My name is Steve Jones and I live in Manchester, England. In October 2019 I my Y DNA test results came back from FamilyTree DNA which showed a close match to Joe D. Hawes, Richard Simrall Hawes, William E. Hawes, Jesse N. Hawes, Raymond Jerry Hawes and Bentley Hause. I understand all of these men are descendants of Samuel Hawes I and submitted their DNA around 15 years ago to try to find an English family connection to establish where Samuel came from.

Well I am the English connection and Claudette and I have been in communication for the last year to try and figure out our joint deep history. We have not yet found an answer but I am confident that our common ancestor came from a merchant family that lived in London in the early 17^th century.

Before we step back 400 years I should probably provide some more recent background.My mother is a family historian with more than 25 years’ experience. She is a Fellow of the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society which is one of the largest such societies in England and she still transcribes old baptismal records from churches in Manchester. After researching her own family, Mum started on Dad’s family but this was hard as Dad was an only child, brought up by his mother in a very working-class (‘blue collar’ as you say) part of Manchester. They had little money. Together with thousands of other children he was evacuated to the countryside at the start of the second world war when the bombing of Manchester began. After a period in the army, he went to night school and had a successful career in business.

Dad never knew his father and took the Jones name from his mother, my grandmother, who was born in Liverpool in 1896 in even more impoverished surroundings. At some point (we don’t know when) my grandmother left Liverpool for Manchester where Dad was born in 1931. As I approached retirement, I took on Mum’s family history research and realised that DNA testing could help to solve some mysteries so in the summer of 2017 both Mum and Dad took autosomal DNA tests with Ancestry.  Dad died peacefully a few months later and it became my mystery to be solved: “Who was my grandfather?”.

Over the next two years I separated out Dad’s DNA maternal matches. The remaining paternal or unknown matches must have included connections to his father. After a year or so of wondering who all these other people were I eventually found a common denominator, with four matches in Canada all sharing the same great grandparents in England. By expanding the families of their English great grandparents I was able to identify other DNA matches to Dad and I have now identified around 20 people who match Dad’s autosomal DNA and who can  be traced back to Harriet Barons (b London 1769) and John Hawes (b London 1770).

Through further matching to people related to Dad’s paternal grandmother I was able to identify my grandfather who lived in Manchester for a few years in the 1930s. This is the only occurrence, that I can find, of a Hawes living in Manchester. Although I have identified my Hawes grandfather, I have made no attempt to contact his descendants as these are sensitive issues even after 90 years. 

Last year I realised that if my theory about my grandfather was correct, then I am on the Hawes male line and my Y DNA should match to other men called Hawes. It did and that is how I discovered my genetic connection to Samuel Hawes I of Virginia. It is interesting that after 15 years there are still no other close matches to anyone called Hawes living in England or Europe and only a couple of other matches to other men not called Hawes in the USA.  

My research into Samuel Hawes led to the discovery of the Hawes Family Association. I contacted Claudette last December and since then we have been working together to see how we might be connected. It’s been interesting reading the HFA Newsletters especially those from 2005-2007 when the Hawes men who I match to, submitted their tests.

DNA is amazingly accurate. However, autosomal DNA cannot be used to establish how I am connected to Samuel Hawes since it decays with every generation and it not meaningful after around 250 years. Meanwhile Y DNA hardly decays at all. I am a ‘Generational Distance’ of 1 from the descendants of Samuel Hawes. In Y DNA terms this means we most likely have a common ancestor within the last 400 years. Our common ancestor must have been born before 1700 so this is consistent.

The Y DNA submitted by the descendants of Samuel Hawes around 15 years ago was measured at the ‘Y-25’ level (the 25 corresponds to the number of DNA segments that are analysed). I initially tested at the ‘Y-37’ level but then upgraded to a ‘Big-Y’ which looks at 700 segments. My ‘Y-37’ test gave me a haplogroup known as I-P37 (also known as I2a) which is relatively uncommon. My ‘Big-Y’ provided a more specific haplogroup below L-161 (which is a branch of I-P37). The descendants of Samuel Hawes also have the I-P37 haplogroup but we don’t know if we match at the L-161 level; I am sure we do but this can only be proved if and when a descendant does an updated, more detailed test. This would also provide a more accurate assessment of how closely we are related.

The I-L161 haplogroup is nicknamed “Isles” because it is more common in Great Britain and Ireland than in continental Europe. But it is rare even in Britain and Ireland, less than 1% of men here belong to I-L161. I belong to an even smaller haplogroup I-A2330 which mostly includes English men but also some men with ancestry from Germany. I-L161 has also been nicknamed “The Deerhunters” which is supposed to mean that our paternal ancestors were living around the North Sea leading a hunter-gatherer life before Britain became an island around 8,000 years ago. They were certainly some of the earliest people to live in Britain after the retreat of the last ice age.

