DNA proves a point? |
The Baughurst Fragment was added to the Web Site on 12 January 2014, and remained virtually unchanged for over 9 years. The simple reason for that was that the progenitor, Francis Lovelock, had declared for the 1851 Census Return that he had been born in Baughurst, Hampshire. No Lovelock researchers had ever found any Lovelock entries in the Baughurst Registers and so there was no way of knowing who the parents of Francis were, nor their origins.
There are other Francis Lovelock references in the Hampshire collection of data, mostly associated with Kingsclere and Hannington, and of course there was a tendency, particularly in the 18th Century and earlier for the same names to be used in successive generations, but we could not make the vital link. So there the Fragment sat, untouched.
Until the late summer of 2023. At that point a new member joined the Discussion Group seeking information on his great-great-grandfather James Frederick Lovelock - a member of what we had termed the Baughurst Fragment. This new correspondent had access to various papers belonging originally to a daughter of James Frederick who had made mention in those papers that suggested Lovelocks in Wallingford, Berkshire were clearly considered to be cousins.
Initially exciting as that revelation was, on its own it did not provide any proof of a relationship, and certainly none of the members of the Baughurst Fragment had ever been shown to have a connection to Wallingford. But then one of the newer tools available to family historians came into play - DNA analysis.
Our new correspondent had taken a DNA test and some of the results were indicating that he had cousins - 5th to 8th cousins apparently - in both the Baughurst Fragment and the Wallingford Line. So the two are indisputably linked.
But how? Consider the Lovelocks in both trees first. We have noted above that we are unable to identify the parents of Francis in the Baughurst Fragment. As luck, bad luck, would have it we are also unable to identify the parents of the John Lovelock who is currently portrayed as the progenitor of the Wallingford Line, born in 1740. However, we know that Francis was born in about 1781, being declared to be 77 years old at his burial in 1858. Meanwhile, John in Wallingford had a son Stephen who was born in 1791. What if Francis and Stephen were cousins? As we do not know where John was born it is possible that he and the father of Francis were brothers, and thus the common ancestor linking the Baughurst Fragment and the Wallingford Line would be their father. In his turn the father would possibly have been born in the 1710-1720 timeframe.
As it happens there were three male baptisms in Kingsclere at that time - John (1713), an unnamed male (1715) and William (1718), the sons of Robert and Maria. William must have died because Robert and Maria baptised another William in 1724 who may be the one who died in 1779, but our Kingsclere data does not include the burial of a John that fits with a baptism in 1713. The second William would of course have been too young to father a John in 1740. Alas our Kingsclere data does not include a marriage for the John born in 1713, but of course the custom of the time was for a marriage to take place in the bride's home village or town, so it may have escaped our researches so far.
That is a good deal of speculation, but whilst the DNA results quite clearly show that the Baughurst Fragment and the Wallingford Line are linked, could it possibly be that both can trace their origins to Kingsclere?
There is, of course another possibility - that the Baughurst Fragment and the Wallingford Line are linked through non-Lovelocks. Will time tell?