This week, another longstanding brick wall tumbled. This one was thanks to a relatively small DNA match (19cM) that popped up at one of the sites I have tested with.
Benjamin Morter
Benjamin was my 5th great-grandfather. I had not had any luck in unraveling his origins over the years. He’d lain a little neglected in recent times. Morter is not a common surname and is localised around East Anglia, so I suspected he or his ancestors probably came from around there somewhere. But I’d had no luck in definitively finding a likely candidate.
The only indication of a birth date I had was the fact that he was recorded as 65 years old when he was buried in the Globe Fields Wesleyan burial ground at Mile End Cemetery in 1834. This meant he was likely born around 1769 if the informant was accurate about his age.
His will named five surviving children and I have DNA matches with descendants of at least four of them. It also named a brother, John, and DNA matches to me have turned up on several branches of HIS descendants too.
His children were from two relationships. The second was a marriage in St Dunstan, Stepney, London on January 7th, 1798 to Elizabeth Cupee, but the first was with a woman named Esther who remains a stubborn mystery and is my 5th great-grandmother. No marriage has yet been found. Perhaps it didn’t take place and the twins he had with her were illegitimate. It might explain why he was able to call himself a bachelor when he married Elizabeth…or he may just have been telling a fib.
The twins, John and Charles, were born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire in 1796. So for a while I thought that may have been his place of origin. However, I found no evidence of his baptism there, and there appeared to be no Morter families in the area. He likely went there for work.
Benjamin’s London life
He turned up next in London. In 1797, he and his family of five were removed from Christchurch, Middlesex to Shoreditch. I don’t know who made up that five, other than the twins and possibly Esther (there is probably at least one other child to discover). Though given he married Elizabeth soon after that, and she was five months pregnant at the time, perhaps she had already died. I am yet to find her burial.
He and Elizabeth had five children together, all baptised around Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. When he wrote his will, he was ‘of Exeter St, Strand, Middlesex’, so appears to have moved back to the area he was originally removed from in 1797 at least for a time. He was living back in Bethnal Green when he died in 1834.
I had never found a baptism for him in the London area and had no evidence to suggest where else he may have been from.
Serendipity strikes with a small DNA match
And then…I got this small DNA match and it all fell into place over the course of the next few hours. Guess who stayed up all night? She was a shared match to multiple other Morter matches. Sure enough, she had Morters in her tree, but it didn’t go back very far. It was a start though.
So off I went and soon found out why she had run into a brick wall. Her furthest back Morter ancestor was orphaned young, raised by an uncle and aunt, and gave the wrong name for his father at his subsequent marriage. He had been born in Norwich and it was a fairly straightforward job for me to find his birth, his parents’ real names, and their marriage.
How a small DNA match tumbled the brick wall
Tracing the tree back, he turned out to descend from a Charles Morter, born around 1763 in Neatishead, Norfolk, who in turn was the son of John Morter and Hannah Walsingham of that tiny village of fewer than 500 people at that time. I checked their offspring. Lo and behold, they had sons Benjamin and John born within a couple of years of the estimated ages of my Benjamin and his brother John. Could this be it at last? Were John and Hannah my 6th great-grandparents?
I worked the trees of a few more DNA matches. Some of them also went back to John and Hannah. I constructed a hypothetical tree including as many of the matches as I could and checked the Shared cM Tool at DNA Painter for each one of them to see if it all hung together. It did. I checked that their Benjamin didn’t stay in the Neatishead area or die as an infant. It all gelled beautifully, there was no sign of him anywhere.
This shows that you don’t need to have a huge DNA match to make a brick wall fall. With some solid tree building, research and a thorough analysis of the shared DNA matches you already have, sometimes it can be achieved with a small DNA match which is possibly at first glance not especially helpful.
My conclusion is that John Morter, collar maker of Neatishead, and his wife Hannah are my 6th great grandparents. Now who on earth is Esther…?