I can trace my family back with confidence to John Hawes and Harriett Barons. So who were they? A notice in the ‘Lady Magazine’ of 1789 stated that ‘John Hawes Esq of Goodman’s Fields (was married) to Miss Harriet Barons’.  In 1793 John Hawes (Harriet’s husband) was admitted to the Company of Ironmongers and he was stated to be the son of John Hawes, a sugar refiner.

Goodman’s Fields was a focal point for sugar refining in London in the 18^th century and one of the biggest of the refineries there was owned by John Hawes senior who died in 1810 in his 75^th year. He had retired to Walthamstow in Essex a wealthy man. As well as being a sugar refiner he was also a director of the Phoenix Assurance Company (established in 1782) and a founding director of  the Pelican Life Office in 1797. The Phoenix specialised in fire insurance and was established by sugar refiners as they found it very expensive to insure their businesses (due to fire risk) and rather than pay excessive premiums they joined together to form their own insurance company.

The Phoenix also did business in America. An auction held in March this year sold a Policy of Insurance written by the Phoenix Assurance Co of London in 1788, signed by John Hawes, Director, in favour of Edward Rutledge in Charleston South Carolina. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. The policy covered insurance for loss or damage by fire on his dwelling house on Broad Street, Charleston in return for a premium of £25 a year.  John Hawes was clearly familiar with doing business in Carolina. Did he have distant family connections there?

The sugar trade was hard in the early 19^th century, not helped by the Napoleonic wars and the difficulty in securing safe shipping lanes. The sugar refinery partnership that his father had set up in 1770 was dissolved several times and in 1816 John Hawes junior was made bankrupt. He presumably recovered from this but in 1833 he resigned as director of the Pelican Life Insurance Company and in 1834 he appeared in the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors. I cannot find the record of his death but his wife Harriet died in 1847. It is possible that John died in a debtors’ prison.

John Hawes senior was baptised at St Mary Whitechapel in January 1736 to a John and Elizabeth Haws of whom very little is known. John Senior married Margaret Pritchard in 1766 and he was admitted to the Company of Ironmongers in 1768 (proposed by W Hawes, who is also an unknown). Despite much research I can get no further on John and Elizabeth Haws who must have been born around 1700. This is a similar situation to that of Samuel Hawes I.

I can trace Harriet Barons’ family back further than I can go with the Hawes line and as most marriages took place between people from similar backgrounds this provides insight into the sort of family that John Hawes came from.

The Barons were a merchant family who came from Exeter on the south coast of Devon. In the 16^th century Exeter was a wealthy and important trading port (more important than Liverpool). Its wealth was based on shipping high quality wool produced in Devon to London and also across the English Channel to France and more importantly to Rotterdam in Holland. The Barons were established traders on the Exeter to Rotterdam route and they would have exchanged metal ware and other goods in Holland for Devon wool. They would have visited London regularly and engaged in business with many other merchants.

Harriett’s father was Samuel Barons who died in Goodman’s Fields in 1781 where he had lived since 1711 at least (this is when his brother George was baptised). His father (also Samuel Barons) and Uncle George were both born in Devon in the 1670s. Father Samuel died in London 1722 and Uncle George died in Rotterdam in 1740 having married a Dutch woman. In 1720 George was also a founding director of  the City of Rotterdam Insurance Company, one of the oldest in Europe. This George eventually settled in Holland but in the early 1700s he ran a merchant business with his brother Samuel running the London office and George looking after affairs in Rotterdam. This would have given them a strong base for transatlantic trading which was dominated by the English and Dutch at this period.

The two Barons brothers had interests in Newfoundland fisheries and Virginian tobacco. They also financed a couple of voyages carrying slaves in 1714/15 using a captain who came from Devon and whose grandfather had mastered ships sailing to Barbados and Virginia in the 1670s.

In 1718 the Barons carried indentured servants to South Carolina on the Neptune. The Neptune left Charleston on 30 August 1718 carrying pitch, tar, rice and deerskins but was captured on the same day by pirates on a ship called Queen Ann’s Revenge captained by Charles Vane. The previous year this ship had been captained by Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard.  

So based on Harriett’s family background it is reasonable to assume John Hawes was also from a merchant family trading across the Atlantic. Merchants mixed with merchants. John was born in 1735 but at age 35 he entered into partnership to run a large sugar refinery in London. This suggests wealth acquired over many decades or inherited. But where did this wealth come from? And how is this John Hawes connected to Samuel Hawes I ? Well, I have a number of ideas but it’s a long story that involves people from Suffolk in England sailing to the West Indies and sugar plantations in Antigua. There are many connections and hints that suggest what might have happened and it is fascinating history. But this will have to wait for the next newsletter.