Back in 2008, the genetic genealogist Blaine Bettinger wrote an interesting and educational post, “Where Was My Y-DNA in 1808?” Today, in the same spirit of curiosity and wonder, I created this map, tracing how my mitochondrial DNA–the very DNA in every cell of my body–was also in the cells of so many maternal ancestors. It shows the travels of my mother’s mothers for 250 years.
Generation 1
The story starts with my 4th great-grandmother, Lucinda (Lucy) Sears. She was born in Virginia about 1770, and was the second wife of John Michael Joseph Hardee, who was also born in Virginia, on June 2, 1761. Nothing is known now about Lucinda’s parents or exactly where and when she was born. So early than 1770, I can’t trace my mtDNA. Lucy Sears is as much a mystery as is Lucy Australopithecus, from whom, for all we know, Lucy Sears got her mtDNA.
John Hardee went off to fight in the Revolutionary War at the age of 14, and after the war settled in Kentucky, then Ohio, and finally Indiana. Six of John’s children were born in Bourbon County, Kentucky; three in Preble County, Ohio; and two in Rush County, Indiana. It may have been that the first six children were born to John’s first wife, Elizabeth. John died in 1839 in Montgomery County, Indiana, and his family went to court in 1840 for benefits related to his war pension. Lucy Sears Hardee had died before John, in 1829, in Rush County, Indiana, where the family had moved in 1824.
Generation 2
While nothing is known about Lucinda’s ancestors, it is certain that the mother of John Hardee’s children born in Ohio and Indiana was Lucinda Sears Hardy. One of those was five children was my 3G grandmother, Frances Mary (Frankey) Hardee, born in Preble County on June 15, 1819. Frankey married Elijah Hollingshead of Newberry, South Carolina, in Rush County on June 3, 1834, when she was 15 and Elijah was 27. Frankey and Elijah had 11 children, six of them in Rushville, Indiana and five in Albia, Iowa.
Generation 3
The Elijah Hollingshead family moved to Monroe County, Iowa in 1848 when their eldest child, and my great-great grandmother, Mary Jane Hollingshead, was 13. Mary Jane had been born in Rushville on July 28, 1835. She married Andrew Stephenson in Albia, Iowa on September 4, 1851. She was 16 and Andrew was 18. Just two years later they moved to a farm in Osceola, Clarke County, Iowa, and remain there for 58 years, raising 10 children.
Generation 4
The Andrew Stephensons had seven girls and three boys. Their eighth child, Henrietta Geneva Stephenson, was my great-grandmother. Born on June 2, 1867 in Osceola, she might have stayed happily in Iowa as a schoolteacher after she proudly became one at age 18. But fate and love intervened. While taking a train trip in 1890 to visit her oldest sister Mag (Margaret Frances Stephenson Day) in Rice County, Kansas, she met Charles Bentley Titus, whose family had moved 10 or 15 years earlier from Scioto County, Ohio to Rice County.
Generation 5
Charles and Henrietta (called Retta) married in 1891 in Clarke County, Iowa, but very soon moved to Rice County, Kansas, where they lived in Union Township, then Little River. Their first four children (Lelia, Fern, Frank and Madge) were born in Little River between 1893 and 1900. Then in 1903 Charles began working for the railroad, and the family moved to rural Illinois, living in Tower Hill, Shelby County, in 1903. They later moved to Harrisburg in southern Illinois near the Kentucky border. My grandmother, Ada Genevieve Titus, was born in Nokomis on July 16, 1909, and her younger siblings Harriet and Chuck were born in Harrisburg in 1911 and 1914, respectively.
Generations 6 and 7
By 1920 the lure of the country’s biggest boom town, Detroit, was enormous, and three of the oldest Titus children–Fern, Frank, and Madge–took off to the big city, where they lived together in an apartment for a while. By 1925, Charles and Retta and the rest of the family had joined them. A few years later, Lelia and her husband Grover had also come to the motor city. In 1932, on August 24, when she was 23, Ada married Bob Hamilton in Detroit, and the next year, on June 23, they gave birth to my mother, Gayle Hamilton. In another 19 years, in a nearby small city, I would be born. And over the next 10 years, my five sisters were born.
And that’s the journey of my mtDNA for the first 190 years after Lucy’s birth, from 1770 to 1962.
Generation 8 and 9
But the journey continues through another couple generations. My family moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1966. There, three of my sisters would transfer their mtDNA to nine daughters born between 1977 and 1991. Among those nine daughters, five have had another eight daughters, all of them born in Arizona between 2007 and 2020. That 50+ years in Arizona marks a remarkably stable period for the mitochondrial DNA that meandered since 1770 across the continent from Virginia.
Lucy Sears Hardee had six daughters, and I haven’t traced Frankey’s sisters, or even all of Frankey’s daughters’ daughters. It’s likely that there are tens of thousands of women and girls alive today who carry the mtDNA that Lucy inherited from her mother. (Try the descendant calculator at Peter van Scheik’s Family Record Finder site.) Just imagine the routes across the US and elsewhere that Lucy’s mtDNA has taken and will take into the future!
Rootedness 