

I’m not sure what I think about ol’ Robert. For sure, adultery and abandonment of first wives is nothing new, but I think he treated Elizabeth pretty badly. I guess I have to admire his tenacity—he knew what we wanted and he just hung on until he got it—and his courage in moving west. I think a trip to the cemetery in Patrick is in order.

Photo from www.findagrave.com