Friday, June 4, 2010

A New Cousin in the Lawrence McCown Line

My brother, Dick, found him as a result of a search using Bing under the search term "Lawrence McCown". This cousin is named Clark McCown and is descended from Lawrence McCown's third son,
Leander. We now have descendants of three of the four sons of Lawrence McCown and the fourth and last son died without issue as far as we know.

His family moved from Kentucky to Louisiana many years ago. He is being urged to take the Y-DNA
test to confirm that he matches cousin Sam (descended from 2nd son Eli) and me. A tip of the hat is due to Leonard McCown, administrator of the McCown Surname Group because he thought that we would be his most likely match.

Even though we likely all descend from the same common ancestor, born somewhere in South Carolina ca 1790-92, sometimes distant cousins can shed new light on the family via DNA mutations. That
was true of Sam's results because he has a mutation that is common to only one of two lines of MacAuley Maguires out of the entire Maguire Clan. Perhaps Clark's results will also turn up an interesting mutation that is of genealogical value as well. As you can see, I have recovered from
my last post in good order.

2 comments:

Chris McCown said...

I have been asking myself this same question for many, many years. I simply can't trace the line back to the UK. It almost seems like our line was was part of a conspiricy coverup and the WHOLE family was shipped off to America with a name alteration.

William McCown said...

In the case of Ireland in general and Ulster in particular, a great many records of the governments, churches and other valuable sources were destroyed both accidentally and on purpose as well. The 17th century suffered greatly in this regard. If your family is from Ireland or Scotland, please write to me at my Gmail account and I will give you William Roulston's email address.