Project Newsletter #11
18 May 2005
Dear Burgess Cousins,
Three more DNA results were reported during these past few weeks, and we have three more matches to announce.
The John Burgess family of Lawrence Co., Kentucky, has now been linked genetically to William Burgess of Bedford Co., Virginia. Genealogists have long speculated about the possible connections between these two lines; we can now confirm that they actually exist. With this result, we now have numbers from descendants of three of William's four sons, and these markers match each other 12 out of 12, a 100% match.
This family's profile also matches the number markers present among seven descendants of the five branches of the family of William Burgess of Richmond (later King George) Co., Virginia, through a common ancestor that dates back at least to the mid-1600s, either in Virginia or in Europe.
There are several early land-owners named Edward and William Burgess living in the coastal Virginia counties of King William and King and Queen in the early 1700s; these may be possible candidates for William of Bedford's father. Unfortunately, the civil records of both of these counties were lost during the Civil War, and very little survives today.
Two other families have now been linked to Thomas Burgess of Sandwich, Mass. One of these lines was located in Washington Co., NY, but the family was intermingled in the county records with a large Burgess group known to be descended from John Christian Burgess (originally Burger?), a Hessian immigrant from the Revolutionary War era. We can now confirm that the likely ancestor of the George Burgess Sr. and Jr. who derived from Rensselaer and Washington Cos., NY, was Benajah Burgess, a descendant of Thomas Burgess Jr., eldest son of Thomas Burgess of Sandwich, MA.
These new results point toward a developing trend in the Burgess DNA Project. The known larger Burgess families are beginning to break out from the pack, with multiple random affiliations becoming apparent, even from families whose ancestral information was largely unknown before their participation. The large families are showing more random matches simply because they have a much greater descendant base, and this trend should continue into the indefinite future.
Of course, we still have a number of families with unique DNA profiles, and we probably always will, even though some of these will undoubtedly find matches of their own as the project continues to develop. If a Burgess family has been created relatively recently through a break in the chain of descent, or if for whatever reason it has a relatively small number of present-day descendants in the male line, establishing matches becomes that much harder and takes somewhat longer.
The relative sizes of different Burgess families often has very little to do with each line's antiquity. There are five branches extant of the family of William Burgess of King George Co., VA, who died in 1712. They've all been extensively researched by me. Two branches account for about 5% each of the total male descendants in the line, two for 20-25% each, and one for over 40%--and that "one" actually represents just the offspring of the third son of the ancestor in question. Each branch started out with three adult male sons, so there's no obvious reason why there should be such disparities in the numbers of present-day offspring--but there are.
I knew when I started this project that the family of Thomas Burgess of Sandwich, Mass., was the oldest--and probably largest--Burgess line in North America, and this is generally proving to be true. The same assumptions have been made about a number of other Burgess lines with multiple correlations. I would expect to find a few more very large families emerging from the project over the next year.
The questions that we have about possible overseas connections, both with Britain and with its former colonies, have yet to be answered, but I'm confident that they will be answered in due course. The key is more participation from Burgesses in the British Isles. As the project becomes better known, we'll begin seeing some astonishing linkages.
As always, please check my personal website (www.millefleurs.tv, under the "Burgess Genealogy" link) for updates to the DNA project, and for additional Burgess family data which I'm compiling from the early records. Dan Burgess has kindly cumulated the previous versions of these occasional reports at his own website, www.burgesslegacy.org.
Finally, for those of you who are interested in such things, I've just sold a new book, the second edition of Codex Derynianus (with Katherine Kurtz), which will be published in trade paperback by Underwood Books in October of 2005.
All best:
Michael Burgess