{"id":15377,"date":"2018-07-07T15:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-07-07T15:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rootsfinder.com\/blog\/?p=15377"},"modified":"2022-02-24T01:35:11","modified_gmt":"2022-02-24T01:35:11","slug":"william-holloway-martha-branson-phebe-crispin-a-genealogical-game-of-hide-and-seek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rootsfinder.com\/blog\/william-holloway-martha-branson-phebe-crispin-a-genealogical-game-of-hide-and-seek\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Solved It: William Holloway, Martha Branson & Phebe Crispin: A genealogical game of hide and seek"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Brian Sheffey, blog author from the website Genealogy Adventures<\/a> has shared this blog with us as part of our \u201cHow I Solved It\u201d Series.<\/p>\n

This blog, Brian explains how DNA has helped find relatives but pinning down the tree and identifying the correct individuals in the records has been difficult. He finally finds some of the information needed after diving into Quaker records.<\/p>\n

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My maternal Quaker Holloway family has begun to rival my maternal Quaker Harlan\/Harling family, my paternal and maternal Quaker White family, and my paternal and maternal Ulster Scots and Scottish Stuart\/Stewart family in terms of size and importance. These four families are enormous. Together, they connect me to a mind-blowing number of Americans from all walks of life. The sheer number of DNA cousins I have through these four families makes my head spin at times.<\/p>\n

The Moses Williams Project <\/strong>(https:\/\/genealogyadventures.wordpress.com\/2017\/05\/16\/the-moses-williams-family-tree-project-update-1<\/a>) has brought my Holloway line back into sharp relief.<\/strong> I think I have identified a Holloway granddaughter of Moses Williams, Sr in Edgefield County, South Carolina. The sticking point is this woman\u2019s mulatto father, Harry Holloway, born around 1797 in Edgefield. I know there is a blood connection between this Harry and my mulatto 4x great grandfather, Edward \u201cNed\u201d Holloway. They are either brothers or first cousins. Additional DNA triangulation work needs to be done to nail down the relationship between these two men.<\/p>\n

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\"holloway-crest\"<\/p>\n

Holloway family crest<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Harry is of particular interest for another reason. His descendants are matching descendants of Moses Williams through the Williams line. Initial DNA segmentation work is showing cMs in the 3.2 to 3.5 region. Along with other DNA variables too complicated to outline here, the common ancestor is looking like Moses. Specifically speaking, that common ancestor is beginning to look like one of Moses\u2019s unknown 40 daughters, five of whom have already been identified.<\/strong> Finding a sixth daughter would be awesome. Not to mention that if Harry and Ned are indeed brothers, this would mean that Ned Holloway would also be a descendant of Moses through this same daughter. You can see why sorting through the DNA triangulation process to understand this match is so important.<\/p>\n

However, in order to solve the mystery of identifying another unknown daughter of Moses, we must begin to solve the question of Harry Holloway\u2019s paternity. Which means returning back to my Quaker Holloway research.<\/strong> DNA triangulation has already identified the white Holloway man who fathered Ned Holloway. While Ned\u2019s father, William Holloway (1765\u20131838) wasn\u2019t a Quaker himself, he is a descendant of the Quaker Holloway family. So it\u2019s once more into the breach where Holloway genealogy research is concerned.<\/p>\n

\"dvm_GenMono004177-00001-0\"
\nThe image above is from a book myself and the Genealogy Adventures <\/em>research team have found to be invaluable. So far, we\u2019ve worked our way through two-thirds of the lineages outlined in the book. As it so happens, I accidentally opened the book to a section the team had already worked through. It\u2019s a section that has a family group filled with brick walls. These brick walls all had to do with the children of William Holloway and his two wives: Martha Branson and Phebe Crispin.<\/p>\n

To begin, I always find it impressive, no, awe-inspiring, that antiquarian researchers could compile lineage research with none of the modern research tools we take for granted today.<\/strong> Olin Holloway, for instance, relied on sending countless letters to Holloway family members. This formed the backbone of his research. Added to which, he visited various repositories to search through records, compiled data from numerous Holloway family bibles from the various branches of the family, and interviewed kin when and where he could. While there are wee errors here and there in the book, or differences in name spellings, the work he compiled is very accurate. Digitized records have proven it. So my hat is off to this cousin for this important work on the Holloway family.<\/p>\n

However, like the main Harlan family book, The Genealogy of the Harlan Family<\/em>, by Alpheus Harlan, there are some 18th and early 19th Century family lines who ceased to be Quakers\u2026and seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth.<\/strong> For those of you who are not familiar with Quaker records, the Quakers kept meticulous and thorough records. These records largely have to do with Quaker Monthly Meetings. Think of these meetings as community administrative records.<\/p>\n

Such records include details about:<\/strong><\/p>\n