This article was originally made available to descendants of David Kennedy and Elizabeth Conway Kennedy of Russell County, Virginia, in August of 2015. These important new discoveries change our understanding of many longstanding family traditions, so I am making our findings available on the public blog so that current and future researchers of this couple and their children will not waste time pursuing the now-disproven relationships which are recorded in older works of family history.
Back in January, a Brooks cousin made me aware of several Kennedy relations on Facebook, with whom I promptly connected since I was about to renew my efforts to push the Kennedy branch of my family tree a bit further back in time. My great-great-grandmother, Ibbie Kennedy Brooks, never knew her father, Wiley F. Kennedy, since he died several months prior to her birth. However, she must have had some degree of contact with his family, as fanciful tales of the Kennedys and of a great “inheritance” in Ireland were passed down from her to my grandmother, and from my grandmother to me. A bit of preliminary research in my teens led me to consider these stories highly unlikely, but until recently I had not had the time to pursue the facts of the matter. What little I knew included nothing to indicate any particular wealth or status of the family in Ireland (in fact, quite the opposite), but what did intrigue me was the great tragedy that had befallen the Kennedy family in the spring of 1800, when David Kennedy and his wife, Elizabeth Conway Kennedy, both met sudden and unexpected ends. The couple left two small orphans, one of whom, John Kennedy, was to become the progenitor of the large family of Kennedys of Russell and Wise Counties in Virginia.
Newly-discovered Kennedy cousin Laura Smith kindly took the time to bring me up to speed on the current state of our Kennedy family’s research efforts. I had recently stumbled across an online copy of The Name and Family of Kennedy and Powers, Wade P. Kennedy’s booklet of family history. Wade P. Kennedy, born 1868, is a descendant of Pleasant H. Kennedy. When I questioned Laura about sources and details to support Wade P. Kennedy’s stories, she advised me to approach the anecdotes with a degree of caution, and explained that some of them were as yet unverified. She added that cousin Curtis Wade Kennedy (1938-ca 2010) had dedicated years of his life to attempting to locate documentation which would conclusively prove Wade P. Kennedy’s assertions that our line descended from the family of Captain Joseph Kennedy of Augusta County, Virginia -- but his most earnest and concerted efforts had failed to produce such proof. Ginger (Rose) Senter, also a newly discovered Kennedy cousin, concurred with Laura’s assessment of Wade P. Kennedy’s work as well as that of Curtis Wade Kennedy.
It occurred to me that this is the very sort of conundrum that lends itself to a DNA testing solution. A simple comparison of testers from the Augusta County Kennedy line(s) and our own line would instantly settle the question once and for all. Laura set about locating volunteers from our family to test, and I contacted James “Jim” E. Kennedy, the Kennedy Surname Project administrator for Family Tree DNA to see if the project currently included any testers who could prove a lineage back to the Augusta County Kennedys. As luck would have it, Jim himself descends from that group, so half the battle was already fought. He informed me that there is a strong cluster of matching testers who had documented paper trails back to that same family, so all that remained was to secure our testers for comparison.
Laura located two volunteers from the line of Pleasant H. Kennedy (1831-1916), and a third from the line of John Fletcher Kennedy (1846-1929). After a not-unusual delay of approximately 10-12 weeks we began to see results that clearly explained why Curtis Wade Kennedy had not been successful in finding documentation to support a connection to the Augusta County Kennedy family. Simply put, we are not related to them.
I realize that this is not the outcome that a number of family members (including myself) had hoped for, although it was probably a result not entirely unexpected by some. It would have been so much easier to learn that we did indeed descend from that distinguished and well-documented group, and consequently double our efforts to find the “proof” that must be there. It is both inconvenient and unsettling to realize that a decades-old and dearly-held family tradition must be discarded as we face the fact that we must look elsewhere for our David Kennedy’s origins. However, now that we know with certainty that we should stop pursuing research of the Augusta County group, we are freed up to begin pursuing the correct group -- if only we knew what group that was!
