Hello Bennetts,

This will be the first time some of you will have heard from me. It's been a while for the others. A new introduction is in order.

I'm the administrator of the Bennett of Somerset England Y-DNA Project. Here's the join link.

https://www.familytreedna.com/group-join.aspx?group=bennett-of-somerset-england&code=G55797

I've been doing genealogy for 45 years, published the National Queries Forum in the 1990s and created one of the first two non-.edu genealogy websites in the 90s. It was sold to RootsWeb in 2000 and is now owned by Ancestry.com (whose habit it is to buy up virtually all free genealogy sites). And I've been doing genetic genealogy for 17 years and now admin (or co-admin) 28 projects. I have a BA in history and an MA in nofiction writing. I've taught and given numerous seminars and presentations over the last ten years in both genealogy and genetic genealogy.

The administrator of the Bennett DNA Project didn't answer my emails for 3 or 4 years. She finally replied last year to say that she sent a message to one of the groups, but she denied my request to be a co-admin. This led me to strike out on my own and, hence, this project.

I've known since 1977 that I'm descended from Gov Richard Bennett of Virginia. I left that fact there for decades until I joined Familysearch 5 or 6 years ago. I quickly learned that there's a whole lot of myth going on regarding the Bennetts and had long before learned that the Y can straighten it out. Therefore, my personal objective is to find Richard's Y-DNA signature. The tricky part, however, is that his Y lineage expired with his grandson, Richard Bennett III. But because of the nature of Y chromossomal inheritance, his uncle and well-to-do merchant, Edward Bennett, had the same markers. This would be true of any paternal relation of Richard's. Therefore, I'm spreading my wings, so to speak, to see what I can fly by.

There are at least two groups of Bennetts that claim descent from Richard's extended family of Wiveliscombe, England -- what we call the Blackwater Bennetts, and the descendants Dr John Bennett. However, the Y has shown that the two lineages diverged about 6,000 years ago. One or the other might well be of the Wiveliscombe family but it's impossible that both are. Which one? We don't know. The search for the Wiveliscombe Bennett Y continues.

I've already written quite a bit about all of this and will provide some links below. But let's look at the new results, first the Blackwater Bennetts.

https://dna.ancestraldata.com/groups/Bennett/

Scroll down to the SNP tree and click on it to see all of it. A second Latimer has Big Y tested but shares no markers with the first other than the topmost BY172987 haplogroup. This *suggests* the Latimers were possibly a collateral family to the Bennetts rather than derived from them. However, there's so much more to consider. That there are 21 markers downstream of BY172987 indicates that the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) for the entire group might have been born in the 1600s. It's possible, then, that the branches split that late. And that no markers match on the downstream SNPs means that the genealogy of the two Latimer lineages might have to be extended some generations before they meet up. My recommendation is to keep pulling in new testers.

The second Big Y arrived this week. He's neither of the Blackwater nor "Dr John" Bennetts. But that's okay. At this point, I'll work with any Bennett. He has a match in the project to a cousin of some degree who has also ordered the Y yet to arrive. But there's a third tester not in the project. I'm copying Karl hoping he'll join us. Once I have access to two Big Y testers, I can run my code and produce reports for them. In the meantime, these three testers have done precisely the right thing. Each descends from a different son of the same man, Amos Bennett born 1791 in Tennessee. Even without the third results we already know Amos's Y-DNA profile. He was born with the whole of FT342778 haplogroup. That can now be used to find cousins -- close and distant. In fact, an $18 test at YSEQ.net will do it. Since there appears to be a debate on who Amos's father was, the SNP can settle the matter.

Now, the FT342778 marker is merely the first listed of 12 in that haplogroup. Each one was born in a specific man *about* four generations apart over about a thousand years. The nearest Big Y match is to a man named Bishop. But the lineages would have broken away from one another many, many hundreds of years ago making him likely genealogically irrelevant. Indeed, with a haplogroup that old, a large number of mismatching names will present themselves in the future. For example, I have a haplogroup in my Y that's that old. I have a subclade project for it with 40 Big Y testers. This is our SNP tree.

https://dna.ancestraldata.com/YP4248/graphics/tree.png

And we still have a long way to go. All that is needed is someone knowledgeable on the subject to take the lead. Enlisting folks, tested or not, is the tough part.

He's an article I wrote last December about the Somerset England Bennetts.

https://blog.ancestraldata.com/viewer.pl?2022-12-06-Bennett.html

A list of links regarding these groups is at https://dna.ancestraldata.com/groups/Bennett/Reports/index.html.

And I have some possible genealogical news. I believe I've already stated that Anstie Tompson didn't marry Robert Bennett of Wiveliscombe but Robert Bennett of Milverton. She and her family lived there at least to the time of her death in 1623. These two towns were near one another. It's reasonable to think that the Thomases were cousins, but I've had no luck so far in tracking the Milverton Bennetts. Match or not, it would be good information.

But this is new. We know Edward Bennett, Richard Bennett's uncle, was dead by 1651. We know he married Mary Bourne and that he had two sons, Edward and John. A correspondant has noted a 1650 death in Sussex, the estate being handled by sons Edward and John Of course, these are very common names, Bennett or otherwise, and I have never connected the family to Sussex. But I'll have an email off by tomorrow evening asking for a copy of the records. Positive results could be huge.

Those who haven't joined, please do. It took me years to get a foot into the Bennett DNA door. And I'm now working on an academically-styled biography for Governor Richard Bennett (he's been largely ignored by historians). I'm very motivated to find his Y, if even for a footnote in the book!

Best Regards,
Michael Cooley, BA, MA