Is This My Line?

Could the eldest daughter of Jeremiah and Deborah (LANHAM) REEVES [“Unknown d Reeves 1813-” just above] be my granddad Cash Adams' paternal grandmother Patsey? I don’t have any proof, but her age and location in Madison County, Kentucky, certainly make her a candidate. Jeremiah is the dark shaded person next to the far right in the third row above.  The unnamed daughter is the second from the left in the bottom row.

I just got an autosomal DNA match from a man who is associated with this family. That match is reported to be “Possible range: 4th - 6th cousins” with a “Confidence: 96%”. My match is a descendant of Harvey REEVES the middle child in the bottom row above. There is no assurance that the REEVES line is where we share a common ancestor. However, my DNA match and I would be 4^th cousins if Harvey and Patsey were siblings. That is within the range projected by the lab (DNAAncestry).

I wish Ancestry provided us with a little more access to the details of our own information. It would help me evaluate the strength of the above match. Perhaps that is all coming as the autosomal service moves out of beta. 23andMe, in its "Relative Finder" tab, gives us a percentage of match and its "Family Inheritance" tab allows us to see the location(s) of any significant matching segments. FTDNA's "Family Finder" tells us the total amount of match, the number of significant segments, and allows us to overlay our results with those of matches to see if multiple matches may be sharing the same segments. Both of the other services allow us to download our own raw data for further comparisons. Ancestry earlier this month on the company blog announced that this latter feature would be coming in 2013. It was reassuring for a testing lab to acknowledge: 

AncestryDNA believes that our customers have the right to their own genetic data. It is your DNA, after all.

Patsey's husband,Isaac N. ADAMS, my third great-grandfather (about 1813 to after 1870), appeared in official records in the 1840 US Census for the Eastern District of Madison County, Kentucky. Patsey was named only in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. Isaac's last appearance was in the 1870 Census for Peno Township, Pike County, Missouri. At that time he was a widower living in the household of his youngest son John Speed ADAMS. Coincidentally 1870 was the year of birth of my grandfather, Cash ADAMS. 

Does this prove that my Missouri ADAMS line descends from the above REEVES family? Not quite. However it is the best working hypothesis that I have found. I’ll be exploring it further when I spend a research week in Salt Lake City later this month.