The second disappointment dealt to our testing effort was that while our three testers are a perfect match to each other (thereby establishing a strong genetic signature for our line for future comparison purposes), we did not match any of the large number of other Kennedys who are currently participating in the surname project. I have been surprised by just how common the Kennedy surname was in early America, and as a result there are quite a few descendants of these early, unrelated men in the project who do not match us (or anyone else). This proliferation of very early Kennedys makes our own research task even more challenging.
Jim Kennedy informed me that many testers are not serious about genealogy and quite a few tested solely in the hope of gaining bragging rights to a relationship with the President John F. Kennedy family. When they didn’t match that family (and almost none did), they quickly lost interest and failed to submit their own lineage details for the benefit of the overall project. This situation makes it difficult to compare our test results to other testers in order to eliminate false leads. For example, if our paper research identifies a potential Kennedy lead in Pennsylvania, we could (in theory) check the current database of DNA testers to see if any testers claim to be descended from the target in Pennsylvania, and we could then potentially eliminate the lead if the DNA results did not match us. However, the large number of testers who have failed to provide information about their ancestry somewhat frustrates this method.
So the bottom line result of the testing as it currently stands is that 1) we do not match the Augusta County, VA Kennedy family from whom we traditionally believed that we descended, and 2) we do not currently match any other Kennedys who are participating in the official Kennedy surname project. The thing to bear in mind, however, is that new testers are continually being added, and just because we do not have any matches today does not mean that we won’t have a match tomorrow, or next week, or next month or even next year. I once waited six years for a single match to a man I tested from Kentucky, but when the match came, it provided all the information we had hoped it would. The moral of this story is do not lose hope. The match will come. One fine day, it will come.
In the mean time, we are pursuing additional leads and an upgrade called the SNP Backbone Test. That test will help us more precisely narrow down our haplogroup and will shed some light on the deep ancestry and origins of our Kennedy lineage. In other words, our Kennedy family’s “ancient history.” While the results are unlikely to be of immediate value in helping us connect our David Kennedy of Russell County to his roots in Ireland (or less likely, Scotland), it may be an important first step in that effort. One other Kennedy tester (unrelated to us) was able to use such testing to pinpoint his exact haplogroup signature (called the “SNP”), which he then cleverly used to identify matching surname clusters in a single county in Ireland. By narrowing down his search geographically he was able to pick up his ancestor’s trail in the correct Irish county and trace back several generations. I am hoping to eventually achieve similar results for our family.
So that, my friends and relations, is the current state of affairs. I would like to make clear that these results should in no way diminish the sincere and dedicated efforts made by Wade P. Kennedy (or more recently by Curtis Wade Kennedy) to trace our family’s lineage. The astonishing volume of original courthouse documentation and obscure (often out-of-print) historical writings which have recently become available online has given us an advantage that neither man enjoyed when they attempted to piece together a history for our family from precious few reliable clues. Had either one of them had access to DNA testing or to the sheer volume of readily-available documentation (including many first-hand sources and original documents) that is available to us now, I have no doubt that either or both would have reached precisely the same conclusions at which we have arrived.
Having said this, I do need to address one additional error which springs from Wade P. Kennedy’s booklet: the tradition of our connection to Captain David Kennedy and Lt. John Smith of the Augusta County militia.
Once again owing to the volume of reliable primary and secondary source information that has recently been made available online, I was able to identify the Captain David Kennedy in question and follow him through the decades of the mid-to-late 18th century. That David Kennedy, a 5’7” merchant born in 1731 in Argyll, Scotland, enlisted in Robert Stewart’s Troop of Light Horse in November 1754. He served as a Captain and Quartermaster in the British Army and can frequently be found in records of Stewart’s unit during the French and Indian War. After the war, and likely on the strength of their military acquaintance, future President George Washington agreed to rent to Kennedy a farm located on Bullskin Creek (in present-day West Virginia). Washington’s confidence in Kennedy was misplaced. Kennedy failed to pay the agreed rent and skipped out, leaving a significant debt which Washington (through a series of factors and friends), attempted to collect for over a decade. After vacating Washington’s Bullskin Creek property, Kennedy removed to Winchester, in Frederick County, VA, where Washington continued to pursue him for payment. All attempts were met with frustration as letter after letter to Washington from his collection agents explained Kennedy’s reduced circumstances and advised Washington that the money was likely never to be had. Washington must not have been the only person Kennedy owed. By July of 1790 Kennedy had been sentenced to live within Winchester’s prison bounds on account of his debts. An increasingly aggravated Washington had asked Daniel Morgan, a friend and resident of Frederick County, to attempt to collect from Kennedy, but Morgan reported that “a bad woman which [Kennedy] kept for a house keeper made such a Deep stroke at him that [it had] frustrated all [Morgan’s] designs & left the old man poor indeed.” Morgan went on to report that Kennedy had “an estate in Scotland worth about￡500 sterling which he has been offering for [sale]” -- but I have been able to find no record of the estate in Scotland, nor any sale thereof, nor any satisfaction of Washington’s debt.
