Re: DNA & Bibles

["John S. Quarterman" <jsq@mids.org>]

>Thank you for your mail. Not sure about DNA tests. As a Quarterman living in
>England I am more interested in identifying which of your ancestors
>emigrated from England to the US, when and which family/place they can be
>linked to in England at that time. Do you have information on these lines?
>i.e. Robert Quarterman who appeared in South Carolina in 1698 for example,
>was he christened/baptised in England ? Are there any immigration records
>dating back this far?

We don't know.  That's the basic conundrum regarding the Midway Quarterman
line.

Experience indicates that there are three main sources of difficulties:

1) The British burned the records in Charleston during the war, in 1781.
(They were cold and wanted to keep warm.)  Charleston was the capital
of the colony of South Carolina, and the main repository of records from
nearby places, such as Dorchester, S.C., where Robert Quarterman lived.
So we have only snippets of records from that place and time that happened
to survive or that were already recorded elsewhere.  Aunt Jane did a
significant piece of work in managing to connect that Robert as father
of John Quarterman Sr. of Midway.

2) That Robert Quarterman would have been born shortly after the
Restoration of 1660.  Since he was a dissenter, it's plausible that
his family were, too, and they may not have been anxious to record
such an event.  If they did it may not have been recorded with the
Church of England.

3) While there are many Robert Quartermans recorded in England around
that time, none of them seem to have dates that would fit.

Our working assumption has been that Robert Quarterman of S.C. was
an emigrant from Oxfordshire.  We have no direct evidence for this.
However, the group he joined in South Carolina had just moved there from
Massachusetts, and before Massachusetts their ancestors were certainly
from Oxfordshire.  Together with the known Oxfordshire origins of the
English Quatremaine family, that assumption at least seems plausible.

We have further taken as a hypothesis that he came from Chalgrove.
But there is no evidence at all that that was the case.  He could have
been from Thame, or Wallingford, or Oxford, or....

And for that matter we don't know for sure that he wasn't already in
South Carolina before the group from Massachusetts arrived.

There were two Quartermans in Maryland somewhat earlier (there's a
chapter in our book about them).  He could have been descended from
one of them.

One thing that is rather certain is that there were no Quartermans in
Massachusetts in Colonial times.  Records there are quite extensive,
and several of us have examined them thoroughly for traces.  There are
none.

Clay's DNA suggestion could be useful in determining which branch
of existing Quarterman descendants is most closely related to the
Midway group, thus providing a clue as to where to look for records.

>Regards
>
>Victoria 

John