A ￡500 (presumably sterling) estate was substantial money in 1790 and had Kennedy been successful in liquidating the estate, he would likely have had sufficient funds not only to pay his debts, but to establish himself as a man of means in the county. A man that I have every reason to believe is the same Captain David Kennedy was appointed first High Sheriff of Frederick County and was a mason in the Winchester Lodge in the late 1790’s, so it appears he may indeed have been able to redeem himself.
I have found no evidence that Captain David Kennedy of Stewart’s troop (later of Bullskin Creek and Winchester, Frederick County VA) ever married. The fact that he kept an unscrupulous housekeeper tends to make me think he lacked a wife (not to mention discernment concerning women). As Wade P. Kennedy stated, Captain David did in fact serve in the Revolutionary militia of the district of “West Augusta” (an area that encompassed far more territory than present day Augusta County and included parts of western Pennsylvania), and his Lieutenant was indeed John Smith. However, there is no evidence that either man ever set foot in Russell County. Their service during the Revolution is reasonably well documented, and with the exception of a couple of brief details into Ohio and Pennsylvania, was mostly confined to the area around Frederick County, VA, where Kennedy was assigned to keep the peace and to guard a contingent of Hessian prisoners of war.
Our David Kennedy first appears in Russell County VA in 1790 when he obtained 50 acres of land from one Richard Price. If you will remember, Captain David Kennedy was confined to Winchester’s prison bounds in July of 1790.
Our David married Elizabeth Conway in Russell County in 1792 (although the month and day are illegible). Captain David apparently never married (no modern-day descendants appear to be claiming his lineage).
On 25 November 1793 our David Kennedy was still in Russell County VA where he was fined for “profanely swearing 3 oaths.” In November of 1793 the formerly destitute Captain David of Frederick County had apparently made good and was serving his first term as sheriff of that county, where we find records of him being bonded and appointed to his position of public trust on the 7th and 8th of November.
Captain David is still in Frederick County in October of 1794, the same year our David Kennedy shows up on the tax lists of Russell County VA.
The records of 1790-1794 appear to rule out the possibility that the two David Kennedys were the same. While not technically impossible, it is a great deal more than highly improbable.
So unfortunately we must lay another cherished family tradition to rest. If anyone can provide additional details or records to disprove my conclusion regarding Captain David Kennedy of Frederick County, VA, who served with Lt. John Smith in the militia of the district of West Augusta, I will happily investigate them. (If anyone would like to review the records I collected regarding Capt/Col David Kennedy, my 33 pages of working notes and unedited comments and observations are available online as a Google Doc.
In the mean time, I will continue to to pursue traditional methods of research as time allows, carefully monitor new DNA matches, and attempt to advance our knowledge of our Kennedy ancestry through SNP testing. While I realize that it may take time to absorb the implications of what we have recently learned and to come to terms with the small varying degrees of disappointment I know we must all feel, I hope you will join me in feeling encouraged that we can release old errors to make way for new research that will give us a truer picture of our family’s shared history. I will make every effort to keep the family apprised of new discoveries and developments on all fronts. My most profound thanks to all of you whose generous contributions made this valuable testing possible.
Just remember, this is not the “end result” of what we’ll learn from our tests, only the beginning.
